He won't help you
As explained ad nauseam in prediction #1, bufferbloat is going to be a growing problem this year as Windows XP machines are replaced and more people are downloading Internet video. But terrible latency, jitter, and dropouts may not be all bad if you are a cable ISP. That’s because cable ISPs are first and foremost cable television providers and the main victims of bufferbloat are video services like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube that have become the natural enemies of cable TV. Cable video-on-demand services, while also digital, use separately-provisioned bandwidth and sometimes even different signaling technology, so the ISP’s competitor to Netflix isn’t bothered by bufferbloat at all.
Bufferbloat also affects BitTorrent, which ISPs hate, though they’d hate it a lot less if they’d eliminate bufferbloat entirely, in which case BitTorrent would be a much smaller problem.
This leads to the network neutrality question: how much ISP bitching about BitTorrent is based on their own stupid network architectures that are lame enough for BitTorrent to break? Passing laws to solve Internet technical glitches seems like overkill to me.
And finally bufferbloat can be fatal to third-party voice-over-IP (VoIP) services like Skype and Vonage. Again, your cable ISP’s own VoIP phone service service runs quite happily in separately-provisioned bandwidth, never seeing the bufferbloat.
So bufferbloat is terrible and getting worse, but don’t expect your cable ISP to actually do much about it, because bufferbloat is actually good for their business.
So the prediction here is that large ISPs won’t address bufferbloat in 2011? Sounds like a pretty safe prediction — doubly so if you’re wrong about prediction #1 and “bufferbloat” fails to become a 2011 buzzword.
Current trends in ISP behaviour indicate that they’re more interested in using their customer base as leverage to squeeze money out of content providers. They have more leverage in that regard when bandwidth is a scarce resource (easier to sell “peering” agreements, or similar), so they’re not likely to go out of their way to make the network perform well.
I think this will apply in 2011 AND 2012. As for peering agreements, I don’t know of any ISPs that pay for them. That’s the whole point of peering — that it’s a free exchange between equals.
When I spoke of paying for “peering”, I was referring to the late November/December 2010 spat between Comcast and Level 3.
An excellent explanation of the issue can be found here: https://www.voxel.net/blog/2010/12/peering-disputes-comcast-level-3-and-you
This one is also quite good: https://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/trying-make-sense-comcast-level-3-dispute
My point is that we can expect large ISPs (Comcast in particular) to look at this problem with the attitude, “how can we use this issue to make more money?”
My question is this: Who will create a company who’s sole (soul) purpose is to be a fiber to the door ISP? Since it wouldn’t be competing directly with Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, and the rest, it could very easily replace those companies.
$20 per month, with real unlimited speeds, the cable companies would die.
Yea, All you need is a few billion dollars and 10 years…… Oh wait, ATT is doing it.
And so is Google. However, with AT&T, they do own a TV franchise (U-Verse) so their willingness to compete with Comcast, etc. is limited.
Quote: “My question is this: Who will create a company who’s sole (soul) purpose is to be a fiber to the door ISP? Since it wouldn’t be competing directly with Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, and the rest, it could very easily replace those companies. $20 per month, with real unlimited speeds, the cable companies would die.”
Isn’t that the dream of every home Internet user?
My understanding of the fundamental problem is as follows: running fiber (or anything for that matter) to the door is generally either obscenely expensive or even illegal. To run fiber to the door, you need right-of-way access, which is usually owned by the city. Unfortunately, many (most?) cities have exclusivity deals with only one or two providers. ISPs that want to complete with the (quite literally) entrenched interests usually only have a couple options: rent the existing lines from the entrenched businesses, or work with the city government to change the sweatheart deals.
There’s been at least one case of communities getting fed up with providers like Comcast, and getting sued when they try to deploy their own network.
I live in a house in the city of Chicago and have exactly two choices for wired Internet: AT&T and Comcast. Other parts of the city have slightly more choices. But this is one of the biggest cities in the USA in a good neighborhood, and there is barely any competition in this space.
The internet of the future will be delivered wirelessly, or fiberlessly.
I hope you don’t expect us to buy this as a separate prediction, Bob. In fact, I would say you owe us for both #1 AND #4, as you haven’t really made a prediction in either entry that isn’t obvious.
