Technology for Mortals

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> Then you complain that the ISPs shouldn’t be permitted to offer IPTV at all

see, you say that i say that ISPs should permitted to offer IPTV _at all_. I’m saying that they should only be permitted _if it is done in a

8472 says: "see, you say that i say that ISPs should permitted to offer IPTV _at all_"

No exclusive prioritization on IPTV equals no IPTV. The Network Operator must ensure sufficient bandwidth, low latency, and low jitter or the TV service simply doesn’t work as well as it did on a separate network. The bandwidth guarantee must be exclusive because offering any other application or company on the Internet that same guarantee means the IPTV can break under some situations. The ISP is also under no obligation to offer lower-than-normal latency and jitter to other applications or companies. If they want it, they can pay for it and it’s no worse than it is today.

If you’re not going to permit EXCLUSIVE prioritization for IPTV, IPTV can’t be as reliable as TV on a separate network. As a result, the Network Operator simply won’t merge their TV pipe with the Internet pipe and your pettiness gets you a small dumb pipe that’s a small fraction of the pie.

See you have it backwards, we want the Network Operator to loan us the bandwidth from TV when the TV service isn’t in use. You’re incorrectly viewing this as the TV service hogging bandwidth from the Internet applications.

Net Neutrality should be about making sure that Network Operators don’t harm anyone; it shouldn’t be about making sure that everyone gets the same sweet deals for free. Google isn’t required to carry an advertisement for other companies for free, Akamai isn’t required to offer free caching, and ISPs shouldn’t be required to offer free bandwidth assurances and caching services either. ISPs shouldn’t be required to make sure I don’t ever see any dropped packets or lower-than-normal latency over their network just because the ISP protects their TV business to pay for the infrastructure upgrades.

8472 says: "i’d say that is a non sequitur as nobody has shown that ISPs can only build out their infrastructure if they are allowed to perfom anti-competetive service-bundling. They haven’t needed it for the last few decades and managed to build out their infrastructure, why should it be granted to them now w/o any proof of necessity?"

Oh they’ll continue to build it under extremist Net Neutrality alright, but nobody has outlawed PRIVATE networks outside of the Internet and that’s precisely what they’ll do under the kind of Net Neutrality laws that you are favoring. Cable operators already keep the vast majority of their network private for TV service and off the Internet and you’d better believe the telecoms will do the same thing in order for them to compete in the new TV business while the cable operators compete in the telephone and data business.

I guess now you’re going to take this to the next level of extremism and simply admit you’re in favor of mandating structural separation and disallow Cable and Telecom operators from operating any kind of TV business over their own private network? Short banning private networks altogether, you’re going to end up with a small dumb network.

George Ou

> The bandwidth guarantee portion must be exclusive because offering any other application or company on the Internet that same guarantee means the IPTV can break under some situations.

riiiight… they can offer hard guarantees for their own services. But they can’t offer the same guarantees for the same type of service going to the same customer just because it comes from their competitor. That is due to the competition-flag set in the IP-headers, right? …
Even assuming they would have a different backbone infrastructure for their own IPTV traffic that for some technical reason cannot be shared with a competitor (and i have heard "we can’t possible open that up to wholesale for technical reasons" before, and guess what, when pressed to it it does actually work) even then they could offer best-effort prioritization for the customer if he should choose a different service.

> Oh they’ll continue to build it under extremist Net Neutrality alright

now now… extremist? since when is preserving the status quo where non-bundling ISPs serve to all services the same way (except some minor QoS which you won’t even notice) called "extremist"?

So you are saying because telcos/cable companies will engage in monopolistic, anti-competetive behavior we should carve it into stone and actually encourage such behavior?

> Cable operators already keep the vast majority of their network private for TV service and off the Internet and you’d better believe the telecoms will do the same thing in order for them to compete in the new TV business while the cable operators compete in the telephone and data business.

yes, sadly… it’s a waste of bandwidth. But at least they are forced to wholesale the bandwidth they do offer on a fair basis to everyone, which prevents unfair behavior, such as throttling the competition… and you can’t tell me that throttling the competition is a good thing.

On a sidenote, cable business could do with 1/10th of the bandwidth if they’d use multicast instead of sending all channels to everyone at once. Sure, you could "only" use like (let’s say) 6 different channels per household at the same time, but that won’t kill anyone.

> Net Neutrality should be about making sure that Network Operators don’t harm anyone

i completely agree with that. And boosting your own IPTV service while blocking out the newcomer (which wouldn’t have the funds to buy himself out of the throttling quicksand) certainly does harm innovation, competition and ultimately customer choice.

