[governance] Net neutrality: Definitions

[Karl Auerbach]

Just so that we have something solid to chew on when talking about net 
neutrality, here are some of the concrete ways in which I see that 
providers can "engineer" (or "bias") the traffic that flows.

This list is only a tiny portion of the ways that providers can "tune" 
their networks.  I'm not trying here to be exhaustive, merely illustrative.

My goal here is to suggest that when we talk about net neutrality that 
we ought to be able to draw clear lines from general principles to 
concrete things done by providers, and, importantly, vice versa.

  - In VoIP the choice of codec can have a big impact.  And some human 
languages suffer greater codec degradation than do others.  Just as one 
of my favorite singers' voice was used to tune the MP3 parameters the 
languages of the US and western Europe tend to have been used when 
creating the codecs most typically used for VoIP.  With those codecs 
vowel-rich languages tend to work better and those languages with sharp 
consents tend to suffer because the rise-time/attack of those sounds are 
frequently chopped or softened.  Asian languages tend to suffer.  And 
I've often wondered whether African click languages become 
incomprehensible, particularly when the provider not only uses a vowel 
oriented coded but also uses the technique of removing packets that 
contain mostly silence.

  - Protocol based routing - this is very often done to segregate VoIP 
traffic onto paths that are not carrying big (i.e. long serialization 
time) packets of HTTP and its ilk.  And some traffic, particularly 
backup jobs and the like, are not harmed by being routed via 
inexpensive, but slow, geosynchronous satellite paths.

  - Protocol based queue priority - routers are usually filled with 
queues of packets that are waiting to be sent on an outgoing interface. 
  These queues can get long.  And they can overflow.  And there are 
often several queues waiting for a single physical interface.  The order 
in which packets are inserted into queues (FIFO or preference based), 
the queue that is selected for insertion, the queues that get preference 
when the interface becomes empty (fair queueing, round-robin, etc), the 
drop policy (tail drop, random drop, RED, protocol-sensitive drop [e.g. 
don't drop TCP ACK or FIN packets]) are all among the knobs and dials 
available to a provider.

  - Aggregate limits - providers may allow up to a given amount of 
traffic within a certain time period and then penalize any overrun.

		--karl--



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