BITAG Recommends Differentiated Treatment Practices

BITAG (Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group - see "Plans for a New Forum: Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group"- here) announced the ".. publication of its technical report on the subject of Differentiated Treatment of Internet Traffic ..This report touches on a broad range of questions associated with differentiation, but is not intended to address or analyze the economic, legal, regulatory, or public policy issues that the differentiated treatment of Internet access service traffic may raise, focusing instead on the technical issues.

.. network operators make many exceptions to FIFO, using the packet header information to classify packets into flows and treating those flows differently, for example rearranging the order or the timing with which packets are sent, or sending them along different network paths". 

Among the contributors and reviewers to the report (see full list below), is Sandvine's CTO, Don Bowman - See - "Sandvine, Internet Leaders Achieve Consensus on Traffic Differentiation" - here.
"Observations:

• TCP causes recurring momentary congestion. 
• A nominal level of packet discard is normal. 
• The absence of differentiation does not imply comparable behavior among applications. Differentiated treatment can produce a net improvement in Quality of Experience (QoE). 
• Access technologies differ in their capabilities and characteristics. 
• Security of traffic has at times been downgraded to facilitate differentiation techniques. 

Recommendations:

• Network operators should disclose information on differential treatment of traffic. 
• Network operators and ASPs should be encouraged to implement efficient and adaptive network resource management practices. 
• Quality of Service metrics should be interpreted in the context of Quality of Experience. 
• Network operators should not downgrade, interfere with, or block user selected security in order to apply differentiated treatment". 

See "BITAG Publishes Report: Differentiated Treatment of Internet Traffic" - here.

Document Contributors and Reviewers: - Fred Baker, Cisco - Steven Bauer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Richard Bennett, American Enterprise Institute - Don Bowman, Sandvine - Lily Chen, Verizon - kc claffy, University of California, San Diego; Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) - David Clark, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - David Cooper, Level 3 - Amogh Dhamdhere, University of California, San Diego; Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) - Amie Elcan, CenturyLink - Michael Fargano, CenturyLink - Nick Feamster, Princeton University - Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) - Kevin Kleinsmith, Union Wireless - Ken Ko, ADTRAN - Gary Langille, EchoStar - Matt Larsen, Vistabeam - Jason Livingood, Comcast - Patrick McManus, Mozilla - Chris Morrow, Google - Barbara Stark, AT&T - Matthew Tooley, National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) - Jason Weil, Time Warner Cable - Greg White, CableLabs - David Winner, Charter Communication

BITAG: Be Aware of SNMP DDoS Attacks

The Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (“BITAG” - here and here), announced the "..completion of its Technical Review, and publication of its Technical Report, on the subject of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks".

  

" A BITAG member and Internet Service Provider (ISP), Comcast, has observed large-scale Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Reflected Amplification Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks are significant and have been observed to result in tens of gigabits to over one hundred gigabits per second of SNMP traffic sent to attack targets from multiple broadband networks. These attacks have been hours long in duration, disruptive for attack targets, and very challenging for targets to mitigate. The conditions that make this attack possible exist on many types networks, regardless of access network technology (DOCSIS, DSL, fiber, etc.), and regardless of geographic location".

"Device makers as well as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Application Service Providers (ASPs) should be aware of this issue and may need to consider a range of potential network management or other responses"

See press release "BITAG Publishes Report on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks" - here; The report is available here. 

BITAG - Shows some Signs of Life

 

4 months after it was founded (see "Plans for a New Forum: Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group"- here), some information was uploaded to the group's web site (here).

A document providing high level overview of BITAG's organization structure is available here, which may be of interest to vendors and operators in the traffic management space wishing to create a sensible Net Neutrality regulation. A blog was added as well - here.

BITAG Web Site Goes Live

 

The new BITAG organization's web site (see "Plans for a New Forum: Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group" - here) is up.

The new site (here) does not have much - the home page is the press release we saw already, and a contact for further information on membership.


With the recent escalation on Net Neutrality (see "AT&T Escalates Net Neutrality Political Fight" - here) let’s hope the group will start the work quickly!

Plans for a New Forum: Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group

     

A group of leading broadband and high-tech companies announced initial plans for a voluntary Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group ("BITAG" or "TAG").

See the press release "Initial Plans for Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group Announced" - here.

Adjunct Professor Dale Hatfield of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Technologist, will be serving as the facilitator of the group.

"The TAG's mission is to bring together engineers and other similar technical experts to develop consensus on broadband network management practices or other related technical issues that can affect users' Internet experience, including the impact to and from applications, content and devices that utilize the Internet. "

The new initiative got the support of the Internet Society (ISOC). Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technical Officer of the Internet Society said: "The Internet Society believes this activity is an important contribution to the ongoing global [However, the BITAG press release statements are very US/FCC centric - Azi], open technical dialog and looks forward to seeing its output appropriately integrated with the work of existing Internet standards activities."

The impressive list of industry participants has a mix of broadband service providers, content providers, equipment and software vendors and includes: AT&T Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Comcast Corporation (see comcastvoices blog - here), DISH Network, L.L.C., EchoStar Corporation, Google Inc. (see Google Public Policy Blog - here), Intel Corporation, Level 3 Communications, LLC, Microsoft Corporation, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.