…… so, before we continue hacking away at each others arguments i have a few questions for you, answering as concise as possible (yes/no where applicable) is preferred:

a) don’t you think that having completely separated ISP and vod/voip/iptv etc. etc. services would multiply user choice and improve the marketplace due to more competition?
b) do you think traffic shaping directly (and intentionally) or indirectly affecting competitors should be allowed? (note that this is slightly different from a), as it involves negative instead of positive shaping)
c) do you think that the concept of net neutrality (not some patchy law proposals) is mutally exclusive with QoS?
d) do you think "the market will sort it out" even when there is no wholesale requirement and customers only have 1-2 ISPs to choose from in their region? Consider this under your statement that others could just buy such prioritization from the telcos/cable companies
e) do you consider internet access as a basic service such as water, roadbuilding, mail, telephone, electricity etc.?

> The bandwidth guarantee portion must be exclusive because offering any other application or company on the Internet that same guarantee means the IPTV can break under some situations.

riiiight… they can offer hard guarantees for their own services. But they can’t offer the same guarantees for the same type of service going to the same customer just because it comes from their competitor. That is due to the competition-flag set in the IP-headers, right? …
Even assuming they would have a different backbone infrastructure for their own IPTV traffic that for some technical reason cannot be shared with a competitor (and i have heard "we can’t possible open that up to wholesale for technical reasons" before, and guess what, when pressed to it it does actually work) even then they could offer best-effort prioritization for the customer if he should choose a different service.

> Oh they’ll continue to build it under extremist Net Neutrality alright

now now… extremist? since when is preserving the status quo where non-bundling ISPs serve to all services the same way (except some minor QoS which you won’t even notice) called "extremist"?

So you are saying because telcos/cable companies will engage in monopolistic, anti-competetive behavior we should carve it into stone and actually encourage such behavior?

> Cable operators already keep the vast majority of their network private for TV service and off the Internet and you’d better believe the telecoms will do the same thing in order for them to compete in the new TV business while the cable operators compete in the telephone and data business.

yes, sadly… it’s a waste of bandwidth. But at least they are forced to wholesale the bandwidth they do offer on a fair basis to everyone, which prevents unfair behavior, such as throttling the competition… and you can’t tell me that throttling the competition is a good thing.

On a sidenote, cable business could do with 1/10th of the bandwidth if they’d use multicast instead of sending all channels to everyone at once. Sure, you could "only" use like (let’s say) 6 different channels per household at the same time, but that won’t kill anyone.

> Net Neutrality should be about making sure that Network Operators don’t harm anyone

i completely agree with that. And boosting your own IPTV service while blocking out the newcomer (which wouldn’t have the funds to buy himself out of the throttling quicksand) certainly does harm innovation, competition and ultimately customer choice.

…… so, before we continue hacking away at each others arguments i have a few questions for you, answering as concise as possible (yes/no where applicable) is preferred:

a) don’t you think that having completely separated ISP and vod/voip/iptv etc. etc. services would multiply user choice and improve the marketplace due to more competition?
b) do you think traffic shaping directly (and intentionally) or indirectly affecting competitors should be allowed? (note that this is slightly different from a), as it involves negative instead of positive shaping)
c) do you think that the concept of net neutrality (not some patchy law proposals) is mutally exclusive with QoS?
d) do you think "the market will sort it out" even when there is no wholesale requirement and customers only have 1-2 ISPs to choose from in their region? Consider this under your statement that others could just buy such prioritization from the telcos/cable companies
e) do you consider internet access as a basic service such as water, roadbuilding, mail, telephone, electricity etc.?

"On a sidenote, cable business could do with 1/10th of the bandwidth if they’d use multicast instead of sending all channels to everyone at once."

Multicast by definition is sending everything to everyone at the same time, you meant to say "unicast". Cable architecture is a single collision domain by definition and all data is sent to every node in the loop so it doesn’t support unicast so it’s clear you don’t understand networking which explains why you’re having a hard time grasping the issues.

"> Net Neutrality should be about making sure that Network Operators don’t harm anyone

i completely agree with that. And boosting your own IPTV service while blocking out the newcomer (which wouldn’t have the funds to buy himself out of the throttling quicksand) certainly does harm innovation, competition and ultimately customer choice."

I see you like to partially quote sentences out of context. No, making sure your own IPTV service works while everyone else’s packets work as well as if they work today without prioritization is not harmful nor anti-competitive. You’re hell bent on conflating the TV business with the Internet business and no one is going to convince you otherwise. I’ve said all there is to say and you’ve had your chance to get your point across so we’ll end it here.

