QUIC traffic throttled on AT&T residential

Thu Feb 20 21:42:01 UTC 2020

On 2/20/2020 1:10 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 10:57:46AM -0600, Blake Hudson wrote:
>> On 2/20/2020 10:34 AM, Ca By wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 10:19 AM Blake Hudson <blake at ispn.net
>>> <mailto:blake at ispn.net>> wrote:
>>> Dropping udp is not from a “best practice” doc from a vendor, it is
>>> deployed by network ops folks that are trying to sleep at night.
>> I get it Ca, I happen to be one of those network ops folks that likes to
>> sleep at night. However, I've never thought it was a good practice to break
>> applications in fun ways for my customers to discover on their own and I've
>> never sold someone a 150Mbps package that actually only delivers 10Mbps for
>> certain applications. Regardless of the intent, ATT and Cox's policies are
>> not transparent, open, or neutral on this topic. This leaves us to speculate
>> on what their intentions might have been and whether their actions are an
>> appropriate response to any concerns they might have had.
> 	I was responsible for deploying such policies in the past, going back as
> far as the UDP/1434 filters I was forced to deploy due to persistent network
> congestion.  Rolling these back took some time.
>
> 	The same is true for UDP policers we ended up rolling out for NTP, chargen
> and other activities.
>
> 	Extending these to consumer side where the traffic often originated makes
> sense until the devices can be secured.  You can blame the providers for deploying
> filters, or not disconnecting consumers that have devices that can be exploited
> or whatever other reason you believe.
>
> 	As a network operator my goal was always to ensure customers receive
> the traffic they expected, high rates of UDP were often not what they wanted.
>
> 	Adusting the limits may be useful but I still think the question of
> what rate of UDP traffic is acceptable is a practical one for the future.
>
> 	- Jared

I think that's a fair statement Jared. How about this question: Would it 
be reasonable for one to presume that someone purchasing a 25Mbps 
internet connection might potentially want to send or receive 25Mbps of 
UDP traffic? I can think of a few (not uncommon) applications where this 
would be the case (VPNs, security cameras using RTP, teleconferencing, 
web browsers implementing QUIC, DNS servers, hosted PBX, etc).