[scrungus]

>You're arguing against the laws of physics here and you're arguing that stupid users should be able to screw everybody else. No thanks.

i think there is a misunderstanding here. he's not arguing that ISPs shouldn' be able to bandwidth-discriminate based on customer. He's arguing that they shouldn't be able to discriminate on the type of data. what would it matter to the other users if they were slowing down the network by html5 video, VNC, or playing a game over TCP?

I don't know a lot about networks, but i think a potential solution could be to discriminate between high-bandwidth and low-latency transmissions. For a video game or something you would want to have low latency, but you wouldn't need a lot of bandwidth. on the other hand, video streaming requires a lot of bandwidth but doesn't depend so much on latency as long as it has a big enough cache. images are probably somewhere in the middle. this would allow low-bandwidth applications to be prioritized.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> this would allow low-bandwidth applications to be prioritized.

That is a completely different kind of "prioritization" than what we are talking about here, though.

In particular, this "prioritization of low-bandwidth applications" does not in any way need to be aware of applications. All you need to do is to do fair link scheduling over all customers on a given link with some sort of token bucket per customer that allows short bursting. That way, if there is a customer that's been idle for a few minutes, say, they'll be able to transfer at, say, ten times the fair average rate for a few seconds, while other customers are slowed down proportionally, thus providing them with low latency. But that does not imply a higher average rate, nor a distinction of video vs. non-video, or anything like that. On average, every customer on a congested link would still be getting the exact same bandwidth, just as a constant low-bandwidth stream for some and as a series of short, fast bursts for others.

What tcxgy is arguing for is that if you are streaming video (or whatever other application that he doesn't like), then you should only be getting 2% of the average bandwidth compared to someone who is using an application he approves of. So, if you are constantly posting high-resolution pictures (something that he seems to approve of) at an average of 50 kB/s, that should get 50 kB/s, but if you are watching a 25 kB/s video stream of some sort, that should be throttled to 1 kB/s, because otherwise it's supposedly violating some laws of physics, and it's abusive to use half the bandwidth for video, and whatever other nonsense arguments he has come up with so far.

[tcxgy]

Cool, so you're arguing for QoS. Thanks for supporting my argument.

[mschuster91]

If the customer specifies QoS, why not? There are 6 reserved bits after HLEN in a TCP packet header, which could be used to annotate the priority of the stream - one for low-latency but also low bandwidth (=Whatsapp, messengers, gaming, VoIP), and one for bulk transfers (=high latency acceptable, high data volume).

Default would be the first so that networks may only have special treatment for apps that explicitly opt in to say "i'm ok to wait a bit" like Netflix, Youtube and friends.