Net Neutrality and RE: FCC's McDowell

Mon Jan 1 16:18:33 PST 2007

bravo, or Here,here.
george

Ken Meyer wrote:
> 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
>>     
>
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>   