Knapp is right, there are apps with special requirements
Saschameinrath tweeted that:
FCC OET Chief, Julius Knapp, says applications with “special requirements” should be given priority and is “a reasonable network practice.”
Julius Knapp is absolutely right, there are applications that need to be given priority just to have an equal chance at success, but the NPRM as it presently stands prohibits this kind of prioritization and good network management. As I’ve said all along, the FCC’s nondiscrimination principle should distinguish between good discrimination and bad discrimination and it should not prohibit reasonable discrimination.
The only thing that needs to be clarified is how does one define “special” when everyone is going to try to claim that their own traffic just as special. And in a world where everyone is special, no one is special. The easiest argument to make is that all applications at least deserve equal consideration and an equal chance to succeed. But to make this happen, the network need unequal levels of prioritization.
For example, VoIP/gaming packet doesn’t have to wait sit there and expire while P2P gets 100 opportunities to be forwarded by the router just because it was aggressive while the VoIP/gaming packet gets zero opportunities.
The other example is that if we have to prioritize HTTP Web traffic over P2P such that the HTTP web traffic gets 50% of the bandwidth and P2P gets the other 50% to prevent P2P from hogging over 90% of the traffic (and by design no less since BitTorrent feels entitled to as much idle bandwidth as they can grab), I don’t know anyone who can argue that’s unfair.
Without prioritizing web traffic the distribution of bandwidth looks like this when I tested the latest BitTorrent protocol which claims to be “network friendly”.
We’re still pretending that the FCC doesn’t know what QoS is?
The NPRM as it presently stands does NOT prohibit prioritization and good network management. The post you link to is deeply misleading. Rather, the NPRM seeks comment on the bounds of what QoS measures constitute reasonable network management. If in that post you quoted the next sentence (“We seek comment on whether these and other potential approaches to addressing congestion would be reasonable”) it’s made very clear that they’re layout out two argumentative extremes and asking interested parties to submit relevant comments. I don’t see why you’re pretending otherwise.
The NPRM is saying that it believes these restrictive rules would be good, but they’re willing to consider additional arguments. The current draft in fact does prohibit good network management and does prohibit protecting things like VoIP.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/fcc-nprm-prohibits-good-network-management/
So unless the FCC is convinced to write in an exception for giving low bandwidth applications higher priority, it will be voted on in its current form.
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