U.S. Pandemic Options Include Crippling Home Modems
Break out the checkerboards and crossword puzzles
"The U.S. has a dark box of options for keeping Internet traffic flowing during a pandemic, including restricting the bandwidth capability of home modems.
The feds have already shown their willingness to impose their power on carriers because of national security, something that happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. If a pandemic keeps large numbers of the workforce at home and causes network congestion, the U.S. government will likely act again.
Most businesses and government agencies have diverse routing and pay carriers handsomely for bandwidth rich connections. But if a pandemic keeps 30% or more of the population at home, the so-called low bandwidth "last mile" to homes will be critical but in trouble as legions of at-home employees attempt work along with those playing networked games and streaming video.
Voluntary appeals to reduce Internet use will likely be the first option for policy makers. But if that doesn't work, the U.S. General Accountability Office report this week on pandemic planning and networks, outlined some of the other possibilities.
One "technically feasible alternative," wrote the GAO, is to temporarily cripple home user modems:
The feds have already shown their willingness to impose their power on carriers because of national security, something that happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. If a pandemic keeps large numbers of the workforce at home and causes network congestion, the U.S. government will likely act again.
Most businesses and government agencies have diverse routing and pay carriers handsomely for bandwidth rich connections. But if a pandemic keeps 30% or more of the population at home, the so-called low bandwidth "last mile" to homes will be critical but in trouble as legions of at-home employees attempt work along with those playing networked games and streaming video.
Voluntary appeals to reduce Internet use will likely be the first option for policy makers. But if that doesn't work, the U.S. General Accountability Office report this week on pandemic planning and networks, outlined some of the other possibilities.
One "technically feasible alternative," wrote the GAO, is to temporarily cripple home user modems:
"Although providers cannot identify users at the computer level to manage traffic from that point, two providers stated that if the residential Internet access network in a particular neighborhood was experiencing congestion, a provider could attempt to reduce congestion by reducing the amount of traffic that each user could send to and receive from his or her network. Such a reduction would require adjusting the configuration file within each customer's modem to temporarily reduce the maximum transmission speed that that modem was capable of performing-for example, by reducing its incoming capability from 7 Mbps to 1 Mbps."
h↑t to Aftermath News
posted by nolocontendere at 6:51 PM
2 Comments:
Let me guess now -- Cable TV is behind this, right?
For DSL they don't need to go into the customer modems, even if they could. The profile on the DSLAM ports (the telco modems, usually in a big steel box within 1km with a fiber uplink) defines the bandwidth. These profiles are changed when you buy a different grade of service. The grades of service are defined in state public utilities commission tariffs which are largely drafted by the telcos but which require the telcos to use their "best efforts" to ensure operation at the rated bandwidth. The telcos almost never change these profiles individually, even if reducing the nominal bandwidth or changing the modulation scheme will make the individual customer's line work much better. Very seldom is there a bottleneck locally at the DSLAM, and throttling ports won't have any real effect, or at best for a few dozen customers. The important potential bottlenecks are more likely be in the ATM/ethernet switches close to the internet service providers on the other end of the telco network.
These bottlenecks are caused by two factors: first, the ISPs (95%+ the customer base is served by ISP subsidiaries of the telcos) have oversold their capacity to an extent that is threatened by having even a third of their customers online at one time; second, the switches deployed over the last few years no longer just pass traffic, but inspect and even alter it, reaching through several layers of encapsulation to monitor even application-layer data. This requires massive processing power and these newer switches have less capacity than their nominal rating when deep packet inspection is being done. Throttling on an individual basis will most likely be done in these switches, using packet inspection to keep traffic to a level where packet inspection doesn't have to be turned off.
This may be followed by individual port- throttling, but that is less likely because the telcos don't want to implement such a flagrant and easily-seen violation of their tariffs, and because changing DSLAM port profiles usually requires massive loads on many databases and network management resources, and doing it on a wholesale basis could bring network management to a virtual halt.
Going into the CPE (customer premises equipment, e.g. modems) isn't needed, would be very (very) difficult, and would expose the telcos to lawsuits. The telcos will do it the easy way.
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