George Ou

> Multicast by definition is sending everything to everyone at the same time, you meant to say "unicast".

no, that is broadcast. Multicast is sending the data once to multiple participients. Unicast would require you to send it to all of them individually. Let’s say 10 people watch the same channel you can deliver it to them a) via 10 IPTV unicast streams b) 1 IPTV multicast stream for that channel c) simply broadcasting all channels to all nodes (the classic TV approach).
If you only have 10 end nodes per hub (i.e. collision domain) and 100 channels that means you’re usually broadcasting 90 channels w/o anyone asking for them. Multicast would solve that problem.

And i’m very welll aware of the cable network infrastructure. You were merely confusing the physical layer with the network layer. While cable’s underlying infrastructure is always broadcasting to all the endnodes the internet connections on top of them are narrowly scoped connections only supporting unicast. If they would allow multicast transports you could deliver the same IPTV stream to multiple subscribers.

I – again – suggest you do not make such unfounded allegations about my knowledge when it is you who did not grasp what i said.

> I see you like to partially quote sentences out of context.

maybe, and you in turn neglect to answer any questions or respond to any points that point out weaknesses in your argumentation. In other words: you’re taking opportunities at shifting topics away from unpleasant arguments, but you leave the starting of such topics to others so that one cannot claim you’re shifting them. Very sneaky

> You’re hell bent on conflating the TV business with the Internet business and no one is going to convince you otherwise.

actually, you are the one doing that. As long as you have the "private network" approach internet and TV are seperate. If you start using the bandwidth for internet and occasionally deliver prioritized IPTV over the same bandwidth you start mixing the services, thus bringing priorization to the once-neutral internet. And this is where the slippery slope towards customer lock-in and competitor lock-out begins.

So yes, either keep the private networks private and seperated or offer the customer to choose priority guarantees for any services he likes.

"I – again – suggest you do not make such unfounded allegations about my knowledge when it is you who did not grasp what i said."

Well, if you were more clear, then it wouldn’t look like you’re confusing unicast with multicast. But you’ll never get IP Multicast on a Cable network without exclusive TV prioritization so we’ll never gain the efficiencies of IP convergence.

8472 says: "If you start using the bandwidth for internet and occasionally deliver prioritized IPTV over the same bandwidth you start mixing the services, thus bringing priorization to the once-neutral internet. And this is where the slippery slope towards customer lock-in and competitor lock-out begins. So yes, either keep the private networks private and seperated or offer the customer to choose priority guarantees for any services he likes."

I’m glad you’re finally honest enough to admit the folly of your argument. You’re arguing that we need to keep it dumb even if it means keeping it slow.

The slippery slope argument is the blunt instrument of debating where you’re afraid to acknowledge any merit on the other side of the argument. Why not separate the issues in to what they really are? There are two issues here, prioritization for the network operator’s TV services and prioritization as a service for other companies on the Internet.

Even if you’re absolutely against the latter, you can certainly make exceptions for the former. One could even argue for a mandate where X amount of bandwidth must always be left over for a neutral Internet where X is at least as great as the entire pie of what we would have gotten with a separated network. So what we end up with is X plus the leftovers from the TV service where the leftovers are on average several times larger than X. And of course, X doesn’t have to be a static amount; it could be a percentage so that X would continue to grow as the infrastructure grows.

So I see no possible slippery slope here because we can put in a safety mechanism that guarantees us everything we have today plus a whole lot more. But since you are insisting on this absolute concept of a dumb Internet and if you have your way, then we will never get more than X amount of bandwidth.

As for charging third parties for prioritization, there’s nothing wrong with offering companies a certain amount of bandwidth that is outside of X where X again is at least as large as the entire dumb Internet we have today. Furthermore, while no ISP should be permitted to double charge on the off ramp where the consumer already paid the freight, there’s no reason the ISP shouldn’t be able to offer Internet companies the ability to boost bandwidth to consumers for a fee.

If Apple for example wanted to stream 6 Mbps video to customers who only paid for 3 Mbps broadband service, Apple should be permitted to offer those 3 Mbps customers their 6 Mbps video by paying the ISP for a temporary boost in the customer’s connection for their own video and they can pass that fee on to the consumers. This is effectively a Bandwidth on-demand option for consumers. I’m not saying that this business model will or will not work, just that there is nothing inherently evil or anticompetitive about it and that the Government should not ban the option altogether.

Net Neutrality would even prohibit customers from choosing their own prioritization on the ISP’s equipment and it would prohibit any charges for the service. If I were given a web console to configure my own downstream prioritization on the DSLAM for example, I would be prohibited from configuring any source addresses. If a network operator wants to offer a bundled service with end-user-configured QoS on the downstream, that’s great for me and bad for others who don’t use the service. If the operator wants to offer that service for a fee, it’s between the ISP and their consumer. The Government shouldn’t get in and mandate a bundled service business model.

