ISP Guarantees Net Neutrality, For a Fee

greedyturtle writes "Ars Technica has up an interesting article on the first ISP to guarantee network neutrality. It's called COmmunityPOwered Internet, aka Copowi. The offer of neutrality comes at a higher price — mostly due to uncompetitive telco line pricing schemes — $34 for 256K DSL, $50 for 1.5 Mbs, and $60 for 7 Mbps. The owner claims to need only 5,000 subscribers to move his ISP into the national arena from the 12 Western states where it now operates. Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?"

Comments

Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[ShaunC]

It ain't gonna work.

They don't own any fiber. The access that they can deliver is at the mercy of the telcos who provision their lines. And while they claim that presently they have cushy arrangements which allow them to do whatever the fuck they want with the bandwidth as long as they pay for it... Who guarantees that agreement will remain in place? The first time a Copowi user turns into a warez pup, what's to say the local DSLAMs won't just "dry up?"

Cute idea. I wish it could work. Ain't gonna survive in our current sad state of Intellectual-Property-uber-alles, especially when one single entity owns the last mile in just about every jurisdiction of this country. Sure, I'd like to start up my own "I don't give a fuck" ISP, too. If only I owned a fiber run to everybody's house, it would be a piece of cake.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[QuantumG]

Umm.. what does anything you're talking about have to do with net neutrality?

for your edification.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[ShaunC]

I know good and well what "net neutrality" means. How do you offer such, as an ISP, when you don't own any infrastructure and you have to piggyback on the big boys? If you're offering DSL over lines that really belong to Verizon or SBC, how can you promise your customers that all connections are equal?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Billly Gates]

My guess is they pay the ISP more money so the traffic isn't throttled back. The telecom industry has been doing this illegally for years. Remember in the 1990s when there were hundreds of ISPs to chose from? Now how many are left?

I wonder what would happen if the public works water and sewer companies tried to do this? Maybe have 2 year contracts and charge by flush and you must pay a surcharge if you move for money they would lose? Pay it or shit in your backyard in an outhouse?

I view the telecom industry as no different here since the lines are tax payer owned and paid for.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[QuantumG]

By, say, shaping every connection equally?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[The One and Only]

And if Verizon or AT&T decides to shape the traffic on the lines you're reselling, you're hosed.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[timmarhy]

these guys are just piss ant small timers, fuck they don't even have 5000 users, do you think them shaping traffic on their network is going to do anything once it goes up stream to at&T?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[ShaunC]

OK, here's the point I'm trying to make.

Consider that there's company V. Company V owns the phone lines. They sell DSL connections to their subscribers, giddy little consumers who are happy to pay whatever company V would like to charge.

Along comes company C. Company C claims "we won't mess with your connection! You will get Google, and YouTube, and MySpace, and Fox News, and everything at the same speed. We will never throttle anything or attempt to meter it based on content! We are all about net neutrality!" And subscribers flock to company C, as they would tend to do in a free market.

However, company C has to buy their connectivity from company V. And company V never made any agreement with company C's subscribers about how their traffic might be throttled. Suddenly, company C is trying their best to provide "all connections are equal" access to their subscribers, but company V keeps interfering. Company C's subscribers who try to load videos from YouTube find it difficult, though they can load videos from Fox News in real-time. And who's to blame? Does company C suck, or is company V holding a brother down?

I wouldn't want to be company C when this shitstorm erupts. I wish Copowi the best of luck, and I hope they get EFF on their side, but I predict they're going to sink like a lead tuna.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[QuantumG]

Yup, and what *I* said was that they could shape everyone the same. That is, if YouTube gets shit bandwidth then Fox News gets shit bandwidth. Neutral doesn't have to mean good.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[gujo-odori]

The thing is, net neutrality is not really about the last mile. I used to be a sysadmin at an ISP, and utilization of last mile bandwidth was never the issue. Whoever they are leasing the local loops from doesn't care per so about whether my DSL line is saturated all the time or not. Net neutrality is about load on the backbone carriers' networks, and below that, on downstream ISP networks. It can also be just about extra profits. A couple cases to illustrate each:

