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Comcast's Wrong Approach

• Comment posted Oct 30, 2007 3:36 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I'm not impressed with this line of attack, and here's why. In essence, Tom is repeating the same hollow criticisms that have already been made by the lawyers and wannabe Internet regulators, and they don't wash technically. We're not allowed…

In Praise of Relatively Dumb Pipes

• Comment posted Dec 04, 2007 4:16 am PST — by Richard Bennett
  You seem confused about TCP, making the common error that it's a network protocol. It is, in fact, an *INTERnetwork* protocol, good for moving data between one network and another. It has an ancillary function, protecting the Internetwork from congestion.…

• Comment posted Dec 03, 2007 7:02 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  Brett, you're repeating yourself. We know empirically that RST works as a traffic shaping mechanims on the Comcast network, its effectiveness has been observed by multiple parties. If you need to know why it works, perhaps you can re-read some…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 10:59 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  RED and packet dropping affect the rate at which TCP hosts transmit data over an established connection. For these to be effective in a multi-connection system like BT, we have to drop packets on all open connections. What these techniques…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 7:27 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  People like Scott Cleland and the doezen’s of “astroturf organizations” that particpate in the network neutrality discussion never fully disclose their agenda, or their benefactors. The “disclosure” sites you reference raise two questions:1) is the disclosure complete, or representative? and…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 5:49 am PST — by Richard Bennett
  The validity of RSTs has been discussed to death in several venues, perhaps most intelligently by George Ou. In essence, Comcast isn't concerned with controlling congestion on the Internet (which is what RED and other forms of packet drop are…

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 3:01 am PST — by Richard Bennett
  Hands Off the Internet's member page lists the companies which support it, as does Scott Cleland's Net Competition member page. That's full disclosure in any rational person's book. You're busted.

• Comment posted Nov 29, 2007 2:08 am PST — by Richard Bennett
  As far as I know, I don't link to a single site that gets undisclosed financial support, and if you have a specific instance I'd like to know about it. Otherwise, kindly correct your false charge. Your argument against Comcast…

• Comment posted Nov 28, 2007 9:38 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  There are so many errors and false assumptions in this post I don't know where to begin critcizing. For one, Verizon offers a faster service than Comcast: nominally, 15 Mb/s downstream and 5 Mb/s upstream compared to 4 Mb/s and…

Will Technology Solve Network Neutrality?

• Comment posted Apr 03, 2008 3:42 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  There are actually a number of people working on variations of this technique. The basic idea is to give the end-user the ability to tell the ISP about the latency requirements of his various streams, so that his own BitTorrent…

Introductory Remarks from Innovation '08

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 2:57 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Controlling usage by cost strikes me as using a blunt instrument, so I'd like to refine that approach just a little. My ideal system is one where each user has the right to send a certain quantity of packets each…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 1:59 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Would you say there's some point at which a network has so much bandwidth that it's immune to congestion, Milton? I wouldn't, because whatever technology you use to transport packets can also be used to supply them. So incremental increases…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 1:54 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  You're a bit off the track here. The previous question was about adding bandwidth to eliminate congestion. Before we go off on this tangent, do you agree with my arithmetic on that point? The QoS issue is complicated by the…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 1:05 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  The demand for bandwidth comes from the network edge, Mike, so adding bandwidth at the edges simply increases supply and demand in equal parts. That doesn't actually affect congestion at all. What you have to do to reduce congestion is…

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2008 12:29 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  One proof of the assertion that adding bandwidth to Internet access links doesn't solve the congestion problem is the experience of countries that have already tried that experiment, such as Japan and Korea (that's two proofs, but who's counting?) Adding…

• Comment posted Jun 16, 2008 6:02 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  My comments about jitter were a response to some things one of the other panelists had written, to the effect that all apps care about latency. While it's true that we all want all our stuff to run fast, it's…

Broadband Internet Adoption Stalls in United States, Says Report

• Comment posted Jul 03, 2008 3:29 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  It actually says broadband adoption has stalled for the very rich and the very poor, but that it's continuing to grow for middle-income families, and shows lots of charts to that effect. I suggest you read the study and correct…

Vint Cerf Comments on Government's Role in Internet Broadband Access

• Comment posted Jul 07, 2008 10:33 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  The regulatory model Cerf seems to be endorsing is indistinguishable from government ownership, because it's total government control. It does not appear that Cerf was misquoted in any significant way. What on earth distinguishes a "wholesale Internet service" from a…

No Fines for Comcast

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 11:05 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Here's part of an e-mail I got the other day from Larry Roberts, the designer of ARPANET, that helps explain the problem, Brett: "...P2P expands to fill any capacity. In fact, as I have been testing and modeling P2P I…

• Comment posted Jul 14, 2008 1:53 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I'm yet to read a comment from you, Brett, that puts forward a serious argument. Making personal attacks may be amusing, but it doesn't advance the debate. The law professors who started the net neutrality campaign make a fundamental mistake…

• Comment posted Jul 13, 2008 6:06 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I have all sorts of financial interests in this debate, the primary one being that I make my living doing network engineering and I don't want my profession equated with dealing drugs. That's why I've been active in the debate…

• Comment posted Jul 13, 2008 10:39 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  In a recent Blog Maverick post, Mark Cuban said: I just want to put it out there to save everyone and anyone who deals with me time. If at any point in time you utter the words "Just Don't Get…

Vint Cerf Caught Off Guard, Nevertheless Says What Needs to Be Said About Our Misguided Policy

• Comment posted Jul 31, 2008 11:15 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  And also yes, I've read several of Lessig's books and find them generally appalling. His grasp of networking technology is weak, and his attempt to extract principles of network design and impose them on human societies is scurrilous. I regard…

