NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: My own take... BitTorrent Inc. + Comcast = Love, Peace, Harmony
On Mar 27, 2008, at 7:24 PM, Brett Glass wrote:
At 08:10 PM 3/27/2008, David Ulevitch wrote:
I might be in the minority in thinking this, but the days of "unlimited" residential Internet on an oversubscribed line are numbered. As someone who purchases 10's of 1000's of dollars of commercial IP transit each month I would begrudgingly be in support of one of two things happening:
1) ISPs sell me committed bandwidth. The downside to this is that
they are either dramatically increasing their pipes to match current
offerings or they are selling me something slower than I have today.
Some ISPs can fix this with a committed minimum with a substantially
higher "burst" ability that is available during times of no congestion.
We do this. But to offer an attractive price on it for residential service,
we must also have a maximum duty cycle and prohibit P2P and servers. In
short, they can't stay at the minimum all the time, or we're back up to
full backbone level pricing, which in our case would have to be at least
$130 per Mbps per month so we didn't take a loss on the customer.
2) ISPs charge me for the number of bits I send on the wire. This is how commercial transit largely works. There are downsides to this model for the consumer but it has lots of positive side effects most notably probably being a big helper in stopping P2P-based piracy (or at least seeding). On the plus side, hopefully my mom and dad would pay less (like they do on their cell phone) and I'd pay more (since I'm a hungry Internet user).
If I had to pick, I'd rather #2 than #1.
Consumers would not. They want fast Web browsing. So, they need "bursty"
service.
-David