1) Simple load. There's an overselling of bandwidth formula by which all ISPs make money. If the aggregate bandwidth of all your customers is X, you don't have to have X amount of backbone bandwidth, because they aren't all online at once, or all fully utilizing their links when they are. You only need some fraction of that amount. You've got this all worked out, but then along comes Youtube, IM with voice, Vonage and other VoIP carriers, Bit Torrent, online music and video stores, etc., and in pretty short order, your average user is consuming far more bandwidth than they used to and your oversell ratio just went out the window. To maintain level of service, you can do a couple of things: the first is to throw a bunch of money at the problem, upgrading your bandwidth, your core and edge routers, the whole nine yards. The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost. Profit margins are very thin for ISPs, generally, so to remain profitable you would have to raise prices. But Internet access is very price sensitive, and the first one to raise prices is going to see customers walking, in large numbers. The other option is traffic-shaping. You prioritize some traffic over others, and put the bandwidth-hogging stuff like Youtube, BT, online music and vidoe stores, etc, at the end of the bandwidth line. Unless, of course, Google, the stores, etc., are willing to pay you money. Now you have a way to finance that infrastructure without raising rates. Net neutrality is dead, but you're still alive. And Bit Torrent? Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.

2) Greed. I'm a big ISP. I want to get into the VoIP business for myself, so I do. My service is super, and it's cheaper than the phone company. My customers like this. Trouble is, there are VoIP companies out there competing with me, like Vonage and Packet 8. Their service isn't as good as mine (I used to use Packet 8, now use Vonage, and in between had a cable company's VoIP service, so I'm talking from experience here; but Vonage is pretty good), but it's almost as good and it's over 1/3 cheaper. A lot of customers like that even better. What to do? Ah, I know! Traffic shaping! Packets for my own VoIP service get routed at a higher priority than other VoIP services. No their service is no longer almost as good as mine. My customers may or may not really like this, if they even pin it on me, but now my service is worth the premium I charge for it b/c I made the others look bad. Net neutrality is dead, and I can no longer claim with a straight face to be a common carrier like a telco, but I'm making more money and can use it to finance the greater bandwidth demands from case 1, above (along with the fees I'm socking the content providers with to not be traffic-shaped on my network).

This, then, is the problem facing Copowi: They may practice complete net neutrality within their network, consisting of their edge, their core, and the local loops they are leasing. However, if their upstream (be it a major backbone carrier or just a larger ISP who in turn connects to a backbone provider) doesn't practice net neutrality, it doesn't really matter much that Copowi does, except on traffic local to their network, which isn't a whole lot.

Of course, if their upstream starts traffic shaping on VoIP, P2P, whatever, and Copowi wants neutrality, they do have an option: pay to have no shaping on traffic going in or out of their network. And lo and behold, this appears to be exactly what's going on

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[ShaunC]

OK, then; who's going to sign up for internet access with company C, knowing that they cater to the lowest common denominator and give everyone shit bandwidth? That sounds more like company V, who already exists and is generally the only option for many people.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[lucas teh geek]

see that would never fly, but not because it's entirely different (it's not, i agree with you on that), but because the luddites in power understand that water is an essential service. they understand that they need water to have a shower in the morning, and they need water to flush their toilet. but the internet... in their minds nobody NEEDS the internet, after all isnt it all just porn and email? why is that important? (their thinking, not mine)

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[bakana]

No I would not be willing to spend the extra money for net neutrality. Anymore no brainer questions you'd like to ask?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[McDutchie]

If you're offering DSL over lines that really belong to Verizon or SBC, how can you promise your customers that all connections are equal?

By negotiating contracts to that effect with Verizon or SBC? If they break the contract, they can then be sued for damages.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay. Company C, has an agreement with company C which states that company V will not fuck around with the bandwidth they are selling to company C. Since company C is buying the bandwidth off of company V, this agreement can reasonably be put into place. If company V breaks this agreement company C can sue company V for breach of contract.

This is the sort of thing I'd expect in this case.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[NickFortune]

By negotiating contracts to that effect with Verizon or SBC? If they break the contract, they can then be sued for damages.

So the way to preserve net neutrality is for our ISPs to pay the big carriers not to downgrade our packets? And this is a good thing because otherwise they might demand payment from our ISPs in order for them not to downgrade our packets?

