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Verizon Threatens Google's 'Free Lunch'
ILikeRed writes to tell us the Washington Post is reporting that Verizon is becoming much more vocal about internet firms using "their" lines to do business without paying extra. From the article: "The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers," Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. "It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers." This, as lawmakers are approaching new legislation that could let telcos charge internet companies much more for the use of high speed connections.
I'm on Verizon DSL. I'm 15 hops from www.google.com, 6 of which are within verizon's network, then into level3, then into google
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
Welcome to the internet, where anyone's traffic is routed to anyone else via different networks. Seriously, do you think these "other networks" get nothing for transmitting traffic? What kind of buisness would that be? If it did not net them a profit, they would not be doing it at all. Sure, top level backbone providers generally peer with each other for free (see Level3 vs Cogent a few months ago...), but anyone smaller than that usually has to pay for bandwidth to peer based on consumption. No one is going to run a network for free. We as end users pay for our connection to the ISP. Part of that pays for the ISP's upstream connection to their provider. If that provider has another upstream provider, a part of the fees go to that as well, up until you get to the free peering agreements. If Verizon is complaining about the traffic Google is creating eating up their bandwidth, they should re-evaluate their pricing with the peers generating the traffic, not try to charge Google. The best analogy from this thread is a few replies up "If Google were in the Pie baking buisness, and used Verizon (or other carrier) to supply them with gas to cook the pies, is Verizon entitled to charge Google more than other pie bakers (or anyone else) because their pies are better than anyone else's and they happen to make a ton of money off of them?" No, they charge a set rate for what is consumed. If they arent making enough, they raise their rates. If they cant raise rates and remain competitive, tough, thats capitalism and competition.
As for relating to the reserving of bandwidth issue...Verizon can do as they like with their own bandwidth, if their customers dont approve, they can go elsewhere. However, being that there is a psudo monopolistic situation with LECs, certain customers might have no alternative, in which case Telecom regulations step in to protect the customer from price gouging and other unfair monopolistic practices. Given the recent results of the Trianual Review by the FCC, most of these protections are sadly being stripped away, and the LECs are falling back together into another AT&T, this time named SBC it would seem. One of the protections still around though, is also protection for the LEC itself for the content they might carry: "Common Carrier" status. The LEC treats all traffic the same, and as such, cannot be held liable if that traffic happens to be transmitting illeagle content, or be going places it shouldnt. If they start filtering traffic based on where it is going and charging or reducing bandwidth based on the source/destination, they stand a good chance of losing "Common Carrier" as they are now filtering specific traffic: so why couldn't they filter all traffic including Illeagle traffic...
This is specifically why I think content providers should be seperated completely from service providers. Its the same as Microsoft being both an OS company and general software company, if they control one part, they tend to use that to force the other down the customer's throats (Netscape vs IE).
Tm
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No one is forcing the telcos to expand their infrastructure
Actually, the taxpayers have already footed a large part of the bill for them to do just that.
Sadly, no one is making them follow through on it.
It's also SBC/AT&T pressing this issue. You don't hear the cable companies pressing this issue, because in most places (in the USA), they already provide the best internet connections available to the end consumer. They already have bandwidth, etc provisioned for VoIP, movies, games and the rest.
It was interesting to note, that it was mentioned during the Senate committee meeting that Verizon has spent exactly $250,000,000 since the 1996 Telecom Act to upgrade its infrastructure (it was also noted, that Verizon and the other Bells promised at that time to have us all 45 mbit MINIMUM symetrical DSL lines into the home by 2005, and were given tax-free government-funded taxpayer dollars to do it with).
Assuming Verizon has 1 million paying customers for DSL at an average price of $45 per month:
$450,000,000
Multiply that by 12 months (this is not taking into account any paychecks, taxes, fees, etc Verizon has to pay).
Now, tell me again how they aren't making hand-over-foot profits while still not keeping their promises NOR paying back the tax-free loans the government gave them (using OUR taxpayer money)?
Maybe they should try improving their infrastructure even more before they go traipsing about trying to provide VoIP and video on demand.
As it was said during the hearing, "There is plenty of bandwidth out there, if you turn on your dark fiber instead of letting it gather dust." - a reference to the telcos laying alot of fiber line willy-nilly about the countryside, but only lighting up a small fraction of it.
Senator Stevens wasn't very pleased to learn that we are 16th in the world for broadband. He was also not happy about the fact that other nations have 100 mbit access and in some cases gigabit symetrical access to the home, while we are piddling around with 45-100 mbit asymertrical tops for home users and small businesses (fiber lines, and 100 mbit is exorbitantly expensive, unless you are a small business who can pass the buck onto your paying customers). He made note of how a certain telco ISP had blocked their customers from signing up with 3rd party VoIP, by not allowing traffic to go to that company's site from their network. He was proud of the fact that under certain laws passed within the last few years, it is ILLEGAL for telcos to do that. He also implied that for telcos to drop competing VoIP services into a low QOS queue would also be to their detriment if Congress catches wind of it, due to 911 emergency issues, etc.
I will reserve judgement until I see what kind of law Congress passes in this situation, but from what I witnessed today, the telcos are not making a very strong argument in their favor, and Google and the rest of the bunch are.
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