Slashdot Mirror
BellSouth Wants to Rig the Internet
PlayfullyClever writes "A senior telecommunications executive at BellSouth, said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates. Some say Small Firms Could Be Shut Out of Market Championed by BellSouth Officer. William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Next up, well dressed men go door to door collecting their monthly "protection money". 'It sure would be tragic if your users started getting 1500ms ping times, wouldn't it mister dot com?'
Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet) sent a deposition to the US Congress on this legislation. See:
o ut_on_internet_neutrality/
http://www.circleid.com/posts/vint_cerf_speaking_
Vint couldn't attend in person since he was recieving the Presidential Medal of Freedom that day for his DARPANET/Internet pioneering efforts.
This link was widely disseminated in the North American IPv6 Task Force and IPv6 Forum where I believe most members strongly support Vint's views.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
On the other hand I recently heard an argument here in the UK that said that one of the arguments against forcing ISPs to cache all email traffic for later inspection by law enforcement in the "war on terror" is that the volume of spam makes it uneconomic (and the bad guys are using untraceable untappable voip anyway).
It appears that the Internet remains a magnicifently untameable beast still, despite pointy headed attempts like this to control it.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
A traffic prioitization service already exists. It's Akamai's whole business model: They buy pipes to strategic locations with many service providers, cache servers near the customer and route requests to the best-choice server. You buy space on their servers and your data gets to the customer faster.
What Mr Smith wants to do is, well, asinine. He wants to allow the data pipes on his network to fill to 100% and then prioritize the traffic based on who pays. This suggests such a flawed understanding of the technology that as the chief technology officer, he should be fired.
See, here's the problem: For a router to make a priority-based switching decision between packets, it has to have more than one packet cached in memory waiting for free space in the outgoing pipe. But, if you havn't started transmitting the first packet by the time the second packet finishes arriving then you've already lost the speed game. Fast service means that you don't hold on to the packets. You send them out the next link as soon as you get them. Any other architecture would result in transmission speeds that are two to three times slower, even for the highest priority packets! Duh!
So if you don't want your network to suck rocks, you still have to keep the utilization below 80%, and if you keep the utilization down then except for rare bursts of traffic the prioritization function will never be used.
As a search engine, why on earth would I buy priority on your network knowing that either A) it almost never gets used or B) your network is piss slow either way? Answer: I wouldn't.
Fire Mr. Smith. He doesn't understand the technology he's charged with overseeing.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
As a BellSouth "customer", Saying that BellSouth has the best customer service of the Baby Bells isn't much of a complement. Thank god for cable internet, or we would still be waiting for DSL.
*Shrug* YMMV. Personally, I've never had a problem with Verizon or any of it's predecessors. The biggest problem with the telco customer service department is that the CSRs don't usually know what the repair people are doing.
With Time Warner I had an interference problem that was killing Roadrunner. The interference would come and go -- bad enough that channels 2 and 3 showed it -- and they could never bother to dispatch anybody when it was actually ongoing. They tried any number of things to fix my line -- ran a new drop off the street -- temporally removed the traps on my line (then forgot to reconnect them -- I have 80 channels and pay for 6 -- suckers), put signal suppressors on my cable modem, etc, etc. They could never nail down the problem. At one point they tried to blame it on my TiVo and suggested I get their DVR product instead!
To this day I think the problem was probably something as simple and mundane as a bad TV or VCR in a neighbors house that was leaking RF onto the cable lines. Perhaps if they bothered to dispatch somebody with haste they could track this down. In any case I'm not very fond of a technology that can neutralized by "interference" that can't be tracked down. At least with POTS and DSL I have my own dedicated pair of wires and don't need to worry about what's going on in my neighbors house.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Jerks. Pure corporate jealousy.