Makes you wonder why no one thought of this before, really.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[spottedkangaroo]

lines are tax payer owned and paid for.

Perhaps in some places, but certainly not at the telco where I work. All the lines were installed by the construction workers employed the telco where I work. The taxes account for over half the phone bill, but we don't get get anything out of it.

I doubt many of the lines are actually owned by tax payers. I'm sure that's the case in some places, but I would guess most of it is privately owned and privately paid for.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't paying more for the full, neutral internet the very definition of a tiered internet... which is the exact opposite of network neutrality?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay per flush?
well it does kind of work that way in the uk, there are water rates and there is water metering. Water rates are a fixed fee per year and you use as much water as you like. with a water meter you pay for the water you use.

Water metering is the water companies preferred system ,however for existing properties with water rates they cannot make you change, although they try to convince you that this would save you money. In reality even a single person will struggle to save anything and a family would definitely pay more. The system also only allows for a switch to water meters, you or future residents do not get the option of reverting back to water rates.

Incidentally unlike electricity or gas where several companies can supply you with the same gas, water companies are a monopoly. You get the supplier for that area.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[peragrin]

In your case, than the Telco most likely got two benefits.

A local monopoly , and a nice hefty tax break to do the work.

I have one choice for local phone service. One choice for local cable service. If I want something else or am unhappy with either setup I get hacks that don't work quite right, or are dependent on one of those two services to make work.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[RMH101]

Company C, DOES NOT HAVE an agreement
Fixed that for you.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Anonymous Coward]

I can no longer claim with a straight face to be a common carrier like a telco

They never claimed they were one, which is why laws like the dmca give them explicit safe harbor provisions.

Also, if they were a common carrier, breaking common carrier regulations doesn't mean they "lose it", it means fines and jail time, just like it means for the guy who opens your mail.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Bearhouse]

Where I live, (France) already happens. Water consumption is metered, and includes a charge for treatment costs as well.
Common throughout Europe. So yup, the more you shit, shave and shower, the more you pay...

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[RobBebop]

Maybe you know something I don't....

The trouble is, this is expensive, and while the routers are a sunk cost, bandwidth is a running cost.

Would the running cost be operating and powering the servers, which provide the bandwidth? Maybe I am nitpicking but it seems oversimplified to say that bandwidth is a running cost. If the servers have an achievable 99.999% uptime, and can auto-recover during the 0.001% when they are down per year, and if the servers are connected to some self-sustained power factory (like a wind farm, or something) then the cost of "running the bandwidth" would go to zero, would it not?

Oh well, nobody's paying there, so BT is just going to have crappy performance on your network.

I thought BT was a distributed application... which makes it better for serving content to the internet than the client/server model anyway. I've seen business plans in Wired for "Movie Distribution" to use a BT-like distribution model to spread the cost of bandwidth across the internet (i.e. monopolize their customers) to keep their costs down. Is there something I am missing which would give a server who is paying for their pipes such a big advantage over the BT distributed method? I can imagine a server paying for service to be assured 500kbps upload speeds, but isn't that offset by BTs ability to connect to 10 different client-servers at 50kbps a pop?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[volkris]

First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.

Anyway, no, that's not what's being claimed at all. The way to gain net neutrality is to pay the big carriers not to intelligently shape their bandwidth, blindly shuffling it back and forth. This makes complete sense, as the blindly shuffling approach is more expensive for them (given equal quality)...so why not expect that cost to be passed along to customers?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[RobBebop]

By negotiating contracts to that effect with Verizon or SBC? If they break the contract, they can then be sued for damages. So the way to preserve net neutrality is for our ISPs to pay the big carriers not to downgrade our packets? And this is a good thing because otherwise they might demand payment from our ISPs in order for them not to downgrade our packets?

I have doubts on any business model that has "sue your vendor" as a fail-safe for profitability, especially when the vendors are the big and powerful telcos. I suppose it beats the current trend of business models that include "sue your customers" or "sue a company that has successfully implemented a business plan that you had vaguely described on paper several years ago".

