Rethinking network congestion

(Especially in community networks)

What is congestion in a network anyway?

A network link suffers from congestion when demand for the link’s resources exceeds the amount of service it can supply within some reasonable duration of time, resulting in data being dropped on the floor or delayed. Both the “resources” and “reasonable duration of time” are highly situational and vary by application and type of network.¹ Ultimately this becomes “ugh, why is the WiFi so slow today!”

In the presence of resource congestion, everyone on the network cannot get everything that they want.

I argue that networking practitioners, myself included…