Disclaimer: I work for an ISP. Also, pardon my reply if it seems incoherent. I've been up all night replacing failed hardware for said ISP.
Kenneth Burgener wrote: > Regarding fair bandwidth for all. If everyone were a good net citizen > and shared the bandwidth respectfully, I would agree with fair > bandwidth. Unfortunately, there is a problem of "bandwidth hogs". For > example, if 10 people on the block all use an ISP, and 1 user is a > "bandwidth" hog, consistently slowing down the 9 other connections, and > the ISP wants to "manage their network" by limiting the one "bandwidth" > hog, is this an okay practice? Me being one of the other 9 would really > like to not have the 1 slow my connection down. This is what Comcast > did with the torrent problem. Should Comcast not be allowed to manage > their networks to keep the 9 other people happy? The proposed rules, as far as I've heard, would allow for reasonable management practices. There appears to be provisions that would require disclosure of those, thus encouraging the ISP to be straightforward. So if somebody is using far more bandwidth than others, that person could be rate limited. The question becomes, could the ISP rate limit bittorrent, for example, across the board just to make sure it doesn't impact other users? How would you feel if you were the bittorrent user? How about if you were one of the others? > Regarding destination/source and tired service discrimination. Don't we > already have this in place. The more you pay the higher the bandwidth > you get. This works the same way on both ends of the connection. Is > Net Neutrality advocates pushing to make all Internet free, or one price > for all? It's not about higher bandwidth overall. It's about higher bandwidth/higher priority for certain sites. If Google pays the ISP a bribe/fee, their packets will get higher priority and higher bandwidth within the network. If they don't, well then they get to fend for themselves among the rest of the packets. Or even worse, what if Google competes with a service that the ISP offers and they decide to block it entirely? That's where it becomes an issue. As an engineer at an ISP I've seen first hand where users have quite negatively impacted an entire town because of broadcast storms, switching loops, and yes even bittorrent. I've seen where prodigious use of rate limiting has dramatically improved service for 99% of users at the expense of a very few. But I can also see how tempting it could be for a provider to abuse those powers. For me, I'm not opposed to the ideals of Net Neutrality, but I'm not convinced that legislation is going to solve the problem. A heavy hand could quite easily make the situation much worse, scare away the little guys (yes, that's me) and drive up costs. That's a Bad Thing(tm). Corey
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