This is a step in the right direction, and it suddenly makes the "300kbps or less" deals that ISPs have been selling for years look particularly smart.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[nine-times]

It's funny how this conversation goes. You're talking about the internet as a kind of important infrastructure, but mostly people talk about it as a business service. You're describing AT&T as running the roads while AT&T is trying to convince Congress that they're just running a taxi service. In general, I think people are failing to make the case that the Internet is infrastructure of the sort that the government should be involved. I'm not saying it's not infrastructure, but only that the argument isn't being heard in the mainstream.

Of course, convince people that it's infrastructure and it'll just be neglected like the rest of the infrastructure in the US. Bridges are falling, dams are crumbling, the train system is pretty much dead. Give it a few years, and even the highways won't be drivable.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[NickFortune]

No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.

What, you mean Google have actually been paying a surcharge to AT&T for their youTube traffic all this time, and somehow they never noticed? Makes you wonder what Ed Whitacre was getting so worked up about in which case.

I think a lot of people are not going to share your definition of "net neutrality", my friend :)

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[rmadmin]

Go to a city council meeting and encourage them to build a municipal telecom. I work for a muni telecom. Telephone, CableTV (Digital/HD too), and Internet (dial-up, cable, rural wireless). Even though we don't have the lowest prices, and the highest speeds, we still have 80% market share. You don't have to put up with a monopoly. ;)

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Insightfill]

I wonder what would happen if the public works water and sewer companies tried to do this? Maybe have 2 year contracts and charge by flush and you must pay a surcharge if you move for money they would lose? Pay it or shit in your backyard in an outhouse?

Notable is that where I grew up (suburbs of Chicago), the water/sewer billing system was that your sewer portion was double the water portion. If you used $50 worth of water one month, you got billed $100 for the sewer portion. Guess they couldn't find a reasonable way to meter the... other end. This meant that if you had a large expense of water (such as a pool or garden watering) that didn't result in sewer use, you still paid for it.

Also (regarding the surcharge for when you move): another suburb over here had a lawsuit when an unlicensed and drunk motorcyclist hit a median and sued (successfully) over poor road markings. The village instituted a surcharge on all houses for the next several years to pay for the settlement. If you moved out before the time was up, you also paid the remainder of your part of the settlement.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[NickFortune]

I have doubts on any business model that has "sue your vendor" as a fail-safe for profitability, especially when the vendors are the big and powerful telcos.

Oh, I entirely agree. Start up vs. Telecoms giant. They could be tied up in court for ten years, even if they won.

Besides which, I can't see what leverage they might have with which to negotiate. There's no reason for AT&T or Verizon to give them a deal at all. If I was an AT&T strategist, I'd refuse to talk at all, and wait. If they get big enough to be worth the effort, then start turning the screws. Either that, or shape them to death from the outset, until they come crawling, and then give them one of those "we reserve the right to change the terms and conditions at any time" agreements.

No, as I see it, these guys are either idealistic but doomed, or else they've come up with an interesting hook to see if they can set up as a high-price ISP. Either way, it's hard to see them making a difference.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[db32]

Sen Ted Stevens to the rescue! It is a series of tubes! They understand tubes! We are saved, all hail Sen Stevens.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[CODiNE]

Packets for my own VoIP service get routed at a higher priority than other VoIP services. No their service is no longer almost as good as mine.

And this is legal?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Kadin2048]

First, "preserve" net net neutrality? No, the notion that have net neutrality now (or had it recently) is a falsehood. You should say "gain" net neutrality.

Huh?

The big carriers don't shape traffic. Traffic shaping is something that happens at the network edges, not near the core or backbones. The equipment to do deep packet inspection is not cheap, and it gets ridiculously expensive when you start talking about inspecting really fat pipes. The only system I'm aware of that does DPI on big network segments are those ones from the creepy quasi-NSA company Narus. And despite their marketing spiel, they're geared more towards surveillance than network management.

Effective traffic shaping requires pushing the hardware to do the packet inspection as close to the customers as you can get it, because that's where the links are slow enough to do it with reasonable hardware (rather than requiring a whole mess of custom logic) and without slowing things down. By the time the traffic has gotten up to a big Tier 1 or even Tier 2 ISP, you're talking about serious bandwidth. There's a point where it's easier just to get a fast router (which has a lot of custom logic in order to do its job, and just looks at packet headers) and not screw around with trying to pull out all the Bittorrent packets and separate them from the rest of the email/IM/VoIP/pornography.

