Net Neutrality

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

"Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"

-- Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T



Edit: This isn't a real ad. It's a joke. Laugh.

Comments

[monk111.livejournal.com]

How much for violent porn, such as screamandcream.com?

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

That's an unadvertised plan called "the antisocial." It's an extra $20/month, but can you really put a price on torture porn?

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

You're being dense. :)

[pragmatic-chimp.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm missing something too.

[inibo.livejournal.com]

All the net "neutrality" fans just don't get it. I work for a small ISP. If the big guys try to inflict something like this there are thousand of small companies like the one I work for who will be all over them offering unlimited access for a far better price. We will kill them. On the other hand if you let congress and their owners dictate the rules they will be in the interests of the very people you think you are going after because they are the ones who will write the regulations that allow them to operate and put their competitors, like us, out of business.

Do a little research, look up the AMA and "lodge doctors." (http://www.fff.org/freedom/1201e.asp) If you like the health care industry that exists in this country today you will love the Internet you get after congress and the big telcos get through with it.

Why does freedom scare you so much?

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

Lighten up. It's a joke. I think the issue deserves plenty of debate, but I'm not on either side of the argument at the moment.

[inibo.livejournal.com]

Most residential providers are so oversubscribed it is ridiculous. Sure they'll rent you a 50 meg pipe for a pittance, but heaven forbid you actually use it. Truth be told no home user needs more than maybe 5 megs unless you are heavy downloader. Most people with FIOS and the like would be surprised to find out they are not coming close to using what they have. Any home user who used something like PRTG to monitor their utilization would realize they rarely sustain more than a meg or two for more than short bursts; they probably average under 500 kbps over the course of a week. Sure, you could hit 50 megs if you wanted, but you'd fill up your drive in couple of days if you did. I currently have 3 megs and it suits me just fine.

So they promise "blazing" download speeds, but if everyone actually used it all you'd find out very fast that they cannot support what they are selling and you'd end up only getting the 5 or so megs the telco can actually provide. It's like putting an 8 lane onramp on a two lane highway. If they charged a realistic price you might end up paying as much for a five meg pipe as you currently do for 50, but you really wouldn't see an actual performance difference since all most people are doing is surfing the web and checking email and the people who really want or need 50 megs would have to pay for it. As the AT&T slug said, net neutrality really is about everyone else subsidizing the heavy users. What AT&T doesn't want you to know is that in the aggregate they can't really provide what they are selling.

The company I work for does not do residential, but the principle is the same. At first blush our potential customers wonder why we charge more for a smaller pipe than the big guys. The difference is if every one of our customers used every bit of their bandwidth all the time our infrastructure can support it because we don't sell bandwidth we don't have. If someone wants a 100 meg pipe we charge them to build it out and pay for their usage not the rest of our customers.

We have business customers who have 20 or 30 users on a 10 meg pipe and they never complain about it being slow till some jerk decides to use his "free" internet connection at work to download a bunch of mp3 or porn on his boss's dime.

There are a whole lot of supposedly tech savvy users who really have no idea how IP transit works. Politicians love ignorance, it gives them power.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

and how many municipalities across the country do you own your own copper and fiber in?

at some point, you end up going through large telco routers and switches. There will still be limitations imposed.