QUIC traffic throttled on AT&T residential

Thu Feb 20 20:30:52 UTC 2020

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 2:57 PM Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:
> if the question is will the browser vendor (google) or the broadband provider (att)
> move first, i can already predict the answer.  my experience (again) with the quic
> wg is they seem to think there's many options and bad providers will be replaced
> which seems disconnected from reality.

Agreed. Since I'm in RTP, I *am* lucky enough to live in an area where
there are multiple ISPs.

But not everyone is, and local-loop unbundling is no longer a thing :(

The average user is at the mercy of their local ISP. So the major
providers should (but may not have much incentive to) provide decent
service.

As has been continually noted, this issue goes away if you use v4 TCP or v6 UDP.

And one may argue that most users *will* by default have v6 UDP
connectivity from their ISP -- to Google at least.

But HTTP/3 is coming -- and site operators may not realize deploying
HTTP/3 on v4 only will break connectivity for their users.

We're currently in a limbo where v4, which had been working fine, has
been *broken* -- and not everyone uses v6.

Site operators aren't used to deploying services that break when
served over ipv4. HTTP/3 will be the first widely-deployed service
that only properly works when served from v6.

So something is going to give:

* site operators will have to deploy v6 before they deploy HTTP/3, or

* network operators will have to make v4 UDP as reliable as v4 TCP (or
block HTTP/3)

If neither happens, then as more sites start pushing v4 UDP, more and
more users will start seeing issues, even if they *do* have v6 working
well at their house.

It may become common practice to block HTTP/3 on the client side to
improve connectivity to v4-only services.

Exciting times lay ahead, indeed

-- Dan