As Craig notes "Unfortunately, traffic from your local city hall meeting may well travel halfway across the country and back before it gets to you." Thus we should replace the requirement of "community access TV" with the requirement of local peering. But why not just get rid of the whole warped system?
Today there is a real problem. I have both Comcast and Verizon. To get from a Comcast port to my small FTP server six inches away but connected to FiOS my connection travels through NY or NJ and loses 90% of the performance. A very long six inches. If a city selects Comcast Transport as its connectivity provider you can be sure that you'll get strong local connectivity and peering with nearby communities. CT would be a contractor maintaining the community's common facilities and would bid against others for that contract. I doesn't make sense to cede rights of way to a myriad of silos. That's just like laying a separate track for each trolley company along each street. At least tracks would be visible and create outrage at the waste of space and money. Distance doesn't matter to the protocols but it does matter for performance and, far worse, it matters if the only reason for the complexity and overhead is a dysfunctional market model embodied in physical hardware. Forcing bits to travel long distances is due to having Comcast Transport and Comcast Content fused into the a silo and doing the same for Verizon FiOS (and RCN and Verizon copper and ATT Cellular and T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless and Sprint and the MVNOs .). You have to transit within a silo to some distant land where they agree to exchange bits held hostage at a high price in money and in performance thus destroying value for no reason other than sustaining a market architecture that would not exist were it not protected from the threat of abundance (again - http://www.frankston.com/?name=AssuringScarcity). We see this with the again and again. Put two cellular phones one inch apart - the voice/SMS bits cannot get between them unless the signals can reach distant towers. Actually for some bits it's just the opposite! You have to put two phones near each other to exchange information using IR or Bluetooth - strange when you have radios that can provide connectivity without regard to distance. It's as if someone picked up an obfuscated C book and assumed it was guide to best practices. I've got Vonage and ATT VoIP as line 1 and line 2 on one phone. Again - the bits travel the long way for no reason other than to create a billable event (or justify a very high flat rate). It's all about billable events and nothing but billable events. The current Internet protocols aid and abet this by being path-dependent rather than end-to-end. I get an IP identifier from a provider's silo rather than generating my own (except for local-only addresses from my NAT which again give me different kinds of bits). Forcing the identifier to also act as a path-address reminds me of the 1960's when we'd put disk addresses in database records "for efficiency" or use octal disk addresses as user names (as on the PDP-10). As our financial system suffers why are we trying so hard to assure profligate waste and costly hurdles by insisting on a horribly inefficient system that prevents us from creating our own solutions and takes what is already paid for and assures we can never get the benefits of local control and ownership. Why do we want frustrate the creation of new value? Telecom - the real financial debacle. It's like a mortgage that is 100% interest and at a variable rate that can never ever be paid off. Yet I'm told there is no political will for change? Is madness our due? -----Original Message----- From: Craig A. Finseth [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 09:54 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [email protected] Subject: Re: [ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast's FCC Filing Today ... One question is whether the cap will apply to local connectivity as well as distance. Is there a limit to how long I can watch a broadcasts of local city hall meetings? I presume the answer is "yes" and that it is a policy question. ... Unfortunately, traffic from your local city hall meeting may well travel halfway across the country and back before it gets to you. Not a problem if you live in a major interconnect point (bay area, Chicago, New York). A big problem if you live in <somewhere>, Nebraska. This brings it around to the public policy side as well: depending upon where the encoders are, the cable company may also bring the video traffic along the same path. Craig
