What is this thing called “Net Neutrality”? Why is everyone bitching about it? Will it appear out of the dark and physically assault me? I’ll briefly go over what Net Neutrality means in todays world, and why it’s something that concerns all of us, from those users with high bandwidth usage, to the average John Doe that browses the net once a week.
Net Neutrality is all about control. Internet service providers want to determine how we use the internet, what services we are allowed to use and what services will require an extra fee to use. You’re thinking about streaming HDTV? Enjoy it while you can, because at the current rate – you might have to pay extra for it (to your ISP).
Let’s just take a simple look at how modern applications have different expectations of internet usage. You’ll have the downloading of large files on your one hand (think bit torrent, p2p, …) and programs such as Skype, or video conferencing on the other hand. They all use the internet to handle communication, but in a different way.
This is where the problem of “jitter” was first introduced. Jitter is a term used to describe variations in delay, for TCP packets. Say you wanted to make a VoIP phone call. You’d want your packets to arrive in an ordered fashion, so the VoIP program can create the necessary output (=the voice of the receiver). This works great, if you can “predict” how long it will take for each packet to arrive at its destination, otherwise you’ll get a shocking (and you can take this litterely) phone call. And there’s no possibility of buffering for a phone call, whatever one person says, has to arrive at the other end at the exact same time. Once packets start getting delayed, your entire conversation goes to shreds.
This isn’t true for regular browsing of web pages, or the downloading of files. It doesn’t matter if there is a small delay in packets, or if this delay varies in time. As long as all the packets are received in the end, the web page can be shown, or the file can be opened. Jitter is less important here.
So here we have it, for some applications jitter doesn’t matter, for others it can be their death-sentence. And seeing how VoIP is on the rise, this calls for action at some ISP’s …
That’s where “quality of service” comes in. VoIP has more requirements, and most of those will be met. VoIP traffic will probably get priority over normal HTTP traffic, and most users won’t even notice. It’ll seem as if nothing changed, because it all works. A VoIP phone call works like a charm, opening a web page never fails, … All because ISP’s determine which services should get which priority.
But then there’s the catch. Internet Service Providers determine the priority of the internet services. They can decide which applications have a higher priority than another one. What happens when a client doesn’t make VoIP phone calls, but only downloads large files? For this client, his priorities will be different. Should he then be pushed to the back, in order to let other (“more important”) services get passed?
Comcast, the ISP in the USA, has recently been getting some bad press due to the throttling of bit torrent traffic, in order to guarantee the necessary quality of service for other clients. That’s a strange thing to do, as they all pay the same monthly fees. And yet they [the ISP’s] can decide who gets more out of their internet line?
Net Neutrality isn’t something that will be solved over night. We all expect different things from the internet. For one it’s the backbone of a company, because all phone calls are handled through VoIP. For others it’s merely a system for sending messages (e-mail, messenger, irc, you name it). Yet all these expectations share a commodity: they all use the same hardware to power it all, your internet connection.
It’s a complicated thing though, and it’ll probably get more confusing once HDTV starts kicking in (imagine buffering-screens during a soccer finale, I can see pints & chips flying through the air in frustration), and other high-demanding services start to make a rise. Our current internet infrastructure wasn’t designed for this large increase in bandwidth, so how will we deal with it?
Should we as clients just sit back, and wait for ISP’s to upgrade their infrastructure to handle it all? Can we expect prices to go up because of it? Should we take action? Can we even do something?
Feel free to watch the following movie, which covers a bit of how the internet evolution has caused Network Neutrality to become a reality, and which shows some different aspects of Network Neutrality (not only the technical bits & bytes).
[youtube://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_3WnJ42kw]