QUIC traffic throttled on AT&T residential

Thu Feb 20 21:58:56 UTC 2020

> On Feb 20, 2020, at 4:53 PM, Blake Hudson <blake at ispn.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>>> 	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).
>> I can think of many legitimate cases, but i think this is where you have internet for everyone and internet for the tech-savvy/business split that becomes interesting.
>> 
>> I’ve generally been willing to pay more for a business class service for support and improved response SLA.  The average user isn’t going to detect that 10% of their UDP has gone missing, nor should they be expected to.
>> 
>> - Jared
> And here I think is where one crosses the threshold between providing an "internet connection" and providing a connection "that can be used to access specific applications or services" (as defined by your provider). This is one step away from your ISP selling you a connection to access Facebook, if you want to access Twitter that's available on their premium package. Oh, you want to access Slack, sorry we don't offer that as a package yet. Call back in a month. You need to esss-esss-achhh? I've never heard of that, why would you want to do that?

AT&T has rarely offered internet service, their required devices for their U-Verse often munged traffic.  I recall when you could reboot their boxes by sending SIP packets to devices behind them and it would intercept them and think it was for itself for their POTS service.

If you have any NAT/ALG in there, it’s not pure internet, but most people want access to the “web” and aren’t running ftp/finger/ytalk/uucp/sip etc.. This is why SSL VPNs on 443 became a thing over time.

- jared