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Smith6612
MVM
join:2008-02-01
North Tonawanda, NY
·Charter
Ubee EU2251
Ubiquiti UAP-IW-HD
Ubiquiti UniFi AP-AC-HD

Smith6612

MVM

But...

TCP isn't broken! Even though I can be a bandwidth hog at times (not torrent, have never used it), it doesn't mean I should have TCP rewritten to simply slow down my game demo downloads, timing some of them out and chewing up more bandwidth because another person decided to do one small file download. If people really want to slow the bandwidth hogs down, just use QoS to limit how much the physical machine is able to use at once, or hog the bandwidth before the bandwidth hog goes at it.

At a Wi-Fi hotspot at a resort I go to two times a year, they have a single T1 line powering all of the free Wi-Fi access points, while they have a T3 line powering the pay Wi-Fi in the hotel and corporate operations. The load on the T3 is hardly anything at night (when everyone is online) mainly because it's only corporate online because people hate to pay for internet, but the T1 sure does take a big banging at night, with everything ranging from 40kbps of download and upload to packet loss, to 300+ms ping because of everyone using the free Wi-Fi to download huge files or to mess around on games/YouTube, and there are probably around 20 access areas with a few routers in each zone as well (heck, due to demand of people they even have their entire main parking lot covered with Wi-Fi for the summer time outdoor people and RV people). This place doesn't limit bandwidth to anyone, so everyone can max the line out, but there's never a time where it's been so slow that I've never been able to connect to sites. Even with that lack of bandwidth, downloads still complete, uploads as well and the internet still works fine.

Again, QoS is the key. Don't like bandwidth hogs on a line? Get a new line just for you.

justbits
DSL is dead. Long live DSL!
Premium Member
join:2003-01-08
Chicago, IL

justbits

Premium Member

said by Smith6612:

If people really want to slow the bandwidth hogs down, just use QoS to limit how much the physical machine is able to use at once, or hog the bandwidth before the bandwidth hog goes at it.
...
Again, QoS is the key. Don't like bandwidth hogs on a line? Get a new line just for you.
You're right, TCP isn't broken. It's just not designed to be fair and P2P protocols take advantage of that. There are proposals for making all Internet protocols more fair.

You throw around QoS as if it's a solve-all term.

One version of QoS (network traffic management) is Sandvine's appliance applied at a whole-network level. Another version of QoS is the Re-ECN extension to TCP that Briscoe has drafted which could result in fair sharing of both congested last-mile backbones and congested major Internet backbones. But realize that the Re-ECN extensions are not just targeting TCP, they can be applied to all Internet protocols to help ease the burden on ISPs for network traffic congestion management.

A change to everybody's TCP stack could result in less need for ISPs to provide their own traffic management. A change to everybody's TCP stack won't slow down your massive downloads on a congested link. Large downloads will still finish in the same amount of time, it's just that smaller transfers would be able to start and finish much faster, instead of being choked out. If everybody were using P2P applications at the same time (which could occur sooner than later), a TCP stack change could improve everybody's web surfing/VoIP performance and without the need for ISPs to implement aggressive or excessively unfair QoS appliances or policies.