Traffic shaping is something that low-level ISPs want to do, in order to control their bandwidth bills (because a consumer ISP has to pay to its connectivity to higher-level providers, it's not peering). I don't see why the big backbone providers would care.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[mrchaotica]

...so why not expect that cost to be passed along to customers?

Because the average customer isn't willing to pay. Therefore, in order to have network neutrality happen, it has to be forced to happen by government fiat.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[beckerist]

The idea is that company C and company V have a contract preventing this sort of thing. Plus, it's all about the key-words nowadays and paying ANYONE for a "completely open internet" means you either don't understand how it works or you don't care.

This is seemingly targeted at a more 'ludditeful' crowd.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[volkris]

Most people at least claim that their ideas of network neutrality are more idealistic and "pure" than to be all about money.

They are, of course, wrong: the entire network neutrality debate is rooted in money. Telecoms need money to operate, content providers don't want to provide that funding, and customers don't either.

So you're almost correct, there is a definitional disagreement here. Most people frame network neutrality in terms of far more noble ideas of free speech and such.

Almost, because content companies HAVE been making deals with the infrastructure providers to improve their access. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that the newcomers want all customers to pay instead.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[COMON$]

Fiber Smiber. Physical lines could be crushed if an ISP would start working on a long distance wifi blanket of sorts. Given I am not a wireless Guru but we can push signals extraordinary distances pretty cheaply in comparison to fiber. Sure you can rave about security but there isnt much that is much more secure about lying cable underground unguarded.

Would it be too much to start a mesh network in a city and have several pipes leading out of the city to the next location? Yes it would be costly but far far cheaper than competing with a Telco for cabling and in the end it would be far more resilient to backhoes.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[dwye]

> I wonder what would happen if the public works water and sewer
> companies tried to do this? Maybe have 2 year contracts and
> charge by flush

Last time that I checked, the water bill was based on the amount used. Likewise, I cannot flush a river down a household sewer connection without expecting repercussions from the Municiple Sewer Authority.

> and you must pay a surcharge if you move for money they would lose?

I do not know if there is a Disconnect Fee, but there is one for connecting, and they have never waived it during a sale to promote more people connecting.

> Pay it or shit in your backyard in an outhouse?

Septic tank. It isn't an outhouse, but it might well be under your backyard (ours was, and the grass grew really high where it broke :-). Until the housing density grows too high, it works well enough.

> I view the telecom industry as no different here since the lines are tax payer owned and paid for.

I suggest that you should pick analogies which are not good counter-arguments to your thesis. Everything that you decry, utilities do, including ban attempts at competition.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[NickFortune]

Telecoms need money to operate, content providers don't want to provide that funding, and customers don't either.

I was under the impression that telecoms made their money through peering agreements. Adding surcharges to Internet users not directly connected to their network is demanding money for services already paid for.

Almost, because content companies HAVE been making deals with the infrastructure providers to improve their access.

As the wikipedians like to say: [[citation needed]]

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[mtmra70]

I'm confused by your Simple load example. Obviously the consumers are paying a flat rate for "unlimited data" (in the USA), but content providers are not. When you deal with large websites/providers, they charge by the bit/byte/whatever. So if Google decides to pump out 100TB/day instead of 1TB/day, they will pay for it. Now, since they pay their provider, that provider has to pay its provider for the increased load - isnt this increased charge (from traffic) always hitting the provider? If the ISP for the end user doesnt like the plan they offered at said price, why not raise the price? Cable companies have been jacking up basic cable prices for years, despite the lack of added benefit.

So all in all, can someone CLEARLY explain how this setup would not work?

Example: If a store (website) on a major street (local ISP pipe) all of a sudden has more customers/cars (end user) coming through the parking lot/side road, they work with the city council/city engineers (ISP) to accomidate the needed changes. The city doesnt say "hey, unless you give us MORE money in addition to the increased taxes you are already give us, we are going to divert traffic".

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[renehollan]

Er, Company C likely has a contract with company V to not DO that.

