Neutral Net Needs Twice the Bandwidth of Tiered

berberine writes with a link to Ars Technica, straight to an article discussing the differences between a net neutral internet and one that supports tiers of content. As you might imagine, our neutral internet is far more bandwidth-intensive; AT&T estimates it might require as much as twice the bandwidth of a tiered internet. From the article: "Corporate sponsorship of research doesn't automatically invalidate that research; what's needed is a close look at the actual results to determine if they were done correctly. According to David Isenberg, a long-time industry insider and proponent of 'dumb' (neutral) networks, the research itself is fine. In his view, it's simply obvious that a dumb network will require more peak capacity than a managed one. But extending that banal observation to make the claim that running a managed network is cheaper is, to Isenberg, not at all intuitive. For one thing, doubling the peak volume of a network does not mean spending twice as much money as it cost to build the original network."

Comments

Re:And

[Maniac-X]

The net neutrality talk isn't making things cheaper, fiber is just becoming more proliferate and easy to manufacture. Overall bandwidth is increasing due to sheer inevitability. The internet will be ruined if it becomes tiered. It stands to put smaller ISPs out of business, and increase net cost for the end user, thus lining the pockets of the major ISP execs... sorry, but that's just not something most people want to see. Let's not turn the Internet into RIAA/MPAA v2.0.