NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Is network unneutrality necessarily bad?
I can think of several problems with net un-neutrality: * you might find ISPs broker deals with a Google, Microsoft, or Apple that exclusively only service their content/traffic and not competitors. In essence, less for the consumer. * as already mentioned, you will find ISPs giving preference to traffic that generates the ISPs revenue like Video on Demand and VOIP. Other traffic like from first-person shooters, MMORPGs, internet based business apps, VPN to your office could see loss of functionality. * abuse by ISPs that control your access. For instance, there is no law that says that ISPs must allow traffic from all protocols or ports used by a client/peer to communicate to a server/peer. In essence, they get complete discretionary control over what you can do with your Internet. My hunch is that they have the interest of the stockholder at heart. * many apps which have developed huge markets have benefited from "open" access. What is the chance of this happening if the ISPs are artificially deciding which applications will be serviced over their networks? It is possible that this will affect the rate of future apps that will make markets that add to the overall economy. World of Warcraft has benefited from this model. I am not saying that this would not occur with net unneutrality, but it will become another step in getting a business that is internet based off the ground. Dan On Nov 8, 2007 3:40 PM, Nick Weaver <nweaver@gmail.com> wrote: > On Nov 8, 2007 1:36 PM, The Anarcat <anarcat@anarcat.ath.cx> wrote: > > Why? Because they are in a conflict of interest. Their interest is not > > to provide good QoS to everyone, it's to maximize their return on > > investment. So what ISPs usually do is under-provisionning: say they > > sell 1000 3mbps ADSL connections, they're *not* going to buy an > > associated 3gbps pipe on the other site. They'll buy less bandwidth and > > hope that the users don't go all together download stuff at the same > > time. > ... > > So to answer your questions more clearly: > > > > Yes, network unneutrality is necessarly bad, unless it's sold as such. > > So why is underprovisioning necessarily bad? > > If you want a fully provisioned link, you can get one today. But > there is a reason why a dedicated T1 costs an order of magnitude more > than your home DSL line. Do you pay $500/month for a T1? > > One can argue that the consumer needs visibility into the > underprovisioning and a way to compare the effective bandwidth from > their (two) competing providers, but explaining it in a useful way is > hard (measuring is hard too). > > But why should one expect an ISP to not be underprovisioned? Any ISP > that tried to provision for peak load of all users in the worst case > would quickly find itself out of business, either from losing money on > the upstream link or from losing customers to vastly cheaper > alternatives. > > And today's "correctly provisioned" can also quickly translate to > tomorrow's underprovisioned, as usages grow to consume the available > bandwidth, getting us back to the traffic prioritization problem. > > _______________________________________________ > NNSquad mailing list information: > http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad >