Traffic Management (or Deprioritization)

The easiest way to think of traffic management is to think of it as a job scheduling problem. Routing nodes maintain queues with different sizes and priorities and decide which packets to let through based on some criteria. Here is a quick example, whenever I use bittorent, my latency increases significantly. What Cox probably does is look for a particular behavior (the fact that I have 60 open TCP connections with a sustained upload bandwidth of 100K) and deprioritize all my packets to some slow, bloated queue. I'm able to notice this because UDP latency to UF nodes which usually takes 15ms with a few ms mean deviation, just to 45 ms with 50ms mean deviation. Long story short, once Cox tags you as a P2P user, your priority goes down and you are put in the slow queue. The other thing to add is that there was no packet loss. Meaning although my bandwidth usage was pretty high, the Cox routers did not drop my UDP packets.

P.S. - Btw, I am a big P2P user, but I condone Cox's practices, the overall algorithm I assume gives a much better user experience for everyone and Cox makes more money. The bigger point, however, is that traffic management systems are already in place and ISPs knows how to use them, so without proper oversight, they can easily make sure that their video streaming services has better performance than Netflix. I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, as a company, I would do whatever it takes to protect my business especially when it's so easy to put Netflix packets in the slow, high latency queue. Final point is that, it's hard to compete with ISPs when it comes to content delivery because you depend on their computers to route packets for you which directly impacts the quality of your service. Bottom line is, get in good with your ISP because it's your lifeline (that piece of advice is for Netflix).

Net neutrality doesn't really matter (recap of what i read)

I was talking to a professor the other day and they told me how many of the classes at UF are moving towards Web video because it makes sense (saves money, distance learning). But one complaint she had was the fact that students still have bandwidth issues from home. Basically she told me that we need to work harder to make home internet faster so that video experience would not be so crappy. So I told her, one of the reasons home internet usage is so darn slow is because ISP would rather use the available bandwidth capabilities of coxial cable for broadcasting a ton of crap channels that we're not going to watch than use if for sending internet traffic. I did some Wikipedia research (LOL, I love wiki) and I realized that if ISPs use all of the bandwidth spectrum for IP traffic, I think they would get a throughput of either 480 MB or probably even more (but that would have to be shared by individual homes of course). Please don't quote me on that number, I'm pretty sure it's wrong. But the moral of the story is simple, cable providers/ISPs are content providers. So if they dedicate the majority of their bandwidth to TV channels, they will always have control over that quality of service. So in other words, cable companies can always make sure that its video-on-demand service is always better than Netflix because it controls how it sends that data to home users, its already uneven to start with. Cable providers have no motivation to make the Internet faster if they realize that companies like Google and Netflix will be making all of the money. Bottom line, it's not a technology issue, it's an economics issue, and that's exactly what I told her. Google is trying to bypass ISPs by providing user with direct fiber connections 1Gbps to their home. We have had fiber technology for the longest and gigabit speeds are possible for cheap, but cable providers (hence ISPs) have no motivation to increase speed because that can effectively put them out of business. It's not about giving customers choices through competition, it's about locking down customers, and making as much profit as possible, it's about monopolies, and changing regulations, and most importantly, it's about survival. Companies have to survive, if they don't people lose jobs, but how far are you willing to go to survive? I guess it helps that companies do not have souls hence they don't have to worry about sleeping at night. It is all business afterall.