> On 29 Mar, 2018, at 3:26 am, Dave Taht <dave.t...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A finicky bit would be who to penalize when the underlying medium
> (shared cable) is oversubscribed.

Two obvious reasonable solutions: share equally per subscriber, or share 
proportionately to provisioned bandwidth per subscriber.  Either should be 
fairly straightforward to implement in an integrated qdisc, and either would 
penalise the (instantaneously) heaviest users before affecting normal or light 
users.

Equal sharing has the interesting side-effect that subscribers on lower tiers 
don't notice backhaul congestion at all until higher tiers have been forced 
down to their level.  This potentially gives ISPs an incentive to avoid such 
extreme congestion (by upgrading backhaul to match demand), since rational 
customers won't pay for bandwidth they can't use.  It also ensures that all 
subscribers retain a reasonable, basic level of service during abnormal 
congestion events.

Conversely, proportional sharing might give a perverse incentive, since paying 
more gives a larger share of the pie, no matter how cramped it is.  Artificial 
scarcity could then be used to aid up-selling in an anti-consumer manner, 
similar to what's been seen with Netflix.  It would be naive to assume that 
ISPs won't do this, given the opportunity, so it would be better to build only 
the more consumer-friendly option into the software.

Theoretically, a middle ground could be to assign a sharing weight separately 
from the provisioned bandwidth.  This would permit, for example, subscribers 
provisioned at 100:1 bandwidths to receive 4:1 service under congested 
conditions.  However, this would be under ISPs' control and fully documented, 
and would therefore be a little too tempting to abuse.

 - Jonathan Morton

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