Bloat

If people have heard of bufferbloat at all, it is usually just an abstraction despite having personal experience with it. Bufferbloat can occur in your operating system, your home router, your broadband gear, wireless, and almost anywhere in the Internet. They still think that if they experience poor Internet speed means they must need more bandwidth, and take vast speed variation for granted. Sometimes, adding bandwidth can actually hurt rather than help. Most people have no idea what they can do about bufferbloat.

So I’ve been working to put together several demos to help make bufferbloat concrete, and demonstrate at least partial mitigation. The mitigation shown may or may not work in your home router, and you need to be able to set both upload and download bandwidth.

Two of four cases we commonly all suffer from at home are:

1. Broadband bufferbloat (upstream)
2. Home router bufferbloat (downstream)
   Rather than attempt to show worst case bufferbloat which can easily induce complete failure, I decided to demonstrate these two cases of “typical” bufferbloat as shown by the ICSI data. As the bufferbloat varies widely as the ICSI data shows, your mileage will also vary widely.

There are two versions of the video:

1. A short bufferbloat video, of slightly over 8 minutes, which includes both demonstrations, but elides most of the explanation. It’s intent is to get people “hooked” so they will want to know more.
2. The longer version of the video clocks in at 21 minutes, includes both demonstrations, but gives a simplified explanation of bufferbloat’s cause, to encourage people to dig yet further.