Dustin, you bring up some excellent points concerning the need to be tech-savvy, or street-smart, if you will, in order to circumvent the shenanigans that lie in wait. I often find myself getting startled Most of the chatter being made in the way of protests is coming from an informed few, the digirati they were once called, that represents probably less than 1 percent of the buying public. I constantly find myself being amazed at how little a given person is aware of, especially those who work in IT and telecoms, when it comes to the issues affecting consumer-level, end-to-end, (dare I say "best-effort", as well?) market place.
I viewed the four principles of neutrality on the nywc site yesterday and noted they were taken from the FCC Docket that appears on the same web page. Or, was it the other way around? Yet, in your message that I'm here replying to, you went on to enumerate with more specificity some of the more insidious types of tactics issues that I thought would appear on the challenge list, but were not. Was that intentional? Or is it assumed that they are endemic to the principles cited, only unspoken? On the subject of the RBOCs seeking additional fees for QoS, earlier today I had the following to say: ------ from: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22074645 : It was stated to me: "Let's imagine that the Internet went dark tomorrow. Who would stand to lose the most? How about those companies whose entire business models rely on a functioning, widely available Internet: Google, Amazon, eBay and their ilk. These three alone have annual revenue of $13 billion. Youâd guess that these firms would welcome an initiative to put in place a framework that would allow carriers to set and receive fair-market payment for backbone services, in exchange for a commitment to deliver highly reliable connectivity. ... On the other hand, end customers do not want to pay ISP twice and give ISP the right to control what they access although they are willing to pay more for higher bandwidth." My reply: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22074993 : One item I find interesting in your message is that you are assuming that the RBOCs, in making their bids for QoS fees, are assuming the roles of backbone providers. I agree that they possess and support backbone functionality, especially now after the mergers with at&t and MCI, but they are also "everything else" in the food chain for many users. So, in that regard, the points we are debating here may have to be modified, accordingly, if the focus were to suddenly shift to other strata in the stack. So, in effect, you are saying that the content providers should be the ones who pay the backbones in lieu of the end users, thereby alleviating the need for backbones to go after the end users directly, but only after those end users have gone through the step function of increasing their access bandwidth? Whatever happened to backbone providers who thrived on the ever-increasing traffic loads that they were paid by downstream SPs to carry? If there are too many backbone providers, then that should take care of itself through reverse-creationism... er, I mean through Darwinian means. If access providers aren't charging their users enough for the amount of downstream they provide, ditto. I'm not suggesting these conditions prevail, but only that mechanisms are already in place if they should come into play. Does the ladder model of transit, peering and settlements get trashed entirely, or does it employ a weighted formula adjustment that is assessed on last milers on the basis of broadband users vs. dialups? The dual-tierd Internet is a ruse, imo, being perpetrated on a public by a service provider community that doesn't have genuine value propositions to offer other than providing good, clean, unobstructed service. The real problem here is, which I've highlighted here before when it concerns the consumer-level end to end Internet marketplace, is that there is only so much you can offer and be rewarded for in such a model, which has caused the owners of such companies to seek and invent new ways to create extras, even if those new ways are to take two steps backward in order to offer one going forward. Except for certain niches that require QoS, the Internet has been on the right track and has been adjusting capacity amply in most respects to allow for the increased traffic being brought about by video. This sort of thing tends to be pendulum-like. Caching and multi-casting technologies will mollify the situation to some degree as additional lambdas are lit, bringing source content closer to users. And for those who don't practice this, shame on them. Wasn't this precisely what was rumored to be taking place at Google, where it was planning to deploy distributed "data centers" connected by its own dark fiber in order to be closer to its end users, thus cutting down on both latency and line costs. Akamai, others, the same. The only way you'll feel the pinch on bandwidth in the future is if the backbones intentionally refrain from making capacity adjustments and tuning their routes to be accessible to all, and they would be incented to do this, as they always have, in order to perpetuate a model based on scarcity that would have the effect of forcing the QoS issue. And if all else fails, as the US Post Office did during the Sixties when they were unable to deliver mail in the city of Chicago for the loads they were experiencing, then maybe it's time to be looking at the creation of a quasi-corporate entity like the USPS, which has done nothing but wonders for the creation of hundreds of competent and profitable competitors in the private sector. But I think there's enough juice left in the market the way it stands today that we won't have to go that far. Yet. FAC --- The Internet isn't all backbone, nor is it all access network or transit, entirely, either. Each segment has its own set of economics to contend with, they have their own business models, and some are more commercially viable than others in the absence of providing content. And therein lies the rub. If layered separations are to be honored, with content being provided by upper layer service providers (content providers) other than those providing transport (the old conduit and content argument), then it must be determined if transport services alone, and which class of them, can sustain a given solution space (such as access, or backbone) of the whole. If they can't, based purely on the economics surrounding their operations in the face of others (competitors) who are similarly racing to zero, then perhaps public oversight and funding are called for in those cases. There exist: The First 100 Meters; The First Mile (UTP, Fiber, Coax, Wireless); The Second Mile (Metro transport fiber); The Backbone (WAN); and all of the above in reverse order. Which of these models can sustain profits without offering upper layer content and voice services? Which cannot? Frank -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