George Ou

> Net Neutrality would even prohibit customers from choosing their own prioritization on the ISP’s equipment

that is not necessary, no

> it would prohibit any charges for the service

but this is,
at least if you consider negative shaping where you’d have to buy yourself out of an web-email-IM-only system for example. And the line between prioritization (whitelisting into the fast lane) and dragnet shaping (blacklisting anything else) is very thin and may be non-existent in the case of saturated links.

——–
Even if you’re absolutely against the latter, you can certainly make exceptions for the former. One could even argue for a mandate where X amount of bandwidth must always be left over for a neutral Internet where X is at least as great as the entire pie of what we would have gotten with a separated network. So what we end up with is X plus the leftovers from the TV service where the leftovers are on average several times larger than X. And of course, X doesn’t have to be a static amount; it could be a percentage so that X would continue to grow as the infrastructure grows.
——–

this does sound interesting, as you one could apply full neutrality on X. But the problem starts when the cable companies/telcos try to put a figure in X’s place. You can easily see arguments like "oh, he only gets 128k/128k for broadband/neutral internet acces, the additional 20M are reserved for TV and happen to be free for internet usage most of the time"

> But you’ll never get IP Multicast on a Cable network without exclusive TV prioritization

i wouldn’t say so. Multicast (at least Source Specific Multicast / SSM) can also solve other problems, such as the p2p-bandwidth-consumption. While it is not a panacea as it puts a strain on the routing table sizes it can dramatically cut down the consumed last-mile upload and the traffic on the backbones as a single source can supply any number of downloaders (depending on far multicast gets routed). Under ideal conditions even a handful of mcasting uploaders could serve tenthousands of downloaders…
Too bad that this is rarely discussed by ISPs.

> If Apple for example wanted to stream 6 Mbps video to customers who only paid for 3 Mbps broadband service, Apple should be permitted to offer those 3 Mbps customers their 6 Mbps video by paying the ISP for a temporary boost in the customer’s connection for their own video and they can pass that fee on to the consumers.

If they can sell that to apple then the bandwidth is already there. Why shouldn’t the customer be able to simply get the option to boost his bandwidth from 3 to 6M for a limited amount of time for the same fee? This way he could use the same bandwidth for any service and not just for apple. This would be neutral and achieve the same result. And since prioritization would also be included in that fee you could even give the customer the free choice which service to prioritize. Again, for the same fee.
And since this cuts out the middleman (apple) who might add margins this could either allow the same service at a lower price or increase the ISPs margins, which can be invested into infrastructure. It also wouldn’t make it necessary for big players to negotiate for bandwidth-bonus deals which might leave out smaller competitors.

Generally i’d say under this particular scenario leaving the choice solely in the customer’s hands is a win for the customer, the ISP and market fairness.

> Net Neutrality would even prohibit customers from choosing their own prioritization on the ISP’s equipment and it would prohibit any charges for the service.

I disagree with that. As i have stated repeatedly: Some strict interpretations of current law proposals might lead to that conclusion. But that is not the goal of network neutrality. The goal is to ensure market fairness and user choice. And providing QoS to the user is… well user choice. Hence this does not go against the core values of net neutrality.

> If the operator wants to offer that service for a fee

a fee for user-chosen QoS may be ok if it’s not a "buy yourself out of aggressive traffic shaping"-fee but really a "buy additional option to add user-chosen QoS to an otherwise fair network"-fee

Oh, and another sidenote that should demonstrate how ridiculous the current US-broadband debate is if you just look beyond the edge of the plate:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Long-Awaited-Japanese-Caps-Arrive-930GB-Per-Month-95580

______________________________________

Anyway, traffic shaping so far has only been used for purposes that hardly qualify as legit such as giving priority to the VoiP service by the user. DPI hardware has been used as a blunt instrument to club down undesirable traffic (P2P for example) to keep investment costs into infrastructure down. That building infrastructure to accomodate p2p is too expensive is just a fig leaf can be seen by infrastructure available in other countries (see link above, see sweden etc.)… at lower prices…

Why expand the network when you can just slow down those that have no big industry behind them, are seen as pirates and might carry content that competes with your own services? I’ve also heard rumors about ISPs in the middle easy blocking skype since it competes with their VoiP service. So an incentive to use traffic shaping for greedy and/or anti-competitive purposes is clearly there and acted on.

So the point is that net neutrality is important to prevent such behavior and only allow QoS where it is a necessity or ensured to not hamper consumer-choice.

"> Net Neutrality would even prohibit customers from choosing their own prioritization on the ISP’s equipment

that is not necessary, no"

I’ve provided you with the legislation multiple times and it’s been cut-paste in to this thread. It does prohibit customers from choosing their own prioritization on the ISP’s equipment and there’s no exception for it. So you are in effect admitting a problem with the legislation.

