How can you determine which packets to prioritize?

You could do source and destination prioritization, but who determines who gets on the priority list? Surely you can see the potential for massive abuse.

You could do packet content inspection but you would need to collect to many packets to get enough meaningful data (one packet probably isn’t going to be enough to determine if something should be prioritized or not), and if your heuristics aren’t perfect then you will have way to many false positives and false negatives (think about the current spam filters in place, they suck, what makes you think a packet prioritizer could be any better than a spam filter)

Also with packet inspection how do you deal with encrypted packets? You can’t inspect their content so how do you determine if they should be prioritized? You can’t just not encrypt all priority data, unless you want your medical records flying around the internet in plain text, I know I don’t. Do you come up with a form of PKI that allows for a so called “master key” that can be used by “trusted” entities to decrypt the data? Not going to happen.

Of course you could set certain fields in headers that are not encrypted, but thats to easy to work around by people who would abuse the system. It works for corporations and internal networks, but not the internet as a whole.

Maybe if the internet and its technologies had been built from the start with these concerns in mind, we could have a system where this idea could work, but it wasn’t. The internet wasn’t designed for this type of use, the fact that it was robust enough to facilitate it at all is nothing short of a miracle.

As an aside I think there is a debate to be had as to whether or not certain groups have the right to move their mission critical services to the internet and then demand to the rest of the world that they be given priority. If the system isn’t going to work for you, don’t use it. But I will leave that discussion for another time.

Anyway, I’d like you to think about, as I’m reading through your old posts to see where you’ve already thought about it, your own assertion, “The internet has become a utility”. I completely agree with you. Well, what type of utility? How have we treated utilities in the past? What’s been successful?

Toll roads, telegraph lines, the interstate highway system, telephone lines, cable lines, radio spectrum…regulation, deregulation, barriers to entry, predatory pricing, etc. I took classes in college on this stuff, but I don’t remember much of it.

I just want to ask one question. Can we please get some massive public investment in fiber lines up in this piece? I actually don’t need roads, the FDA or the rule of law as much as I need as a marginal 1mbps more of download speed. Seriously, I’d actually prefer that the streets of Chicago turn into the Wild West if it gave me an additional 500kbps of upload speed. I am the future, Cubes. People need to get used to it.

I think that’s a fairly primitive point of view.

** Prof. Donald Winkleman, University of Boston professor of performing arts and armageddonology.

I’m not so sure Mark Cuban’s weblog is a great place for your political stage.

That being said, this is a very interesting take on capabilities of broadband, and being able to prioritize it, however I’d hate to think how people might take advantage of such technology, manipulating it to give themselves highest priority any and all of the time — actually worsening the very thing we’d be attempting to better.

There’s a couple of problems using technology to upgrade emergency calls. Bits can be lost. True, phone calls can be difficult to make, but once a hardline connection is made, it’s not often lost. Unless it’s wireless. I’ll agree with a post above that one reason for departments sticking with pagers is cell phone and wireless have terrible reception in fire houses and police headquarters. Those structures are a lot of brick and mortar designed to withstand just about anything. And most emergency calls centers are in the basements of those structures, so they can be up and running during natural disasters. But, I think looking for technology to help ease the burden off 911 would be good to consider (even if giving preferential treatment to younger citizens).

Although, this makes one think: since most texters are in a younger demographic (and that younger demographic would most likely abuse the system more often than middle-aged or senior citizens?), would we just be setting up a problematic emergency alternative that would detract a call center’s attention away from the severe hardline calls?

Another thing to consider, is the unlikelihood that someone would be able to text if they’re in the middle of an emergency. When the adrenaline hits, most people can’t even collect their thoughts, much less type on a small QWERTY keyboard. If you’ve heard a 911 call, you know that people can barely provide an address or description of the incident they’re so frantic.

And most people don’t text full words! I’d like to see the call center interpret: “help dog 8 my i”

Typing and talking may become secondary to live streaming images for much of our messaging.

I think the best solution is whatever gets the job done in the quickest amount of time that does not sacrifice the integrity of the process involved.

NOtifying 911 might be tough b/c we are dealing with life or death situations many times, and synchronous communication lines are necessary to get the job done.