Look, I get my internet connectivity from Comcast, yeah, a cable company, for the first time (always had DSL before but am too far from the CO now, and trying Clearwire sucked million year old eggs).

Guess what?

I run my own mail server on port 25 (no, I WILL NOT relay your traffic), can open any inbound port I want (even port 80), and share whatever content I have the right to share. I have the holy grail of cable internet access: a static IP address with the right to reverse resolve it to whatever domain I want.

I have Comcast's lowest tier of business service: their teleworker package in San Diego: 10 Mb/s down (and I get close to 7 from most test servers), 1.5 Mb/s up, static IP, no ports blocked, no inbound or outbound shaping.

Of course, I pay $105 a month for this. Consindering I paid $60 for 1.5M/384k DSL in Seattle with a static IP and no filtering, that's not too shabby. I'd rather pay a bit less as I don't need the bandwidth I have, but that's the market here.

Now, I use it for personal reasons, and am not trying to conduct business on the 'net. If I were, I'd be pretty upset that Comcast might shape traffic to their consumer class customers some of who I might want to do business with on line. But, it's their pipe, so I guess they get to charge for preferrential routing.

But, wait! That can't go on for ever. See, they have a monopoly in the areas they serve. The can't legally leverate that monopoly to bolster a business in another area, oh, like restricting those who do not pay extra for their business traffic to have preferential routing from doing business. In fact, if Comcast has a stock interest in some of the businesses that do pay for preferrential routing, it's an even clearer case of monopoly abuse.

Of course, like all things litigous, this will take time to settle in the courts.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[saleenS281]

Fine, replace water with electricity. They haven't quite figured out you need that apparently.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[MrHops]

No, as I see it, these guys are either idealistic but doomed, or else they've come up with an interesting hook to see if they can set up as a high-price ISP. Either way, it's hard to see them making a difference.

Or, they are trying to get the attention of Google, or they are a proxy for Google, to test the 'net neutrality/being an ISP' water...

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[NickFortune]

Or, they are trying to get the attention of Google, or they are a proxy for Google, to test the 'net neutrality/being an ISP' water...

Interesting ... I don't think it would help, though. AT&T probably aren't going to charge Google's ISP; they're going to demand tribute from Google direct. They probably already get paid by Google's ISP via peering fees.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[sjames]

1) Simple load. There's an overselling of bandwidth formula by which all ISPs make money. If the aggregate bandwidth of all your customers is X, you don't have to have X amount of backbone bandwidth, because they aren't all online at once, or all fully utilizing their links when they are. You only need some fraction of that amount. You've got this all worked out, but then along comes Youtube, IM with voice, Vonage and other VoIP carriers, Bit Torrent, online music and video stores, etc., and in pretty short order, your average user is consuming far more bandwidth than they used to and your oversell ratio just went out the window.

Really, net neutrality is just a buzzword here. The real offering is to pay more to me and I will maintain a more reasonable oversell. The problem is that when every ISP gets away with claiming "unlimited use and blazing speed" when they provide nothing of the sort, it becomes impossible to exist as a higher quality ISP that is less limited and does less overselling. The differentiation disappears in a puff of lies that make the better ISP look like a worse deal.

It's unfortunate that the term "committed bandwidth" has lost all meaning. Why is it that I CANNOT get residential do whatever I want with it committed bandwidth for anything like a reasonable surcharge? The ISPs probably pay $30/meg at most given the bulk rates so why can't I get a 1 meg commit with no caps or restrictions for $50 or so extra? Instead, if I want that I get to pay hundreds a month in loop charges and such.

The reason is that if they offer that, they are forced to explain to their other customers that they are paying for 0 commit, have undisclosed limits on their "unlimited" service and that the no-server policy exists only to act as a "soft limit" so they don't have to tip their hand to too many "bandwidth hogs".

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. People don't shower in France.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[edunbar93]

Oh, that's easy. Because when you're not $TELCO and you're selling ADSL to end users (like we do where I work), then your company pays $TELCO for a leased line between the telephone switching central offices you want, and your datacenter where you do all your network routing. That's it. You're not paying $TELCO to provide your customers with a connection to the internet. In fact, you could be paying anyone you like for that link.