"this does sound interesting, as you one could apply full neutrality on X. But the problem starts when the cable companies/telcos try to put a figure in X’s place. You can easily see arguments like "oh, he only gets 128k/128k for broadband/neutral internet acces, the additional 20M are reserved for TV and happen to be free for internet usage most of the time""

Interesting huh? Sounds like you’re having second thoughts but you’re grasping at straws to find problems with the solution. Nowhere did I say that only 128/128 Kbps would be reserved for Internet. In fact I explicitly said that X could be whatever we have today (6000/1000 Kbps) and it would grow proportionally with any increase in future capacity. A percentage of X could be set off-limits to bandwidth allocation and we can separately debate whether that off-limit percentage needs to be 50% or 100% or somewhere in between.

The point is that on average, X plus leftover bandwidth from TV is many times faster and many times greater than X. And like it or not, you have to acknowledge that you’re not going to get any of the leftovers unless you’re willing to permit exclusive TV prioritization on a converged IP network. That seems quite silly when you consider the fact that the "leftover" bandwidth from TV distribution is 16 Mbps on top of the 6 Mbps base Internet when you turn the IPTV box off.

But hey like you say, you’d rather keep it separate on a private network than permit any kind of exclusive prioritization on the Internet. Or am I detecting cracks in your stubbornness?

"i wouldn’t say so. Multicast (at least Source Specific Multicast / SSM) can also solve other problems, such as the p2p-bandwidth-consumption."

Multicast is very difficult to implement on large IP networks and the savings in bandwidt isn’t that great for non-broadcast applications because users want files at different times. There’s a good reason that caching is a far more popular solution because it operates independent of time.

"If they can sell that to apple then the bandwidth is already there. Why shouldn’t the customer be able to simply get the option to boost his bandwidth from 3 to 6M for a limited amount of time for the same fee? This way he could use the same bandwidth for any service and not just for apple."

Because that requires an additional transaction with the ISP and that makes it less usable. If the user had to go to a separate webpage and order a temporary boost in bandwidth, it’s less convenient than paying for it through Apple and they may not bother with it. Again, I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a viable business model; just that the Government should not outlaw it because there is nothing inherently evil about it.

Take the Amazon Kindle for example. Kindle users don’t directly pay for their wireless bandwidth; Amazon pays the network operator a part of their sale.

George Ou

> I’ve provided you with the legislation multiple times and it’s been cut-paste in to this thread.

and i have repeatedly stated that i do not care about legislation, as law is implementation of concepts. Net neutrality is a concept i’m arguing about, not some flawed implementation

> So you are in effect admitting a problem with the legislation.

i never argued otherwise. In fact, i do not base any arguments on those law proposals.

> Nowhere did I say that only 128/128 Kbps would be reserved for Internet.

no, of course you didn’t. I’m just saying that ISPs would certainly like it that way.

> Because that requires an additional transaction with the ISP and that makes it less usable. If the user had to go to a separate webpage and order a temporary boost in bandwidth

well, i agree that it would be too complex for the average user. That is why there should be a fully automated API for applications to use it, similar to DHCP, UPnP (yesyes, i know… upnp is a mess) & Co.
Usability wasn’t my point. The point was that you can achieve the same results business-wise while ensuring fairness by laying all options into the user’s hands.

> But hey like you say, you’d rather keep it separate on a private network than permit any kind of exclusive prioritization on the Internet.

here’s a range of positions that come to my mind… from no regulation to full regulation:

a) bad: allowing ISPs free reign over all of their bandwidth (including competitor-lockout, exclusive priorities and other forms of unreasonable traffic shaping)

b) compromise: allowing ISPs to do exclusive priorization up to a certain percentage they should use for their own services, ensuring neutrality for the remaining bandwidth and disallowing selective blacklist-shaping (which would target specific vendors/applications)

c) ideal solution: only allow QoS/prioritization when it controlled by the customer. The customer can buy internet access from the ISP. And he may also buy IPTV from that ISP. If he wishes he can then assign priority to his own IPTV traffic. Or he could assign priority to the IPTV traffic he buys from a competitor. This does not outlaw QoS but merely puts the choice in the users’ hand

d) compromise: keep IPTV/VoiP and Internet networks separate to ensure fair treatment on the internet portion

e) bad: 100% neutral internet w/o any QoS

quite simple… as you can see I do not want seperate networks, but i don’t want X% reserved bandwidth either. They are compromises. What i consider ideal is unbundling of the internet service and services ontop of it while still allowing prioritization for _any_ of those services ontop of it.

