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

[morgan_greywolf]

Even then, let's suppose you were willing to accept a tiered Internet. How you tier makes a difference in whether it is maximally efficient for a given application. The reason we used managed networks in a corporate environment is because of corporate priorities -- financial transactions are more important than e-mail, so we segment off financial transactions and then give those transactions that must run over the same network as e-mail a higher priority over the e-mail, for instance.

The question is: How do we decide what traffic is more important on the Internet? Who pays? Who pays more? That's stupid. The benefits of a a free and open Internet far outweigh the inefficiencies of working with a basically unmanaged network. (Not that the Internet actually is completely unmanaged -- that's just not true. ISPs shape traffic on their own networks to improve customer connectivity to mail or webservers within the ISP's own network). The point of the Internet is to have a network where anything is possible. Tier it off and you'll make it about as useful as the television networks.

Bandwidth

[Renraku]

Bandwidth is a funny resource.

Imagine if you had a tree that bore fruit once or twice a day. But if you did not eat the fruit within an hour, it spoiled. There's no point in trying to conserve the fruit unless your demand is higher than the output of the tree.

Its always good to have say, 10% free. Out of ten fruit, leave one so that any surprise visitors might have a quick snack as well.

Of course, the other reason you might try to conserve it is to create artificial demand. Now, half of your crop goes to waste. You sell the other half for very high prices saying that your supply just can't keep up with demand and that you must sell them at a higher price due to the whole free market thing.

Point is, every fruit you don't sell will be useless in an hour. But its better to let a fruit rot than to sell it for a decent price, after all.

Multicast

[Kludge]

Speaking of reducing necessary bandwidth, when are these ISPs all going to push multicast for media delivery? Isn't this a no brainer for reducing bandwidth?