Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?

dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.

Comments

What a waste

[CowTipperGore]

Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community. But his main point about tiered service is not really supported or proved.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer may well lie in an extension of last week's column about net neutrality.

Readers claim that some -- who knows, maybe ALL -- big broadband ISPs are ALREADY running tiered services.

Well, there are no Net Neutrality rules/laws in place (yet). Correct? So, they can do anything they want, right?

So instead of a true "best effort" network upon which some ISPs want to impose tiered services, what most of us probably have are already tiered services

What a waste of a real estate on the Slashdot front page.

VOIP has it's limits

[InsaneProcessor]

Since VOIP uses data compression I suspect that it is lossy. Voice can have lossy compression and still sound good to the ear. Even music can work. Since FAX is data that is embedded in higher audio frequency, I would expect it to not work becuase of lossy compression. POTS is analog all the way and has very little loss (except for analog filtering).

Anyone else know about this?