I understand the point of ISPs using QoS, though i don’t think they should should be the ones forcing it upon its users. ISPs are being paid to grant access to the internet, that’s really all they should be doing, if my downloading on P2P applications slows down my IPTV, then maybe i shouldn’t download as much or setup my own QoS on my router through enhanced frimwares such as DD-WRT or Tomato.

It really isn’t fair to the more advanced users to have their ISPs choose and personalize their internet connections for them. This could be a useful feature to maybe add onto a modem’s firmware if asked to by the client, but shouldn’t be forced upon every client, especially ones that prefer getting high download speeds vs using IPTV or VoIP, chances are they’ll be able to view more HD content by getting it pirated than waiting for it to show on their favorite IPTV channels.

And i feel your argument that using a BitTorrent client can slow down IPTV or VoIP for the whole home holds no merit. By giving this example, ANY bandwidth usage on that network will slow the other services down. I could argue that using IPTV would slow down my BitTorrent downloads which is true since the scenario you’re painting puts both services on the same bandwidth pipe and any usage therefore effects the overall performance of that network. It should be the ones that are paying for the services to determine what services should get more priority over the other and how much priority that service should get.

I guess my point is, if ISPs start determining my bandwidth allocation for me, i’d be very upset because my preferences on bandwidth allocation will NEVER be the same as the ones they set for me. Why should my Internet suffer if I don’t choose to use VoIP and IPTV? Why should they force VoIP packets over my bit torrent packets since the only calls i receive from my VoIP line end up being telemarketers anyway and I’d prefer them not hearing me; my important calls come directly to my cell phone. This all seems more like a restriction on my freedom than it does a device to help my overall internet/tv/phone experience. ISPs should be worrying about granting a faster connection to every user than trying to throttle their current connections to provide a better experience. I mean, Japan has been busy laying fiber optic network connections that allow NTT Communications (Japan’s largest ISP) and other ISPs to offer download and upload speeds at an incredible 100Mbps for a very low price of $46 USD per month. I’d rather have an upload cap with high speeds over low speeds with bandwidth throttling. ISPs should be improving their lines by creating fatter bandwidth pipes.

The ISP is not determining your bandwidth allocation; you determine it when you choose to buy the IPTV service or when you choose to have the IPTV tuner box turned on. You have two ways to shut down that prioritization.

Net Neutrality would shut down your choice in having QoS or no QoS.

Prateek, I think you missed the whole boat on the conversation. Read the thread, it pretty much answers all your questions.

George Ou

I just read through all the comments and I feel like I need a shower. Its July, 2009; many facts have come to light over the last year that were unknown at the time of your post by the general public. My guess is that you are aware of many of these FACTS:

1) Large telcos are on the public record stating that their bandwidth usage has decreased; their customer count has increased; and they can continue to increase their monthly fees forever given their current business model. Costs decreased by 12%; Subscribers & Revenue climbed by 10.5 and 11% respectively; Bandwidth usage decreased; yet monthly rates charged to customers continue to climb. (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/time-warner-cab.htm) (Which locks customers in to one or two, if they are lucky, vendors for access) Economics would dictate that rates would drop and the extra bandwidth would be allocated for existing customers to increase their user experience; based on the throttling down of my internet access to as low as 4K, consistently below 20Kbps by my ISP obviously that is not happening. In fact having a pipe with a guaranteed minimum of say 1MB would be very welcome to many around the country. If economics is NOT working, and it is NOT, than something artificial is mucking up the works and preventing it from working. I suggest that such would be the case with a Monopoly or Oligopoly which is the American market today. From one telco executive: “Average Revenue Per User, or “A.R.P.U. continues to grow”

2) Telcos most certainly have been receiving tax incentives as well as gov’t (read Congressional and House of Representatives) approval to add additional fees to every (billions) customers bill for the purpose of building out their FIBER network offerings. These fees have been collected in some parts of the country since 1990. Still no competitive Fiber offerings in the year 2009 anywhere in the USA.

3) Thanks to Government de-regulation of the industry in Japan, Japanese consumers have had 100MB / 100MB for less than $55 per month since the year 2000. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801990_pf.html)

4) The ISP community spends over 18 Million per week in lobbying in Washington D.C. to prevent becoming just an internet pipe, what many of us view them as now. They fight Net Neutrality; they perpetuate the bandwidth scarcity myth (see #1 above); bittorent-P2P FUD, wrongly equating all types of large file transfers to child pornography. This is FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Denial by the ISPs, primarily to protect their Cable TV offerings and perpetuate the false need for tiered pricing.

