[ih] Internet/Wireless Principle of Levelness

[James J Dempsey]

[ this is not sent to internet-history ]

internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org wrote:

> My friend tried complaining to his ISPs' tech support, but they all said
> their service was working fine.? Perhaps that is a consequence of the
> "Levelness" that now makes Users' applications involve many different
> service and equipment providers?
> 
> Is this latency how Users now see the effects of those "deep buffers"???
> Why would providers require a feature that makes their customers
> unhappy.....?

I speculate that one of the reasons this might be happening is the demise of
net neutrality.

An ISP lets packets from Netflix, HBO though because Netflix and HBO have
been extorted into paying the ISP to let their packets through unmolested.

An ISP sees "random game port" traffic, does deep packet inspection on it
and can't determine what it is, so throws it in the "random traffic that
hasn't paid the tax" which might be the same as "someone trying to trick us
by hiding the nature of their traffic".  Some news articles call this the
"internet slow lane."

Of course, by "ISP", I might mean any carrier along the path, though the end
user's ISP is the most likely place this would happen.

When I see pixelization from some big provider like Netflix, I assume that
their back end servers are getting overloaded.

Just random thoughts,

--Jim--