Net Neutrality and RE: FCC's McDowell

[Ken Meyer]

This reminds me of the telcos' hand-wringing over dial-up access to the
Inet, when they said that their system had been designed to handle calls
that might average 5 minutes a pop, notwithstanding the socializing by
teenagers at pre-driver's license age, and now they were having people
camping on their circuits for hours at a time.  Well, the ISP's might put
time-outs on your connection and forbid, as much as they could identify
them, keep-alive signals, but that all turned out to be a non-issue,
overtaken by events, didn't it.

As for "finite bandwidth", I suggest that, in the scheme of things and in
view of the experimental verification of Moore's Law to date, bandwidth IS,
for all practical purposes, infinite (yes, I know that Moore's Law addresses
transistor density, so I'm suggesting a corollary that, at least in
principle, seems pretty likely to hold, as we have gone from 300 Baud to
3,000,000 bps -- 10e4 improvement -- at home in about 20 years, and are
looking at at least one more order in magnitude in the next 10).

In fact, Seattle's recent Broadband Telecommunications Taskforce reported
that the only way to go in Seattle was FTTH at 25 Mbps SYMMETRICAL, just for
openers.  They also asserted that adding new hardware to the ends of the
fiber would essentially provide escalation of bandwidth to address future
demand -- as the technology and cost of such improved systems becomes
economically feasible.  Yes, I'm sure that even single-mode fiber with FDM
has a limit somewhere; but then there's all of that "dark fiber" I hear
about that's in place already -- Lord knows, we in Qwest land are still
paying for it's creation by Quest, which is why Qwest is not doing a FIOS or
Lightspeed rollout already.

How about the $45+ reaming by Comcast we take each month for maybe a
realistic average of 2 Mbps down, and virtually nothing up, sharing our loop
with 300 of our "closest friends"; and I've been told, using only one
channel's worth of bandwidth on a cable that already carries several hundred
channels, and will gain 2x to 5x the channel capacity when all TV becomes
digital.

Of course, wireless has more stringent limits, the electromagnetic frequency
spectrum being what it is, but even the measly systems that the cell
providers offer have progressed from compressed audio to images to now
video -- and the providers are encouraging one to use it, at great profit to
them all.  But IMHO, wireless is always going to be a niche player, having
some real benefits in performing uniquely ubiquitous connectivity; but
programs that presume to install these systems as the solution to all
broadband demands are just the result of politicians who wouldn't know an
Ethernet cable if it bit them in the ass doing another grandstand play.

Internet activity has gone from text to images (marginally practical at best
with dial-up) and now to audio and video as the normal mode of operation.
It's really annoying when I'm online late at night and some site comes up
with a loud video -- usually an ad -- spontaneously provided, which evokes
some verbal hostility from the bedroom.  But I assert that this is the world
of the future, and everyone is going to be using the Inet that way, so get
over it -- I'll be wearing headphones, just in case.

One indication that quite surprised me that this trend is well-appreciated
is that the requirement for SYMMETRICAL bandwidth is the conclusion that
many study projects are reaching, which suggests strongly that the planners
assume that a whole lot of us are going to become independent video
producers, not just on YouTube, but on our own servers (as M$ seems to be in
process of enabling for the masses).

No one asked for more money to transmit images rather than text, so why
discriminate when the images come to life?  And the suggestion that we are
getting this for nothing is really offensive, given the egregious amount
that we all pay for the connection already.  And some ISPs already charge by
the GB, and offer fast connections cheap just to encourage you to run up the
GB total (cf. Northwest Net for one).

The network providers should adhere to the principles of the common carrier,
just as has served the POTS people well for so long.  The real problem is
network providers who are also content providers and who are not above
sabotaging their competition.  Just as the music industry is finding, this
is a new era with new rules -- stop trying to maintain the untenable and get
with the program.  There is money to be made and neither music recording nor
video over the net is going away, though the birth process of the new era
certainly is painful -- and unnecessarily so to a great extent.

Ken Meyer


-----Original Message-----

From: talk-bounces at seattlewireless.net
[mailto:talk-bounces at seattlewireless.net]
On Behalf Of Yournet at hotmail.com
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 4:55 PM
To: SeattleWireless Talk List

Subject: Re: Net Neutrality and RE: FCC's McDowell

Right.

Network neutrality does not mean that network providers can't set up 'fair
and non-discriminatory' use policies.  I haven't studied this issue in much
detail but have heard the carriers side of the issue: they have paid for
spectrum or to build out cable and other broadband  networks and now see
their business models shifting increasingly to services over flat rate
access plans.

For example, IPTV, music download services, file sharing can be offered on
the Internet which eats up bandwidth
but for which they get no direct revenue.  All service is built out based on
expected prime hour traffic patterns.  The IPTV and file sharing services
are using 10X+ the bandwidth of typical Internet website traffic.  YouTube,
which has about 40% of the IPTV open server hosting traffic, is growing at
the rate of doubling traffic every 3-4 months, now at a rate of adding 25
Gbps of capacity.  That is huge capacity and is about to be repeated across
services from Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo! and others.

This marks just the tip of the iceberg for new services including 'webized'
collaborative office suites, localized video advertising and location
mapping services.


----- Original Message -----

From: "Tyler van Houwelingen" <tyler at azulstar.com>
To: "'SeattleWireless Talk List'" <talk at seattlewireless.net>
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 6:01 AM

Subject: Net Neutrality and RE: FCC's McDowell

> Quite a stand up guy, that is very good to see on either side.
>
> The issue at its heart is really about network neutrality.  I got to tell
> you, from the point of view of a network owner, network neutrality is
> pretty
> scary.  Because you do not have infinite bandwidth, you really need to be
> careful, especially with P2P apps.  Providers moving around HD videos can
> use up YOUR entire network very fast.  It can cause other critical apps to
> stop working.  If there is not an economic incentive to segment traffic
> according to economic priority, you will always have problems.
>
> There must be at least some money to be made by owning a network.  Even if
> the networks are NOT FOR PROFIT, they still need to be able to support
> themselves financially.   If not, muni Wi-Fi and WiMAX networks will hot
> be built or are destined to fail.    You need an incentive to increase
capacity
> or overlay networks and break the duopoly.
>
> Shouldn't net neutrality also apply to mobile providers such as Sprint?
> How the heck to they do ANY of there premium services if it MUST be wide
open?
>
> ty
>
>
>
> Tyler van Houwelingen
> Founder and CEO
> Azulstar, Inc.
> 1-877-AZULSTAR (main)
> 1-616-842-1104 (fax)
> www.azulstar.com