On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Gerry Hull <ge...@telosity.com> wrote: > If a bandwidth provider says they will deliver me 10Mpbs, > and (non-real-life) let's say a content source can deliver data to me > at 10Mbps, I should get 10Mbps throughput.
As you say, that's not a realistic example, so I'm not sure what good it does to raise it. One of the many misconception people have is that if they have a "10 Mbit/sec Internet connection", then they have dedicated 10 Mbps pipe to every uplink or peering point on their provider's network. That's simply not true. That 10 Mbps is is the nominal rate from the subscriber interface (modem, etc.) to the first concentration point (generally the CO or head-end). From that point on, bandwidth is shared and oversubscribed. The result is, someone sucking Bittorrent all day uses substantially more resources than someone who reads email, browses the web, and watches the occasional YouTube video of drunk college students. I can't blame providers for having a problem with that. (I can, and do, blame Comcast for their poor handling of it.) You can, of course, arrange for a higher service level with good providers (not Comcast). Such service costs orders of magnitude more. You think $80/month is bad? Try hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. > - An open internet means if I want to bit-torrent all day from a site > who can deliver me content at rated speed, I can. Sounds good to me. The problem is people don't seem to be willing to pay for it. They want to pay the same no matter how much they use. See above. > - An open internet means that if I want content of a certain type > (VOIP traffic, for example) which competes with a product my bandwidth > supplier happens to provide, I can be sure the traffic will be > delivered without hindrance or fiddling. At first read, that sounds good to me. But consider: What if a subscriber wants to pay more for their packets to be given higher priority? Say I'm a VoIP user, and I don't want my quality to go in to the mud just because there's a surge in Internet traffic because there's some high profile media event happening. I'm willing to pay more for that. How does that fit in? What if it's not a subscriber but a provider? What if it's a VoD provider who wants to make sure their videos always look good and is willing to pay for it? As you say, there's a real conflict-of-interest in many of these companies (Comcast, TWC, etc.) They sell communications transport, plus voice and TV over it, plus content itself. But at the same time, there are legitimate reasons to impose selective priorities and limits, as described above. That's one of the reasons structural separation seems to be an ideal solution, at least in theory. It reduces or removes the conflict-of-interest. It should also let subscribers more easily switch providers, and lower the barrier to entry for new providers. I'm just not sure it's a practical possibility in the US cultural/political/economic whole-sort-of-general-mish-mash. I hold out some hope; that link Ted posted is intriguing. Assuming structural separation proves impractical, I'm not sure what the next-best-thing would be. I suppose a simple solution would be to tell the big providers they have to treat all packets equally, and limit themselves to simple bandwidth caps, but there are potential problems with unintended consequences there, as noted above. I got an email from Comcast last month. They now display a "Usage Meter" in my account information on their website. Currently, they claim I've used 7 out of 250 GBbytes so far this month. As you note, they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they're threatened by legal action. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
