6 ms·

ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance

47 points by pmb 12y ago

pmb 12y ago
Original title was something like: US ISPs are failing to provide broadband speeds during peak hours. If I could make it longer, I might have said "Due to neglect of relatively cheap interconnects, US ISPs are and were measured to be providing sub-broadband connections to many portions of the Internet". The title "ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance" just says that there was a study and says nothing about its results, but it's the results that are interesting. It was kind of a surprise to see the title changed out from underneath me. I did not know HN titles were edited in that way.
- JshWright 12y ago
  How have you been here for more than half a decade and haven't noticed that title editing is favorite pastime of the mods here...? Generally speaking though, the original title is the one to us, and if you use something else, it will generally be changed to match the original one.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too. I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it. It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.
    - dang 12y ago
      > Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too. The HN guidelines (edit: which are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and linked at the bottom of every page) say not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait. How could that be clearer? Do we judge every case correctly? Good lord no. That's why we change things when people point out our mistakes. The community contribution here is considerable, so the best way to complain about a title is to suggest a better one. The guideline also explains why titles can't be automated in the way you suggest: the software would have to identify what is misleading or linkbait. If anyone can show us such software, believe me, no one would use it more eagerly.
      - jrochkind1 12y ago
        My opinion on what is linkbait or misleading is often not the same as yours. But that's fine, that's why you're the mods. My titles have been changed so many times (in both directions), that I just decided to always use the original title, and let you do your mod job and change it according to your judgement. Do the HN guidelines also say to always use the original title unless it's misleading or linkbait too? I hadn't actually been aware of that -- where do I find these guidelines? I'm not actually sure. If I had known that, it would have spared my energy in coming with titles I thought were more informative only to have them, as a rule, changed back. Thanks for your work! I just found the Hacker News Guidelines you mention by googling -- previously I hadn't been aware they even existed, so didn't know to look for them. I see they do say to ordinarily prefer the original title. I am not sure how people find out about these guidelines, are they linked to from somewhere on HN that I'm missing? It might make a lot of sense to include a link to them on the 'submit' form.
        wmf 12y ago
        The guidelines are linked on the bottom of every single page of HN (edit: except the submission page itself!) but I guess that's the part that nobody reads. Maybe they should be more prominent in the submission flow.
        12y ago
- rhino369 12y ago
  Like the tango, it takes two to interconnect. It's a bit biased to say ISPs fail to provide broadband speeds. You could easily say L3 or Cogent fails to provide it's subscribers the transit service they are paying for. ISPs are rightly a little pissed that Cogent, for example, takes Netflix's money for transit service then hot potatoes the data right onto the ISP for the ISP to transit to the end customer. Remember, Cogent is being paid to deliver the content, but they are contracting to carry more data that the interconnect can hold. Now you could say the ISP should just let them expand the interconnect, but that is no excuse for Cogent overselling their own capacity. Interconnects have always been a wild west.
  - msandford 12y ago
    You could argue that, but Cogent is willing to provide the interconnect to its customer, Netflix. But what we're seeing is that the ISP that is selling internet to its customer isn't willing to provide sufficient bandwidth to meet their expected-but-not-contractually-obliged obligations. They can do this because they have a monopoly on their customers. Not just a "Microsoft monopoly" where there are plenty of alternatives but network effects that keep people using Windows, but honest-to-god monopolies not just granted but ENFORCED by the government. What we have here is a failure of the government to break the monopolies, revoke the monopolies, or police the monopolies. A little legislation that said "you can't oversell your bandwidth by more than X amount" would go a long way towards giving consumers an effective stick to beat their ISP with for over-promising* and under-delivering. Note: The * is there to denote that they've written the contracts such that basically no matter what happens they're not in violation of them. We're only entering those contracts willingly in the sense that it's an abusive contracts from one of two or three vendors, or no contract at all. It's kind of like asking someone if they'd rather be beaten or stabbed. Given the choice; neither. If I have to pick one, how big is the knife?
    - rhino369 12y ago
      1) The ISPs are willing to interconnect, they just aren't willing to interconnect in an unbalanced fashion without being compensated. Settlement free peering is free because the two sides transfer the same amount so it's a net of roughly zero. In these cases, the net is heavily on the Cogent or L3 side. Now I think there is a decent argument that ISPs should have to have free peering available at their local loop level. If congent wants to peer at the CO office of the local telecom, it should be able to do it. The issue is that Verizon is not just a local ISP, it's a nationwide T1 provider. It sells transit service. It should be allowed to charge for transit to it's own local loop networks. 2) There are no enforced monopolies anymore, and haven't been for a long time. Damn near all profitable areas have a telecom and a cable provider. Congress banned monopoly franchise agreements for cable and fiber in 1992. Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-385, 106 Stat. 1460 (1992). 3) I believe ISPs should have to meet some benchmarks for speed compared what they advertise, but you can't force them to maintain speed on specific interconnects. If Cogent has a shitty network that isn't on Verizon.
- dang 12y ago
  Begging your pardon, that wasn't the original title. You editorialized it by picking a detail you consider important and interpreting it. That breaks the HN guidelines. The policy here is to let readers make up their own minds what's important. Indeed, the first reply disputes your interpretation.

47 points by pmb 12y ago

pmb 12y ago

Original title was something like: US ISPs are failing to provide broadband speeds during peak hours. If I could make it longer, I might have said "Due to neglect of relatively cheap interconnects, US ISPs are and were measured to be providing sub-broadband connections to many portions of the Internet". The title "ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance" just says that there was a study and says nothing about its results, but it's the results that are interesting. It was kind of a surprise to see the title changed out from underneath me. I did not know HN titles were edited in that way.