I suppose that $TELCO could say "fuck you, Google didn't pay their extortion money^W^Wrent this month, so we're going to firewall their site at the CO", but then you could take them to court for not providing to you what you pay for - an unfiltered leased line between their COs and your datacenter. Besides, I highly doubt they would go to the trouble of doing that kind of filtering at their 800,000 COs instead of their 80 gateway routers. That would cost them more money than they could ever possibly collect from sites like Youtube.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[HobophobE]

I think the purpose of the theoretical example of negative shaping to achieve neutrality is predicated on the idea that network partiality only makes sense because you're giving advantage to someone. That advantage is leverage as a means to revenue.

ISP Q turns all connections to 10% strength and then puts their tip jar out. Whoever throws money in gets the 10% widened and has a merit-agnostic advantage to attract customers. But if ISP R leases bandwith from Q, even with Q's 10% rule, they can ensure only the 10% on all connections. That removes the advantage. This is especially effective because Q has a contractual agreement to provide better connectivity to the tippers and they're also bound to lease their lines to other companies. Since R thwarts partiality the tippers won't keep paying Q and while Q can keep all lines at 10% their revenue won't go up. Sooner or later a Q-type company will open to say 15% to try to bring in more customers since their partiality scheme failed. Other Q-type will follow and the consumer will benefit.

In theory, anyway. In practice, if the government regulators and the ISPs want to be anti-competitive bastards about things then they'll end up costing their country a lot of money. This already seems to be happening in the USA with our dismal consumer broadband offerings and similar technological deficiencies.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[a.d.trick]

A poor analogy is like a leaky screwdriver ...

Actually, that analogy isn't terrible, but your example missed out some important facts. Water consumption is, by-and-large, fairly even across the board. It's not like some people flush the toilet once a month while others flush it 10 times every second. If your water consumption doubles in a month, you'll probably get a visit from some technician to see if a pipe got busted. If your water consumption stays abnormally high, you might get a visit from police to make sure you're not growing weed.

Just because something is a public service doesn't mean its unregulated. I won't get very far trying to ship my 20 kg suitcase with a 48 cent stamp.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[garnetlion]

You host your web page on that connection? 'Cause it's down. Perhaps you ought not be so pleased with it ;)

(I've got roots in San Diego, that's why I was curious about you.)

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[cdrguru]

In the places where I have lived if a business requires upgrades in the road for their business, they get to pay for them. In addition to any other taxes and fees they are paying. Nobody else cares, so of course the business gets to pay the whole load. Maybe the city isn't actively diverting traffic away from the business but they certainly are going to make it known that the problem is Business XYZ is creating all the traffic problems.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[lucas teh geek]

see, that sounds like net neutrality. you pay for what you use. if the ISPs ran it the way they'd like to run the internet, you'd pay different amounts for the water used to flush your toilet, the water that came out of your shower and the water that came out of your garden hose, even though it's all the same product. and when there wasnt enough pressure to use all of them at once, your plumbing may slow to a trickle while someone else who pays for a premium water service would have their pressure flowing at full speed.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[eeyoredragon]

If we could only convince the luddites it's ALL porn... then it'd stand a chance.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[gujo-odori]

Actually, ISPs have always sought to have the legal status of common carriers, at least with respect to things like copyright infringement. The safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are aimed at exactly-that, conferring a common carrier-like status on network providers.

Jail time?! Gimme a break. Have you ever - *ever* - heard of anyone at a telco (which are common carriers) going to jail for anything other than financial malfeasance?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[jujuchef]

I agree with the luddite portion.

Here comes the ass-hole portion which the luddites enjoy being kissed:

Water is as essential as much as you pay for it. Internet is not (yet?) deemed an essential utility. What? You mean it's not relied on as much as power!? Our very conversation right HERE is a mere spit in the wind flying with pidgeon shit!? Why yes... it is... The slashdot dot effect? Why son, what on earth is a slashdot and what kind of effect are you on about?

Food for thought: http://geekspin.wordpress.com/2006/06/29/broadband -to-become-essential-just-like-water-and-power/

Once the rest of the world that gets shit upon by us catches up, then I really hope we can entertain ideas of NEEDS the internet. Until then, pragmatically as the parent puts it. What is your life worth over mine or anyone elses? Nothing. Same as shock and awe campaign here folks. It rumbles and tumbles, then people forget about what they don't want to see.

