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Comment by travbrack | Hacker News Reader

Paid fast lanes are a bad idea, but I think 100% equality for all packets is just as bad or worse. Real time traffic should be prioritized over data transfers. Right now my video call gets clobbered when I download a file. It doesn’t have to be like that.

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Use quality of service controls in your router/modem. That's an end user problem, not a dumb wires problem.

Without tagging packets over the internet, you can only throttle tcp streams and prioritize your upstream.

I can prioritize the packets I send to my ISP, but I have no control over the order I get packets from them.

How should your ISP know? Diffserv might help, but I doubt some shitty application will set them.

They can tell right now. T-Mobile gives free data usage for video and music streaming, for instance.

You can either do traffic pattern analysis or just base it on what IPs they are connecting to.

That works great today, but it stifles innovation. If I roll out a new real-time service my users suffer shitty delayed service, until I get big enough to force them to prioritize me.

That is not independent and not net neutral.

It also doesn’t cross the ISP boundary.

It probably doesn't need to, bottleneck is usually at the customers side. (Mainly due to bad upload)

That’s one of a whole host of issues raised by the idea of tagging packets on the internet. Attackers could assign priority to their DDOS attacks for example. I don’t have the answers but I think this is the direction the conversation should go in. The discussions I see on the topic almost never competently address the issue I’m raising. Nobody should be arguing that all traffic should be equal, we should be discussing which traffic gets priority and how that decision is made.

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