Mark Tinka wrote the following on 3/20/2014 7:39 AM:
On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 09:06:47 PM Patrick W. Gilmore
wrote:
The angle on my right shoulder wants to congratulate a
"tier one" (whatever the F that means) provider for
finally admitting, in writing, in public, from a lawyer,
what the rest of us have known for decades.
Every time the market has troubled the status quo, networks
have failed to find ways that adapt to that market. The
market ends up working around the network.
Napster and all the goodness that followed it, is one such
example; until iTunes adapted. And yes, iTunes is NOT the
network.
Now the OTT's are driving the network hard, and the network
des not want to adapt (perhaps calling in the FCC is
adapting... not).
So expect the market to work around this as well. The
network keeps getting left behind...
Mark.
I don't see this as a technical problem, but one of business and ethics.
ISP X advertises/sells customers "up to 8Mbps" (as an example), but when
it comes to delivering that product, they've only guaranteed 512Kbps (if
any) because the ISP hasn't put in the infrastructure to support 8Mbps
per customer. Customer believes he/she has 8Mbps, Content provider says
we provide 8Mbps content, but ISP can (theoretically and in practice)
only deliver a fraction of that. That feels like false advertising to me.
One can reasonably make the argument that not all of ISP X's customers
are using the service simultaneously, so the infrastructure to support
8Mbps per customer is unnecessary and unjustified. However, if past
experience proves that 25% of business X's customers are consistently
using the service simultaneously and business X has NOT put in the
infrastructure to support this common level of usage, then this appears
to be a simple financial decision to advertise/sell something that the
business knows it cannot deliver. Would the same business practices fly
in other fields? Perhaps. Airlines overbook, knowing that some customers
won't show up. However, they don't sell 200 tickets (knowing that 90% if
customers will show) but have only 100 seats to serve the 180 customers
they expect. Fast food restaurants don't sell you a fry and drink when
they know they're out of fries. I can speculate that customers would not
patronize companies in the travel or food industry if they operated the
same way that some ISP's operate. The difference, to me, seems to be
that ISPs often enjoy a monopoly while there are usually several food
and travel options in most places.
--Blake
