Now if Apple paid AT&T money to block Microsoft video downloads or vice versa, that certainly should be illegal and already is illegal under anti-trust law. But if Apple merely paid AT&T for caching services for faster and more reliable delivery, that’s normal CDN (caching services) and there’s nothing strange or illegal about that. Any content distributor on a large scale pretty much has to buy CDN to get their content delivered anyways. That is how the Internet works today.

This whole article seems to misunderstand the intent of NN.

Even if it’s 15 routers and you can slash that to 8 ms delay (I doubt that much), what’s the point of gaining 7ms? It’s far less than the 20ms or 30ms of packetization delay you get in the creation of that VoIP or gaming packet. The real problem that you need to tackle is that transmit queue in the DSLAM that is opposite your DSL modem that might be 200 packets deep with up to a 1000 ms delay or more typically 200 ms delay.

So *CAN* you reduce software latency? Sure. Is it even remotely worth implementing? Not even close. The fact of the matter is; any function that is computationally expensive on existing commercial Cisco routers are already done with ASICs and you’d be hard pressed to lower the latency crossing a router any more than it already is.

Is the "problem" worthy of a civil class action lawsuit? That’s like saying that you get to sue Intel for selling you a $50 CPU that can’t encode 1080P H.264 in real-time.

As for Snowe-Dorgan from 2006, here is the exact language.

Snowe-Dorgan proposal:
(5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;

So again, it says nothing about "special QoS deals"; it just flat out bans the sale of QoS. So if you as the consumer want to buy a service where you get to tell your ISP that you want to prioritize Lingo (which I am a customer of), Snowe-Dorgan 2006 and Markey-2006 would prohibit you from doing so.

If I read this conversation right, if you have an uncongested coast-to-coast link in the USA with, say, ten hops in the link, you will likely have ping around 80 ms and one-way delay of half that, or 40 ms. (This is using the figures you and dre argued over above, but I checked it with traceroute during non-peak hours and it seems to be about right, maybe a little low.) Am I correct in thinking that that 40 ms OWD is because of:

-20 ms speed-of-light delay
-insignificant (<1 ms in most scenarios) router delay (combining the delays from all ten hops)
-and 20+ ms packetization/depacketization delay?

If that’s correct, then *could* packetization be sped up by making changes at the software level, or is TCP (which I believe is the upper layer protocol we’d be using here) pretty much going to packetize at the same speed (thus giving you the same latency) no matter how you send it data?

Lastly, my understanding of the most recent net neutrality legislation that I’ve looked at (Snowe-Dorgen 2007) was that it would only ban special QoS deals between networks and specific content providers–the law would prevent a scenario in which, say, Lingo data would have a higher priority than all other VoIP traffic because Lingo would have coughed up the big bucks to the ISP’s and Vonage wouldn’t have–while still allowing protocol-based QoS. Am I missing something here? Did the 2008 proposed act change this? If not, how does a ban on that very specific type of QoS impact the entirely reasonable protocol-based packet prioritization you proposed in this article?

I know those questions probably have quite a few errors just in the asking. Sorry. Thanks for any answer you may (or may not) give.

-W.

1. How does 1ms router latency compare to 20ms packetization latency or 300ms congestion-induced latency? And how does that 1ms of latency in the router negate the need to deal with congestion-induced latency using packet scheculing prioritization technology? How does that justify a lawsuit against every router manufacturer as you suggest?

2. How do you explain the fact that you do not understand that QoS works regardless of protocol or encryption usage?

Don’t post another comment until you’ve answered these questions.

I’m sure that you couldn’t hang with Nate McFeters or Larry Dignan. How do you feel about your replacement, Dancho Danchev? I bet that’s got to hurt.

Wow… since you’re not really a journalist anymore… I have to wonder… what kind of "expert" are you?