Posted on 02/19/2015 10:09:21 AM PST by Western Phil
After years of fence-sitting, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has come down strongly in favor of Net neutrality, which in some sense must mean the equal treatment of all Internet data packets. The FCC plans to vote on a proposal on 26 February. -snip- “There’s a lot of complexity here at a technical level that is absolutely lost in the policy conversations,” says Fred Baker, a distinguished engineering fellow at Cisco Systems and former chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Getting the technology right is crucial for the future of the Net. -snip- Engineers decided that the best way to manage traffic flow was to label each packet with codes based on the time sensitivity of the data, so routers could use them to schedule transmission. Everyone called them priority codes, but the name wasn’t meant to imply that some packets were more important than others, only that they were more perishable, -snip- Treating all bits equally has become a popular mantra. It says just what it means, giving it a charming simplicity that leaves little wiggle room for companies trying to game the system. -snip- Yet its philosophical clarity could come at the cost of telephone clarity. “LTE uses expedited forwarding services and [packet] priority to reduce jitter, which reduces voice quality,” says Cisco’s Baker. But that involves giving some bits priority over others. And all telephone traffic could be affected if the FCC pursued its plan to shift wire-line phone service to the Internet. -snip- “Networks just plain don’t work worth s--t if you literally treat every packet exactly the same as every other packet,” said one engineer, who asked not to be named. Cisco’s Baker put it more delicately, saying that equal treatment for all packets “would be setting the industry back 20 years.”
(Excerpt) Read more at spectrum.ieee.org ...
Technical article. My take is that voice communications will suffer most from the FCC confiscation of the internet.
The fact that they are billing it as “treating every packet equally” is disingenuous if not patently false. This has nothing to do with traffic management and everything to do with regulation.
The big problem I see is that half of the youth in this country think “net neutrality” is something for which they should stand up. They have no idea what’s being planned.
This is why you have to implement QOS(Quality Of Service) on your internal network, if you are running a lot of voice on the same physical network as your data. If you don’t give the voice packets priority, you’ll get ‘echos’, dropped calls, and other problems. It would just basically suck.
Normally, the IEEE is terrified of anything the least bit political. Largely (I believe) because some of their members sit on various government advisory panels.
Amusing. That would certainly never happen, even with such “rules” in place.
… or a Republican Presidency shut down Daily Kos or Democratic Underground …
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