5)Back to Japan, since 2006, thanks to having Fiber, earlier de-regulation (2000); the Japanese consumer now is being offered 1GB / 1GB for $52 per month. (http://www.pcworld.com/article/151562/.html?tk=rss_news; http://ringo.net/forum/index.php?topic=1660.0; ) Yes prices have actually gone down while consumer bandwidth capacity have gone up from 100Mbps to 1Gbps. As with Fiber, all you need to do is to change out the hardware routers on each end of the piece of glass in order to get higher bandwidths. Since the Fiber is laid in the ground, that cost is now zero. (And I worked in a telco and I experienced how they priced out cost allowances and more than once that mainframe, software, staff, maintenance, the pipe, etc was considered a NO COST item as they already had it. Perhaps not logical, but that is how they viewed it. I called them on it and they still considered it a zero cost in the proposal. )

6) The only Fiber option, FIOS, does not even come close to 100MB / 100MB and costs over $99 per month. FIOS might be great compared to Cable; but compared to the rest of the world its a FAIL.

7) The telcos are on the record as of 2006, that they knew the average American consumer would need a minimum of 250 GB of bandwidth a month. (http://telephonyonline.com/iptv/news/BellSouth_VOD_costs_030706/ ) I know factually that they knew this years earlier than 2006. Yet in 2007, 2008; they proposed 50 GB bandwidth caps. They only increased these caps to 250GB in some areas after much customer complaints to elected officials. They knew we needed more, yet they proposed less in order to institute tiered pricing (a failed model) and get every Internet users monthly rate up to $150 per month.

The telcos are on the record that it costs them less than .50 cents per 1 GB of bandwidth to provide service to a residential customer. ( http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/net-neutrality?from=30; http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/economies-of-scale ; ) Yet the average residential customer pays between $30 – $34 per month for the first year; with that rate being ramped up each year forever until the customer gets pissed off and churns. A typical path is 1st year: $33 per month; 2nd year: $44 per month; 3rd year: $46 -$48 per month. Obviously they know that most consumers that are interested in Internet (and do not care about TV) have a problem with rates over $50 per month. But that does not stop them from driving up the price until they force everyone into the $100 per 150 per month range. (Particularly dishonest as they advertise rates up to 10Mbps for the first year; yet you are throttled (everyone, without exception) down to 24Kbps or less. (A typical quote from telco executives, “Broadband data is such a great product. I think there will be some customers who don’t use much that will select the lower tier. But over time, they will use more and move up to the higher price plans.”) Only if you prevent us from having a viable choice, which they have todate through massive lobbying.

9)Most residential routers do not give you the log information to see that you are being throttled and what your monthly bandwidth usage is. (Note: Only buy routers that will run DD-WRT software; that those routers, you will have the logging information that will show how bad your ISP is throttling you in real time.

10) ISPs throttle a customer even if they DO NOT use bittorrent or P2P software. I do not use bittorrent, though I see the plus side for the downloading of Linux distros and other application software, thus will be using it in the future. I also have not used P2P in the past; yet my bandwidth is throttled. Thus I know first hand that ISPs throttle connections without regards to other FUD about bandwidth usage. (remember bandwidth scarcity is a factual MYTH: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/time-warner-cable-to-press-stop-questioning-our-caps.ars; )

11) All American telcos, Wireless and Wireline companies have business interests in each other, either directly or indirectly. (I have worked in the industry, I know this to be 100% true) Americans will continually find themselves systematically at a competitive dis-advantage based on bandwidth alone. Every year it gets worse and worse. It is only a matter of time until other countries have businesses providing real time large bandwidth usage applications that can not be used here in the US by individuals without paying a punitive amount per month for bandwidth to American ISPs. (Remember Japan has had 100MB / 100MB for $55 or less since 2000, 9 years ago. As of 2006, many Japanese consumers have 1GB / 1GB for less than $52 per month, three years ago.)

12) One of two things is required to break the telco oligopoly of tiered, perpetually increasing prices: a) A non American company or American company with NO peering agreements with other American telcos that would prevent competition. OR b) Government de-regulation here in the US as was accomplished in Japan in 2000. (Considering that telcos spend more then $18 million per week to lobby against competition, this is doubtful, otherwise the Telecom Act of 1996 would have passed and not in a watered down form.)

13)Quality, the term is misused; They use the word “quality” but never tell how it is to be measured; What is important is what contributes to their revenue or, to put it another way, how much value they can take from their users.; Quality is a dangerous word – it’s used to justify arbitrary policies.