JshWright 12y ago
How have you been here for more than half a decade and haven't noticed that title editing is favorite pastime of the mods here...? Generally speaking though, the original title is the one to us, and if you use something else, it will generally be changed to match the original one.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too. I've given up on trying to come up with what I think is the most useful title to HN though, or on trying to guess what the mods will do. I just use the original title and let the mods change it if they want. If I think the original title isn't good at explaining the main point of interest from a HN view, I feel sad, but oh well, that's clearly how HN wants it. It might be convenient if HN had a tool like reddit to automatically fetch the title from HTML given a URL. In fact, if they had such a tool, I'd expect HN to maybe actually mandatorily make that the title and not allow you to edit it, since it seems to be HN editorial preferences not to let submitters write titles.
  - dang 12y ago
    > Except when they consider the original title "click baity" and change that too. The HN guidelines (edit: which are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and linked at the bottom of every page) say not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait. How could that be clearer? Do we judge every case correctly? Good lord no. That's why we change things when people point out our mistakes. The community contribution here is considerable, so the best way to complain about a title is to suggest a better one. The guideline also explains why titles can't be automated in the way you suggest: the software would have to identify what is misleading or linkbait. If anyone can show us such software, believe me, no one would use it more eagerly.
    - jrochkind1 12y ago
      My opinion on what is linkbait or misleading is often not the same as yours. But that's fine, that's why you're the mods. My titles have been changed so many times (in both directions), that I just decided to always use the original title, and let you do your mod job and change it according to your judgement. Do the HN guidelines also say to always use the original title unless it's misleading or linkbait too? I hadn't actually been aware of that -- where do I find these guidelines? I'm not actually sure. If I had known that, it would have spared my energy in coming with titles I thought were more informative only to have them, as a rule, changed back. Thanks for your work! I just found the Hacker News Guidelines you mention by googling -- previously I hadn't been aware they even existed, so didn't know to look for them. I see they do say to ordinarily prefer the original title. I am not sure how people find out about these guidelines, are they linked to from somewhere on HN that I'm missing? It might make a lot of sense to include a link to them on the 'submit' form.
      - wmf 12y ago
        The guidelines are linked on the bottom of every single page of HN (edit: except the submission page itself!) but I guess that's the part that nobody reads. Maybe they should be more prominent in the submission flow.
      - 12y ago
rhino369 12y ago
Like the tango, it takes two to interconnect. It's a bit biased to say ISPs fail to provide broadband speeds. You could easily say L3 or Cogent fails to provide it's subscribers the transit service they are paying for. ISPs are rightly a little pissed that Cogent, for example, takes Netflix's money for transit service then hot potatoes the data right onto the ISP for the ISP to transit to the end customer. Remember, Cogent is being paid to deliver the content, but they are contracting to carry more data that the interconnect can hold. Now you could say the ISP should just let them expand the interconnect, but that is no excuse for Cogent overselling their own capacity. Interconnects have always been a wild west.
- msandford 12y ago
  You could argue that, but Cogent is willing to provide the interconnect to its customer, Netflix. But what we're seeing is that the ISP that is selling internet to its customer isn't willing to provide sufficient bandwidth to meet their expected-but-not-contractually-obliged obligations. They can do this because they have a monopoly on their customers. Not just a "Microsoft monopoly" where there are plenty of alternatives but network effects that keep people using Windows, but honest-to-god monopolies not just granted but ENFORCED by the government. What we have here is a failure of the government to break the monopolies, revoke the monopolies, or police the monopolies. A little legislation that said "you can't oversell your bandwidth by more than X amount" would go a long way towards giving consumers an effective stick to beat their ISP with for over-promising* and under-delivering. Note: The * is there to denote that they've written the contracts such that basically no matter what happens they're not in violation of them. We're only entering those contracts willingly in the sense that it's an abusive contracts from one of two or three vendors, or no contract at all. It's kind of like asking someone if they'd rather be beaten or stabbed. Given the choice; neither. If I have to pick one, how big is the knife?
  - rhino369 12y ago
    1) The ISPs are willing to interconnect, they just aren't willing to interconnect in an unbalanced fashion without being compensated. Settlement free peering is free because the two sides transfer the same amount so it's a net of roughly zero. In these cases, the net is heavily on the Cogent or L3 side. Now I think there is a decent argument that ISPs should have to have free peering available at their local loop level. If congent wants to peer at the CO office of the local telecom, it should be able to do it. The issue is that Verizon is not just a local ISP, it's a nationwide T1 provider. It sells transit service. It should be allowed to charge for transit to it's own local loop networks. 2) There are no enforced monopolies anymore, and haven't been for a long time. Damn near all profitable areas have a telecom and a cable provider. Congress banned monopoly franchise agreements for cable and fiber in 1992. Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-385, 106 Stat. 1460 (1992). 3) I believe ISPs should have to meet some benchmarks for speed compared what they advertise, but you can't force them to maintain speed on specific interconnects. If Cogent has a shitty network that isn't on Verizon.
dang 12y ago
Begging your pardon, that wasn't the original title. You editorialized it by picking a detail you consider important and interpreting it. That breaks the HN guidelines. The policy here is to let readers make up their own minds what's important. Indeed, the first reply disputes your interpretation.