Engineer Rips ‘Vague’ Nondiscrimination Rule on Packet Networks

Bennett joined other panelists opposing bans on traffic management, meanwhile offering an alternative he said could satisfy both sides in the dispute. ITIF was created in partnership with the Information Technology Industry Council, which counts Cisco, Apple, Microsoft and other technology vendors as members.

Proposed rules advocating nondiscrimination are “vague,” Bennett said. “To an engineer, that’s a completely idiotic idea.” Solutions that worked to relieve congestion on FTP and HTTP “won’t work” with P2P, which BitTorrent uses to send files, he said. The only way to handle Internet congestion now is to use traffic-management tools that discriminate between packets and give priority to VoIP and other services with the greatest need for fast delivery, he said.

Traffic management is needed to stop P2P companies from shifting costs to ISPs, said Brett Glass, founder of Lariat wireless broadband. Unlike previous file transfer protocols that sent data from a company’s server to the end user, P2P networks take bandwidth from multiple consumer PCs to send data. That effectively makes ISPs, not P2P companies, pay for the transfer, Glass said. Regulation proposed by Vuze and other P2P companies to bar ISPs from managing P2P traffic would drive Lariat and other small ISPs “right out of business,” he said.

ISPs must be allowed to “innovate” to find the best way to address network congestion, Glass said. Net-neutrality regulation could complicate experimentation, he said. ITIF president Robert Atkinson agreed, saying regulators must allow multiple kinds of management tools.

Targeting traffic is the only “practical” way to reduce congestion, Bennett said. There’s technology to reduce the load without “explicitly targeting” BitTorrent or other bandwidth-eating applications, but they would need to be installed in “every individual end user’s computer,” he said. The technology, Explicit Congestion Notification, is bundled with Windows Vista but not older operating systems, he said.

ISPs might reduce worries about competition and free speech raised by neutrality regulation supporters by putting management in consumers’ hands, Bennett said. A common argument for neutrality regulation says network management lets ISPs favor their services over competitors’. Bennett proposed letting consumers designate the services they want given the most bandwidth. Consumers would use their home gateway to assign VoIP, BitTorrent and other services to tiered subscription “buckets,” he said. Each bucket would offer an amount of time for each level of bandwidth, he said. A consumer wanting fast BitTorrent service could put it in the high-priority bucket and demote Web browser service to a low-priority bucket. If the bucket used up its high-priority minutes, the BitTorrent service would be “demoted” to a lower tier bucket, he said.

Metered pricing such as Time Warner is testing isn’t a good solution, Bennett said. Time Warner’s system prices by the traffic a customer creates. ISPs shouldn’t “penalize” people for using P2P, but make sure that P2P use doesn’t slow the Internet for everybody else, Bennett said. Consumers won’t like metered pricing, because it will mean frustrating overage charges like those on cellphone bills, added Glass.

Adding bandwidth on networks won’t fix congestion woes, Bennett and Glass said, citing Japan. At 100 Mbps, Japan has some of the world’s largest pipes, but still faces significant congestion due to P2P networks, they said. Demanding that Comcast and other ISPs increase capacity is also unreasonable because P2P is used most often to send unlicensed content, Bennett said.