• Comment posted Jul 28, 2008 9:30 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Professor Google, Larry Lessig, has been promoting a more regulated Internet since 1999, James, the debate didn't just start in 2006. What happened then was Google paid to have the issue become a hot political topic as opposed to private…

• Comment posted Jul 28, 2008 11:09 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I don't recall the statement by the Verizon SVP, but in context it probably had a different meaning than you attribute to it. If you have a link to the actual story, I'd like to see it, as even Whiteacre's…

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2008 12:45 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  No, James, you're confused. The former CEO of AT&T;, Ed Whiteacre, said that he didn't want Vonage and Google to "use his pipes for free" once upon a time, but the president of Verizon said no such thing. Whiteacre's statement…

• Comment posted Jul 25, 2008 11:30 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  James, there is no reason to believe that either Verizon or Google wishes to charge the other for access to its network. That would be commercial suicide for either. Nobody in his right might takes speculations like this seriously.

• Comment posted Jul 25, 2008 6:38 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  It's not clear that the American public harbors a secret, burning desire for hundreds of megabits per second of Internet access bandwidth. Surveys has consistently shown that demand for the highest tiers of bandwidth is modest, so the risk for…

• Comment posted Jul 25, 2008 2:06 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Vint Cerf's comments offering the British model to the US are actually quite odd, as Britain is moving in a direction that's more US-like, where the next-generation fiber infrastructure will be funded by services. The general idea is that British…

Customer Owned Fiber in Ottawa

• Comment posted Jul 31, 2008 11:17 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I don't think the average consumer wants to be a network administrator, so this experiment is bound to fail. But that's OK for Google, since they're just looking to score some public relations points, as they did in the D…

Another Wrong-Headed WSJ Editorial

• Comment posted Aug 04, 2008 7:23 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Let's just say that no network management technique should be ruled out a priori. I'll leave it as a exercise for the student to discover the utility of TCP connection pruning.

• Comment posted Aug 03, 2008 6:32 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  BitTorrent is an innovate new application that presents a new and different pattern of traffic to the Internet access network relative to other applications. Therefore, it stands to reason that it might need to be managed by different means than…

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2008 11:20 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I don't propose a complete free pass for ISPs, and have actually proposed a regulatory framework to the FCC. Maybe I'm more of a regulator than you are.

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2008 10:18 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  I was specifically referring to the popular movement for a regulated Internet, Rob, and I don't consider you a part of it. Am I wrong?

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2008 6:50 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  There are many things that need to examine session state, and NAT is certainly one of them. Flow-management gear would be another. Don't confuse the academic accounts of Internet architecture with the actually deployed architecture. Similarly, let's not be naive…

• Comment posted Jul 31, 2008 11:22 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  And the one by Commissioner McDowell in the WaPo was also quite good. BitTorrent does two strange things to ISP networks: opens an enormous number of TCP virtual circuits and puts a ton of data on the upstream path. Both…

Hunting Unicorns: Myths and Realities of the Net Neutrality Debate

• Comment posted Aug 06, 2008 3:39 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Hardware-based DPI is at least 10 years old, Robb, flow managers, accelerators, and caches have been part of the middleware for a long time. People use them because they eliminate some of the waste and redundancy that's epidemic to IP-based…

Comcast is Right, the FCC is Wrong

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 7:37 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  P2P works perfectly fine on the Comcast network, and always has. Any harm to the protocols is strictly theoretical.

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 7:33 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  The fact remains that none of the applications Comcast targets for throttling are harmed by the Reset packets. They typically open thousands of TCP connections, leaving them open until they're closed by network management. This is actually one scenario where…

• Comment posted Sep 30, 2008 1:32 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  The virtue of header inspection is that it works on legacy applications that don't happen to be on-board with whatever future agreement the Industry wants to reach about packet classification. It's a practical approach, in other words, and not simply…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 11:33 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  And inside the secure bunker, Sarah Palin lectures about QoS. Comcast doesn't retain any customer information obtained by the Sandvine deep header inspection system, and in fact touts the fact that it's completely anonymous. But don't let me confuse you…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 10:53 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Most American broadband consumers choose DSL or cable, but that's not because they don't have other choices. There are at least two national wireless broadband systems, Verizon and AT&T;, and their user base is growing. In fact, most of the…

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 6:28 pm PDT — by Richard Bennett
  Diffserv has never been widely adopted, and until applications mark their packets consistently, it doesn't address the problem at hand. Header inspection works just fine.

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 9:49 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  The more significant point is whether it's reasonable to prioritize applications according to their unique requirements at all. That point so dwarfs the pedantic discussion of one technique over another as to render it moot. Neutralists argue, for the most…

Net Neutrality an 'American Problem', Australians Suggest Alternatives

• Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 9:51 am PDT — by Richard Bennett
  NNSquad is a group of hysterics and alarmists, best ignored.

Fiber Optics: Thinking It Through

• Comment posted Nov 17, 2008 2:12 am PST — by Richard Bennett
  I seem to recall reading that Verizon had reduced their cabling costs to around $700 per home passed, presumably in typical suburban neighborhoods, but I'm not sure about that. There are around 120 million homes in America, about 75 million…

CRTC Denies CAIP Application on Throttling, But Sets Net Neutrality Hearing

• Comment posted Nov 21, 2008 10:24 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  The CRTC is obviously not as beholden to Google as the American FCC is. The CRTC saw through the smokescreen to the underlying fact that networks have limited capacity. The issue that traffic management addresses is the fair sharing of…

How Fast is Internet Traffic Growing?

• Comment posted Nov 27, 2008 12:08 pm PST — by Richard Bennett
  S&D;'s overall numbers don't simply agree with Odlyzko, they are Odlyzko's numbers. They're only in a position to report what they actually see, so their global numbers come from somebody else. Odlyzko may be right, but it would be a…