NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Do the Happy Dance people...
Richard, Years ago I was writing about the technical (and promotional) fallacies of selling services as essentially unconstrained when the backhaul capacities were so relatively limited, and what would happen if consumers actually started trying to *use* more than a relatively small fraction of the advertised bandwidth. But the big ISPs were most interested in getting footholds and market share -- by making grandiose promises to municipalities and to customers. And they got away with it for a while, until more people really did start using a significant chunk of that promised bandwidth. I had a long talk about this with an AT&T exec way back. His reply basically was "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, right now the important thing is building up our customer base." So these services (residential and small business, anyway) have been (and are) marketed in many cases using unrealistic (false?) advertising slogans, nebulous TOSes, and basically preyed on consumers' lack of technical understanding -- just like how AT&T apparently (until recently) was willing to sell someone a 6 Mbs DSL even though their particular pair only supported 1 Mbs. But as for the FCC's recent action's impact on this -- it's been an excuse, not a cause. Unfortunately a fair bit of my info on this is off the record because I'd love to name names, but I'll simply say that the plans for caps (especially lower ones) have been in the works for years. They were not considered high priority because the big ISPs were still in their customer gathering phase. The issue was not if the switch would be thrown, but when and using what public rationale. Now that broadband penetration increase in the U.S. has been slowing way down, and ISP-provided content (cable and U-verse VOD, etc.) is rolling out rapidly that competes with external services, the time apparently is right to throw that big switch. It was going to happen in any case. The recent FCC activity just provided some useful cover and helped establish the timing. Even if nobody had complained about Comcast's P2P actions to the FCC, the caps were still on the agenda, even though they may have come in down the line a bit further in time. --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator