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