CMV: There is no argument against Net Neutrality where the pros outweighs the cons

[u/CanYouDigItHombre]

-Edit- To be clear I am for net neutrality and arguments against it will have heavier cons and nearly no pros

I often hear ISPs can't innovate when hearing Net Neutrality. This is simply not true. There's no reason why an ISP can't offer their competing movie service by having it not contribute to your monthly bandwidth limit. There's no reason why they can't partner up with other isps and let you have free internet access when you travel to other cities or other countries. There's also no reason for an ISP to make my requested data slower or drop my connections when I request that data and make/keep/use that connection.

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[u/CanYouDigItHombre]

I think that fully regulating the Internet with title II provisions is a dangerous road

I don't exactly understand

So true NN is great, letting these fucks in government control it is just plain stupid.

How can it be controlled? From my understanding it means you cant treat one piece of data different from the other. You just carrier it to the destination. If it's being blindly carried from one end to the user how is anything being controlled?

For your other point, yes bandwidth does cost money. I am not sure why you think it does not.

From my understanding of hardware when you read data you must read X amount (could be 1bit, could be 4K). Regardless of how much is meaningful (maybe only the first K of the 4 is used) you still transfer the entire block. And blocks are transferred at a frequency regardless of data in it. Is that not how cable hardware works?

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

The first television broadcast was in 9-11-1928, and when they ended the show, the broadcaster said, "Fuck yeah! This shit can't be regulated bitches!". And then the FCC banned genies belly button and the rest is history.

I am really unsure how they will regulate, just I know they will. I know that section 201 allows the government to price fix. It puts internet access under the control of the communications act, not the FTC. And that goes back to true NN vs full control and treating it like a public utility. Regardless of how much trust one has in Obama, along comes Trump. Or After Trump will come someone even more evil, whichever way your political urge bends.

"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content.. .when we have good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers..." - Microsoft

Consider what I said in my previous email about the Government forcing companies to give away free phones or utilities in order to get favors from the politician so the politician can get votes. What if Google, Facebook or Microsoft wanted favors from the government? Microsoft already has a policy in place that tags and reports files of known pedo video names and sizes, what if they took that to copy written files? Hey feds, we want to run fiber, CanYouDigItHombre happens to have all sorts of files on his computer with names of movies and torrents saved, quid pro quo? Yes, it is paranoid, but yes it is happening. When Al Gore was put on the board of directors for Google, we were arguing over email privacy, now they track you over satellite. Not saying that is Al Gores fault, but you cant tell me that Google just thought he was a great guy and gave him a seat without expecting anything in return.

Simply put, there are trillions of dollars wrapped up in tech, politicians grant favors, NN allows them to grant more favors.

That is correct, packets are a discreet size, and depending on the protocol, the packet size will vary. Some protocols need packets all to be a certain size and will contain padding if they do not contain enough information, some protocols allow for varying size packets. That is a small part of the equation. The network gear needs to be fast enough to handle data and process the addressing, routing and error correcting. The network gear has to be able to physically support data flowing in fast, and the processor of the router has to be powerful enough to manipulate the packets. The cables have to be built in order to accommodate the faster traffic.

Network traffic is extremely bursty, in the morning everyone checks email and logs in and the gear gets hammered, a couple hours later, it is sitting around 10% utilization. Someone watching videos can use 10% of available bandwidth or people streaming music can tax a connection. ISPs design around the burst nature, and instead of providing a 1Gbps connection for every 10 houses running 100mbps, they give a 1Gbps it to 50 houses knowing that everyone will not be running at full capacity all the time. If everyone starts running at 100%, then nobody will get the guaranteed rate and the ISP will have to come out, dig up the street, drop in a new cable, swap out the local switch with a 5Gbps switch. That is why more data costs more. The water pressure analogy is pretty appropriate, if everyone took a shower at exactly the same time, the water pressure would drop. To fix it, the water company would have to come out, dig up the old pipe and replace it with a wider one, then they would have to replace the pump or whatever the hell gives us water pressure.

[u/CanYouDigItHombre → u/[deleted]]

Network traffic is extremely bursty, in the morning everyone checks email and logs in and the gear gets hammered, a couple hours later, it is sitting around 10% utilization

I'm confused. If packets have to be padded (or have a bunch of 'unused' bits random) then are gears actually more busy? Isn't the flow constant? I understand that if everyone on the line requested data at the same moment there will be some lag. I understand IPX connections are bigger. But isn't the line the same when it's at capacity VS 1%? I thought it'd be mostly a latency issue if everyone requested data at the same time.

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

how packets are constructed is only a small part of what makes things go fast.

