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Nicholas Weaver wrote:
On Jun 9, 2008, at 7:58 AM, Joe Touch wrote: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.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.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.
Right. But what is enforced depends on what the user paid for...
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%.
I don't care what "economic sense" it made for the ISP. If it sold me X Mbps, it had better provide that. If there's upstream congestion, that's another issue, of course. But if not, if you sell me X Mbps, I had better get it.
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.
AND define what they're selling better. Don't sell me a gallon of gas which is a gallon UNLESS there's a run on gasoline. I don't care about *your* economic implications of heavy-tails on your provisioning model. I care about getting what I paid for.
Once I pay for X Mbps, you can throttle ALL my stuff, but not just TCP, and not per-flow or anything else. If you do, you're not selling me Internet access, you're selling me a single TCP connection or somesuch, and nobody would buy that.
Joe
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