One of the standard arguments one hears against network neutrality rules is that network providers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to certain kinds of traffic, such as video. If QoS is necessary, the argument goes, and if net neutrality rules would hamper QoS by requiring all traffic to be treated the same, then net neutrality rules must be harmful. Today, I want to unpack this argument and see how it holds up in light of computer science research and engineering experience.
First, I need to make clear that guaranteeing QoS for an application means more than just giving it lots of bandwidth or prioritizing its traffic above other applications. Those things might be helpful, but they’re not QoS (or at least not the kind I’m talking about today). What QoS mechanisms (try to) do is to make specific performance guarantees to an app over a short window of time.
An example may clarify this point. If you’re loading a web page, and your network connection hiccups so that you get no traffic for (say) half a second, you may notice a short pause but it won’t be a big deal. But if you’re having a voice conversation with somebody, a half-second gap will be very annoying. Web browsing needs decent bandwidth on average, but voice conversations needs better protection against short delays. That protection is QoS.
Careful readers will protest at this point that a good browsing experience depends on more than just average bandwidth. A half-second hiccup might not be a big problem, but a ten-minute pause would be too much, even if performance is really snappy afterward. The difference between voice conversations and browsing is one of degree – voice conversations want guarantees over fractions of seconds, and browsing wants them over fractions of minutes.
The reason we don’t need special QoS mechanisms for browsing is that the broadband Internet already provides performance that is almost always steady enough over the time intervals that matter for browsing.
Sometimes, too, there are simple tricks that can turn an app that cares about short delays into one that cares only about longer delays. For example, watching prerecorded audio or video streams doesn’t need QoS, because you can use buffering. If you’re watching a video, you can download every frame ten seconds before you’re going to watch it; then a hiccup of a few seconds won’t be a problem. This is why streaming audio and video work perfectly well today (when there is enough average bandwidth).
There are two other important cases where QoS isn’t needed. First, if an app needs higher average speed than the Net can provide, than QoS won’t help it – QoS makes the Net’s speed steadier but not faster. Second – and less obvious – if an app needs much less average speed than the Net can provide, then QoS might also be unnecessary. If speed doesn’t drop entirely to zero but fluctuates, with peaks and valleys, then even the valleys may be high enough to give the app what it needs. This is starting to happen for voice conversations – Skype and other VoIP systems seem to work pretty well without any special QoS support in the network.
We can’t say that QoS is never needed, but experience does teach that it’s easy, especially for non-experts, to overestimate the importance of QoS. That’s why I’m not convinced – though I could be, with more evidence – that QoS is a strong argument against net neutrality rules.
Leave a Reply