Re: [p2pi] One more proposed definition of fairness...

[Nicholas Weaver <nweaver at ICSI.Berkeley.EDU>]

On Jun 9, 2008, at 7:58 AM, Joe Touch wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe I'm missing something, but if I have one ISP, I paid for  
>>> THOSE bits too. How I use them is up to me, not the ISP.
>> I don't see what our disagreement is.  Users paying for multiple  
>> accounts get more bandwidth, and as ISP A doesnt' see the packets  
>> going through ISP-B, it doesn't matter to A what they are doing  
>> elsewhere.
>
> We agree on that. We agree that if I pay two ISPs for BW, I get to  
> use both. Do you agree that if I pay one ISP for BW, I get to use it  
> - all of it? (i.e., if this is about ISP internal congestion, then  
> the ISP is at fault for underprovisioning, not the user)
>
> I get the impression that if an ISP has upstream congestion, you  
> think it gets to limit the number of flows I send; I think that my  
> packets can get dropped due to congestion, but it's not useful for  
> the ISP to have a different notion of 'fairness' than the endpoint.

Actually, I disagree here, for the following reason:

a:  The endpoints have a proven in practice bad notion of fairness:   
They have TCP flow fairness (which can and is abused by some users,  
who eg, transfer on many torrents simultaneously), or (with crap like  
Joost) no fairness at all.  Why should someone who's playing by the  
"rules" (a few TCP streams) have to compete against users who aren't  
(many TCP streams or UDP based volume protocols without congestion  
control)?

Flow rate fairness is not user fairness.


b:  More importantly, in the flat rate pricing world, if a fairness  
mechanism which allocates traffic between users is such that 90% of  
the users DON'T experience significant long-term congestion, the ISP  
is actually properly provisioned, not underprovisioned.

It does not make economic sense to up capacity to serve just 5-10%  
heavy-tail of the users, as those 5-10% of the users aren't paying any  
more than the 90%.

If this is the case, ISPs need to either prevent the heavy-tailed  
users from affecting the rest (fairness, app-discrimination, usage  
caps) or charge the heavy users more (usage-based pricing) to justify  
the cost of an expansion which only benefits these users.


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