14) ISP Pipes are equivalent to roads and they have been receiving government funding since the 1990. That funding is OUR tax dollars. I want my fiber that has been promised since that time, but has still not arrived to my door, into my house, connected to my firewall/router. Their story is accepted because it seems necessary to pay them to give us connectivity but that’s not true. It’s like paying the railroads to build roadways. You don’t do that, you build roads based on the need for roads. You fund connectivity in the same way – so it can support other activities and not as a profit center in its own right. You’re paying people to carry your bit just like you pay them to carry your garbage – you don’t expect to sell them your garbage. (http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=assuringscarcity;)

15) U.S. Customers have paid in excess of $200 billion in higher service rates, tax breaks for fiber-optic networks that we have never received. (http://www.newnetworks.com/videodialtonedeployment.htm) Bear in mind that the government still regulates the areas where companies may no longer exist. It gets even worse for the telcos that bought up, bought out or merged with any of earlier telcos that received monies and incentives for the promise of Fiber. Any company serving these areas MUST be held accountable by government for previous promises, even more so in the case of buy outs, mergers, etc….

16) The US could add an estimated $500 billion annually to its GDP if we had Fiber to our homes. The fact that any telco has ever promised to build out fiber, is enough.

17) The FCC definition of high speed internet access or high speed internet is still too low. It languished at below 768Kbps as a definition. I would be thrilled to have a consistent and minimum 768Kbps; sadly my cable provider has advertised up to 10MB and throttles me back to 24Kbps. Sure it spikes up to 3 Mb occasionally. But considering that I am paying a monthly rate for that up to 10 Mb; well you do the bell curve statistically and tell me what my average bandwidth should be. Hint: 20Kbps or less is on the wrong end of that bell curve.

18) All ISPs should offer a guaranteed minimum bandwidth in their advertising. They should NEVER be allowed to throttle anyone back below 3 Mbps for any reason, just my opinion, much less below the minimum FCC definition of High speed Internet Access and bandwidth.

19) The FCC definition for minimum high speed internet should reflect the minimum speed we, Americans, should be innovating and trying to arrive at. I suggest the 2000 Japanese rate of 100MB/100MB to be a new appropriate FCC definition of minimum acceptable high speed internet access. Even FIOS does not get you here as they are capped way below this on both the downstream and upstream ends.

20) The telcos promised a # of million homes connected by fiber by certain dates, most often by 2000. By 2008 none of those promises have been kept. (i.e. California: 5.5 million homes; Bell Atlantic (New Jersey to Virgina): 8.75 billion homes; Ameritech (IN, OH, WI, MI IL): 6 million homes all by the year 2000)

21) The Telcos lied. They continue to lie. The telcos are un American. In fact they may as well be owned by our enemies, given their anti-American policies and activities. I would welcome a foreign owned telco that had NO relationship with any American telco.

22) Google is laying undersea cables, maybe I can buy 100MB/100MB access for $55 per month from them soon. Hint to Google: you could charge Americans $99 per month and take over 90% of the US market overnight. Just get the Fiber near our towns and many of us will make sure that it gets to our doors and into our houses. In my opinion, it is not a matter of if, only of when. And do not expect me or many other consumers to EVER go back to an American Telco, Cable company, etc… That is the cost of you not only losing but abusing our TRUST!

23) I will make sure my kids, their friends and their kids know and understand the deceitful history of the American Telcos, including by default all American ISPs operating in the USA as of July 2009.

24) Our politicians failed us with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Our politicians got lobbied hard and paid well to fail us. We need to replace our current crop of both Democrat and Republican politicians, unless they can prove that they have NOT taken telco money. All we have to do is look at their voting record related to anything Wireline, Wireless and Internet and the truth will be known. Their individual voting records are public record. A politician that consistently does NOT vote should be considered in bed with the industries that are hurting Americans.

25) The rest of us need to WAKE UP and find out what the telcos in our areas have promised, specifically fiber optic service wise, and how much money they have received in taxes, fees, etc… and start complainer to the commissioners in our state to hold them accountable. If you support the current telco position of tiered pricing you are an industry shill or uninformed.

26) We must have Net Neutrality. My definition is simple, no inspection, no throtlling, no interruption of any of my packets from point A to point B, PERIOD. End of discussion. There is no acceptable reason to CENSOR free speech, which is banned by our constitution. Net Neutrality, if not watered down, will help protect FREE SPEECH. Telco policies of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) by definition violate FREE SPEECH and MUST NOT be allowed. Since 100% of telcos do some sort of packet inspection, 100% of Telcos are already violating the spirit of FREE SPEECH, if not the very lettering of it.

27) The American telcos have been operating under a defacto net neutrality, now they are censoring and limiting us further. (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2269835,00.asp)

28) The Average American consumer is much more technical savvy today then even last year. You need to think through your arguments intelligently or else you will be viewed as a shill, un-informed or at best naïve by most of us. WAKE UP, we have.