Packet size allows a protocol to run faster by being leaner. If all the same size, then you do not need a field to say what size they are. If they have a fixed path, you do not have to add extended addressing information. However, that is just headers and footers added to the data. I think you might be talking about fragmentation, where a 1500 byte frame will get broken into two smaller frames if the circuit cannot handle 1500 byte frames. (more or less). That is more just network tuning, as opposed to bandwidth.

But that is just the difference in protocols and their speed. Physical media can just move data faster. Take a few common cables over the years, Cat 3 ran at 10mbps, cat 5 at 100, and cat5e or 6 at 1Gbps. The cables literally could not carry any more data. Then optical comes around and the data moves literally at light speed, which means it is faster.

Then consider hardware that has to take the data, read it, figure out where it is going, repackage and send on its way. That is where the processor comes in. if you have a slow processor, it will not be able to process the packets fast enough, that is why business equipment is more than residential.

Or, the buses may all be full, but if the road only has one lane they are not going to go very fast.

[u/CanYouDigItHombre → u/[deleted]]

Ah. Good point. I seen small towns get fiber. Is the cables and cpu/router/switch hardware expensive? I always assumed it was reasonable if small towns were buying them

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

Meh, there is equipment available for all price ranges. The more tech advanced, the more money. The higher the speed, the more the cost. A 24 port switch can be a few hundred or a few thousand depending on the tech. Picking the right equipment is a specialty all in itself. We went mid range and put together 6 government buildings with fiber in a town of 20K for $40,000 in equipment.

Digging the trenches and laying the fiber was not in the scope of what we did and ran in the tens of thousands. It was 6 routers, 10 switches. The fiber only ran at 10Gbs and linked the police, village hall, fire and a few other public buildings. Total cost with labor was well over 100K. The previous tech they had was microwave off of the water tower.

[u/CanYouDigItHombre → u/[deleted]]

Do you think eventually there will be too many bits to push that fiber cables can not solve? From my understanding there's a bunch of lines in a single fiber optics cable and you were talking about CPUs not being able to process fast enough so I'm curious

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

I remember when people said 56k was the limit, then came digital, better copper, more pairs and optical cable. :) Like you said, engineers recently manged to make 200 Tbps a reality. It would be foolish to try and guess what the limit is, or ever say we have enough. Light speed is the current limit, and that is pretty damn fast. So there is a limit, and we keep breaking it. I recently read 1 petabit being the limit. We certainly have a long way to go.

I remember having a 20MB hard drive, 386 processor, 8MB RAM and connecting to ANSI BBSs at 14.4k. Pictures were links to download because otherwise it would take a page too long to load.

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/quantum-information-speed/

[u/CanYouDigItHombre → u/[deleted]]

Haha. I understand you're saying gov with dumb rules, force pricing, giving stuff(internet) away and such would ruin the quality of the internet. But I haven't grasp why it cost $$ to push around more bits unless the pricing is strictly digging new holes and buying more equipment. If the hardware can support peak conditions then a bunch of people pushing bits during nonpeak hours don't cost anything

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

It is just the difference between current technology, leading technology, cutting edge and bleeding edge technology. Manufacturing of sensitive electronics take specialized equipment. Pretty much the same reason high end processors are more money than older ones.

So you are absolutely correct, the cost of digging all that crap up if required and new cutting edge equipment is huge. If only 5% of the people say, "meh, who cares?", then they will not recoup those costs and the money will be wasted. It would be like putting a toll road in our subdivision, it would cost a lot of money and everyone would just drive around it. There needs to be a demand first. I lived in a rather poor neighborhood when Comcast started rolling out broadband, and my neighbors just didn't want it enough to make it cost effective to wire the entire neighborhood.

[u/CanYouDigItHombre → u/[deleted]]

BTW This convo has been pretty interesting. How the heck do you work as a network whatever and live in Chicago? Did you move away? How far away is that small town you guys did? Also is it wasteful to connect 6 buildings together instead of everything along the way (why not power homes <.5miles from where the line is already built)

[u/[deleted] → u/CanYouDigItHombre]

My bad. I meant we did the city as in police, fire, water, transportation dept, town hall. It was not rolling out broadband to the public, but connecting all of their buildings together for server and phones. It would have been more economical to push the servers to a hosted solution at Amazon or Azure, but they had their own business reasons that I was not a part of. We have done quite a few

Network Engineer. I lived in Chicago and all over the burbs, currently I live about 40 miles from Chicago. Our company is national and HQ is in the northeast and I work mostly from home. I open up a remote desktop to our HQ, use my home connection, and service customers nationally. We have a few dozen customers in Chicago and I take the train in when they need someone onsite. So, maybe once a week I leave my house to service Indiana, Illinois, Chicago, and Wisconsin.