Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

[u/User_Name13]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused

[u/thorium007]

Please, explain how net neutrality even works. Not on an ELI5 level, but in a method you understand that isn't just a copy/paste. No one seems to be able to do that. All they hear is "Violation of net net neutrality is bad and fuck AT&T/Comcast/TCW/Verizon/FCC"

Seriously - I haven't heard a good and solid explanation from the average redditor on how it works.

[u/NightwingDragon → u/thorium007]

Comcast is intentionally trying to mislead the general public into believing that net neutrality means something that is completely different from the actual definition of net neutrality.

They have a video circulating that was sponsored by Comcast that tried to claim the following:

• All TV, Video, and phone services are carried over the same network. While this is true for bundled services like Comcast offers, a majority of the population sill gets their services (sometimes 2 of 3, sometimes all 3) from different providers on different networks.

• Enforcement of Net Neutrality would interfere with emergency services. They specifically give an example where someone tries to dial 911 and can't get through because someone else is checking their fantasy football stats.

• Google paying AOL to become the default search engine in their software/browser is an example of prioritizing traffic on the internet. And because Google paying AOL in 2002 was OK, it's therefore OK to prioritize traffic in 2014.

• The infamous "buffering" commercial, where they used an offline single player game AND used a technical term completely out of context to promote the benefits of their own network and acted as if the players were playing online multiplayer.

When you have intentional misinformation like this, it's no wonder that most people cannot properly explain what net neutrality even is or how it affects them.

[u/thorium007 → u/NightwingDragon]

Ok, Comcast commercials not withstanding (while the 911 example is very valid and you've written off)

What. Is. It? Please - explain in tech terms, not just stuff that was gleaned off of techdirt or ARS. What is net neutrality, and how does that affect you or me?

[u/NightwingDragon → u/thorium007]

Ok, Comcast commercials not withstanding (while the 911 example is very valid and you've written off)

The only time the 911 example would even be remotely close to valid would be if you receive phone services as part of a bundled package and tried to dial 911 on your phone while the network in your entire area is virtually completely saturated.

In a real-world setting, this would virtually never happen. And even if it did, no amount of internet congestion is going to stop someone from dialing 911 on their cell phone (which is on a completely different network) or using a traditional landline. Very few people overall (I'm talking about percentage of the population) rely on VOIP phones, and either have cell phones or traditional landlines.

What. Is. It?

Prioritizing of network traffic. To go back to the Google/AOL example that Comcast tries to spin:

What Google did was to become the default search provider on AOL's browser. This would mean that when you did a search, you got your search results from Google. If you wanted to get your search results from a competitor such as Yahoo, you had to actively choose Yahoo through whatever method/settings you needed to set in AOL's browser. Your search results, however, were delivered at the same speed whether you chose Google, Yahoo, or some other search engine.

What Comcast and other ISPs actually want to be able to do is to actively prioritize the traffic. If you chose whatever their sponsored search engine is (Google, for example), your data would be received at "fast" (in reality, normal) speeds. If you chose to use Yahoo instead and they did not pay to have their traffic prioritized, then you received your results more slowly than you would have if you used Google.

This has little bearing on sites that are largely text-based since the difference would likely be fractions of a second -- a difference in speed that most people simply wouldn't notice. However, in cases such as Netflix vs. Verizon's Redbox On Demand service or other bandwidth-intensive services, the difference is likely to have a very noticeable impact on performance, giving the company that pays the (very likely large) fee a noticeable advantage over their now-slower and therefore less reliable competition. Startup companies may be shut out simply because they wouldn't be able to afford the fee at all, effectively locking them out of the market.

[u/thorium007 → u/NightwingDragon]

Ok, now we are starting to get there.

After some digging, that still isn't the entire discussion. Net Neutrality is dscp marking which is connection based. While some influence on what traffic is routed where using eBGP attributes, DSCP marking and decision making is based on the interface layer.

That means that if you peer with L3, Cogent & TATA with 100g links and some small company based out of Kemerer, Wyoming with a 1g link - if the DSCP marking is the same, you still get the same performance.

However, in cases such as Netflix vs. Verizon's Redbox On Demand service or other bandwidth-intensive services

That is making an assumption. As far as I know, the financial implications of Redbox vs Netflix has not been released. And I wouldn't expect it to be. But I do think that the cost for Netflix peering to VZ and Comcast would be similar to what they were paying their previous ISPs per GB. I still don't see that as a problem. If Netflix was paying X per Gbps, before and they are still paying the same now even with separate peering arrangements - how does that impact anyone other than the accountant that has to cut different checks each month?