Bob’s first prediction is that bufferbloat will become a problem with the move away from XP (not obvious to me). The fourth prediction has to do with his request for a cable modem with simultaneous dual band wi-fi which should reduce bufferbloat but won’t be offered by cable companies since bufferbloat works against their competition. Granted that is somewhat more obvious to business oriented people but not obvious to idealistic engineers. Time Warner cable won’t even let me buy my own modem.
Maybe I’m easily confused, but didn’t you say in a recent post that Comcast makes more money from internet service than from television service? If that is the case, then they should try to improve internet services.
Yes, but they THINK OF THEMSELVES as a TV company. McDonald’s makes more profit from drinks than burgers but you don’t see them dropping burgers. The bit-schlepping transformation will inevitably happen for Comcast and other cable ISPs, but none want to take the risk of being first. That’s part of the reason why I predict Apple will do that for them (#10).
Well… We just “upgraded” to AT&T U-Verse, which has been pretty good (big honking modem that has an internal wireless access point, BTW), but one thing I have a grip about is that, periodically, when watching an on-demand movie, it will suddenly stop, and put up a message about “this movie cannot be shown right now, please try again later”. Go back through the menus (ack! work on that user interface, please!) to get to the movie again, and we’re in business. The other night, “Inglorious Basterds” was interrupted 3 times. Sounds like buffer bloat might be a culprit?
For what it’s worth, with AT&T U-Verse DSL (at least in my part of the city of Chicago), you can opt-out of that fancy modem+switch+wireless gateway and get a standalone modem (a Motorola whose model number I forget, but is roughly the size of a deck of cards).
So far I’ve never had the Netflix problems you describe with my AT&T service. But when I first signed up, they sent me that big modem+wireless device you described. I already had my own router, firewall, switch and wireless access point. I thought the software on the AT&T device was junk. So I called them and got the little Motorola sent out to me as a replacement.
If you already have your own network infrastructure in place, it might be worth calling them to arrange for a swap.
“For what it’s worth, with AT&T U-Verse DSL (at least in my part of the city of Chicago), you can opt-out of that fancy modem+switch+wireless gateway and get a standalone modem (a Motorola whose model number I forget, but is roughly the size of a deck of cards).”
Do you still have to pay their BS $4 “rental fee” for that Motorola box?
They gave me their (large and power-hungry) box even though I told them the ONLY thing I care about is internet, and the first thing I did was switch off every “feature” so that is acting as a pure modem, feeding the WAN signal into my router.
If I could get rid of that box and replace it with something smaller, less power hungry, and not requiring their stupid “rental fee” I’d be very happy.
Must I be the one to tell you that the accusative of “nausea” is “nauseam”? Sigh… there are things a man just has to do.
Thanks. It’s been a long time since I had the 4 years of Latin in high school. I should have caught that too.
Fixed, thanks.
[…] I, Cringely » 2011 prediction #4: Why ISPs are their own worst enemies […]
Maybe this problem can be avoided at the by altering TCP to react differently to an increase in RTT.
Consider that your Xbox 360 streaming issue was caused by the buffers dedicated to you (i.e. in your router(s) and not in the DOCSIS equipment). This seems likely since the the older Roku box didn’t have the issue.
Now, if the TCP stack on the Xbox 360 reacted to an increase in RTT similarly to packet loss and reduced it’s window in response it would give the buffers a chance to drain. (Again, this is assuming that the Xbox was the cause of the congestion)
Of course you can’t upgrade the Xbox 360 stack (Microsoft could), but perhaps it’s possible to make the change on the senders stack too – in this case at Netflix’s end. That is Netflix’s TCP stack could look for increases in RTT and reduce it send window in response.
Completely agree on this one. Anything the cable guys can do (or NOT do in this case) to maintain their stranglehold over us they will do.
Current trends in ISP behaviour indicate that they’re more interested in using their customer base as leverage to squeeze money out of content providers.
Current trends in ISP behaviour indicate that they’re more interested in using their customer base as leverage to squeeze money out of content providers.
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » 2011 prediction #4: Bufferbloat may be terrible, but your cable ISP won’t fix it – Cringely on technology[…]…
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