Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

Thu Sep 16 15:33:55 UTC 2010

On 9/16/2010 8:19 AM, Chris Boyd wrote:
> <end user>
> I DO have a problem with a content provider paying to get priority access on the last mile.  I have no particular interest in any of the content that Yahoo provides, but I do have an interest in downloading my Linux updates via torrents.  Should I have to go back and bid against Yahoo just so I can get my packets in a timely fashion?
> </end user>

Depends on what constitutes last mile, really. For me, it would be 
prioritizing traffic over a customer's saturated DSL line (ie, you paid 
for and saturated your bandwidth). Although, to be honest, I've been 
extremely tempted to just prioritize for free.

Your case in point, if you are streaming video from Y' and doing a 
bittorrent, there is still the presumption that you want the bittorrent 
to play nice and let your video stream.

Of course, proper prioritizing really requires both sides working 
together. I've had more issues with upstreams saturating and killing a 
video stream than I have with downstreams saturating.

> I understand that the last mile is going to be a congestion point, but the idea of allowing a bidding war for priority access for that capacity seems to be a path to madness.

It seems pointless, really. Customer has to request the content, for the 
priority to matter. It only makes sense in a shared pipe, and that's 
where bottlenecks shouldn't be (ie, customer A's video shouldn't have 
precedence over Customer B's p2p (which may be valid WoW updates, iso 
downloads, etc).

Jack