NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] [IP] Faulhaber, Comcast, and Antitrust
----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave@farber.net> ----- Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:43:12 -0500 From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Subject: [IP] Faulhaber, Comcast, and Antitrust Reply-To: dave@farber.net To: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com> Begin forwarded message: From: Dave Burstein <daveb@dslprime.com> Date: January 21, 2009 8:55:05 PM EST To: dave@farber.net Subject: Faulhaber, Comcast, and Antitrust Dave I'm in direct disagreement with both of you on the principles behind this one, although I'd agree this case is probably trivial. Comcast has enough capacity, I believe, that very few VOIP calls will be affected in practice. If Comcast's data service did a poor job carrying video over the net to the point their video programming had a major advantage, I think we would have a real issue. Everything I know - including the reasonable 250 gig cap - suggests Comcast is playing fair with video competitors, living up to Brian Robert's comment "shame on us if we can't compete." Other carriers selling video I believe are taking measures that prevent a customer watching things over the Internet, such as Frontier's proposed 5 gig cap - two movies a month. Consider AT&T's U-Verse IPTV. Through about 2006, some AT&T people were saying that if they didn't restrict TV over the net their backhaul would be impossibly clogged. The rumor in the industry was that they hadn't put in enough backhaul, whether for capex or to limit video competition. If that proved true, then even if I had a ten meg AT&T DSL line I'd often have problems watching TV. Dan Berninger, Susan Crawford, and others have pointed to that possible problem. I took it very seriously because a very senior telco exec (far off the record) had looked me in the eyes and said "of course that's what we are going to do. They let the cablecos have a walled garden, so they have to let us do the same." I heard very similar from several other executives, usually as a way to reassure wall street they wouldn't be hurt by video competition over the net. That's why I threw myself into net neutrality. I believe NN has pretty much been won in the U.S. after enormous effort, with vigilance still needed. If the networks remain neutral and other obstacles (caps, excessive prices) prevented, this will be a minor issue in the U.S. I had a chance to discuss this with Kevin Martin in 2005. He recognized the possibility, but said he hoped the cable-telco competition would be enough to prevent serious abuses. In the U.S., among large carriers, it has worked that way so far although Time Warner and AT&T have suggested that might change. A duopoly often behaves as a cartel/monopoly, but this seems to have worked in the U.S. so far. Hopefully, the furor over NN will keep them reasonable and Kevin's instincts prove right in the end. (There are real problems for smaller networks and in other countries. British carriers have threatened to shut down the BBC iPlayer, and DT outlined a major business plan to block video providers who didn't pay a special fee.) Around 2006, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre and their SVP Jim Cicconi made strong statements they did not and would not have any problems like that. "We will not degrade a signal coming from the Internet. If we get a two megabit video stream at the edge of our network and our customer has three megabit service, they will get that two megabits reliably." I since have been told the same by Verizon In practice, carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, British Telecom and Free.fr have discovered that upgrading the switches, WDM and similar gear is cheap enough they can afford to virtually eliminate congestion and have happy customers. (Comcast and other cable companies do have a problem on the shared local upstream, at least until they upgrade. Large DSL and fiber builds rarely do, and Comcast in a filing said they had no downstream problems.) So my take is that on this Comcast is de minimus, but the principle is important because otherwise the carrier has strong incentive to give their video a major advantage. The best way to avoid the issue is to have enough capacity it almost never comes up. Whether that's practical isn't a theoretical issue to be solved by models but an empirical one about the actual costs of having sufficient capacity. Luckily, routers etc. have been coming down in price so rapidly that the bandwidth costs for a large, wired carrier are typically less than $1 on a $20-50 service, so not an issue. Small carriers who don't have dedicated fiber and the cable upstream have issues, although most are solvable. In Europe, a survey of senior telco executives found about 80% of them wanted to charge competitive and it's a very open issue. Ed Richards at OFCOM has decided NN is not necessary as along as their is (limited) disclosure. Richards is probably wrong where competition is weak. Rochester NY is served by Frontier and Time Warner, both rhetorically militant against over the top competition. They've both suggested charges that would get prohibitive at 3-13 movies a month, including a 1,000% markup for any overage. Rochester has no other major choice at video speeds if many people wanted to watch Hulu or ABC over the net. db ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message -----