TPRC Panelists Consider Pros and Cons of Alternatives to Internet's Transport Protocol

Whether Internet service providers will accelerate early efforts to prioritize bandwidth, and what impact such measure might have upon the open Internet, were actively discussed by panelists at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference here. Traditionally, Internet traffic has been managed by the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the engineering standard for almost all Internet transmissions. When there is a great demand for Internet content than is available to flow over the network at any given point in time, "each flow of the network gets a roughly equal share of the bottleneck capacity," according to Steve Bauer, a professor of computer science at MIT. Bauer was presenting a paper on "The Evolution of Internet Congestion," with Professor David Clark and William Lehr, also of MIT. Such a standard for routing Internet traffic has been dubbed "TCP Fair," and this approach remains the standard for dealing with congestion. However, a variety of Internet providers, including Comcast - which was punished by the FCC for blocking traffic from the BitTorrent application - have been experimenting with alternatives.