I cringe, at you, yeah you thinking, "We should really invest in water...".. capitalist scum... :-D Oh wait, I forget, I can think free but not talk about acting on that freedom...

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[jujuchef]

So what would your solution be before comapany C has to brave the 'shitstorm erupt'?

What is the ideal solution to make everyone play happy? Is there a better alternative to capitalism?

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[renehollan]

No, I don't host a site there. I COULD if I wanted to, without violating my TOS. www.hollan.org is down until further notice.

Re:Naga..naga..nagannahappen

[cmarkn]

The big carriers don't shape traffic. Traffic shaping is something that happens at the network edges, not near the core or backbones. The equipment to do deep packet inspection is not cheap,

It may be expensive to what you say, but nobody does that and nobody needs that. Right in the TCP header are the source and destination port numbers. All you have to do is look for anything coming from or headed for ports you don’t like, and put it on the short bus. Once the filtering slows the packets a little, the edge machines notice it and slow their rate of sending. Moreover, filtering really doesn’t need to be very smart to be effective - the blockage doesn’t need to be perfect to accomplish its purpose. You don’t really have to stop everybody that has a web server running, you just have to stop everyone doing it on port 80. The ones using non-standard ports are probably not going to be eating up enough bandwidth to worry about - because they are non-standard.

Oh, and Comcast is one of the big carriers and they do shape traffic. Their tech support even confirmed it when I called and asked if they did.

Pricing not actually that bad

[JoshJ]

Compared to Comcast, which is $30 (or more, I have no idea what their post-introductory rates are) for internet access that's theoretically 3 megs but more like 1.5, I'd gladly pay for Copowi.

I'm on a college campus so I don't have to, but this could be nice when I leave, if I stay in the States.

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[shaitand]

'that's theoretically 3 megs but more like 1.5'

I guess it varies from area to area but on Comcast I pay for 8 and get it. Nothing is no ports are blocked, no slow torrents (or any other protocol).

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[symbolic]

I use comcast, and although I don't do bit torrent, or download music or movies, I do spend a bit of time on YouTube. I've noticed that the service seems a bit sluggish now - sometimes I have to reload a page 2-3 times (or wait for who knows how long) in order for the video to actually start playing. This might be YouTube's problem, but with all the talk about net neutrality and throttling, I'm certainly wondering. My service (internet only) costs me $55/mo.

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[Seumas]

Where in the hell is Comcast only $30?!

I currently pay $60/mo for 8mbps/768kbps with Comcast. This guy's service wouldn't be any more expensive and would presumably be bidirectional 7mbps.

On the negative side, if it's DSL -- that means it is only available to a limited group of people. If you can't spit on the drive-way of your local telco office from your house, you're probably not going to get great speed.

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[aplusjimages]

I was wondering the same thing. It's $50 a month in north Florida.

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

GP mentioned that he's still on introductory rates.

Re:Pricing not actually that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

comcast actually offers a variety of service speeds now ranging from about 15 to 60 dollars a month

I would, but...

[Yetihehe]

I would. My family wouldn't. And it will be so with most of those "dark masses" we keep hearing about.

Re:I would, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would. My family wouldn't.

Um... move out of your family's basement and get a job?

Re: I would, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"dark masses"? Yeah, those fucking blacks always go for the cheap option. Usually robbing white folks.

But wait a minute

[Billly Gates]

I was promissed by the telecom industry that this would never happen. They told us we would have cheaper rates with more bandwith. Its not like they lied to us just so they could rip us off on tax payer subsidized lines.

ah

[Anonymous Coward]

[mob voice] That's a nice internet you have there... would be a shame if anything happened to it... say me and my pals here will make sure no "accidents" happen... for a fee- what do ya say? [/mob voice]

Re:ah

[bstempi]

Someone a little more intimidating than you already came along

uhhhm, what?

[RelliK]

How is it "net neutrality" if you have to pay extra lest your packets be lost? Sounds more like extortion to me. (or precisely the big telco version of "net neutrality").

I also fail to see how the ISP can "guarantee" net neutrality. They can do nothing if their upstream provider decides to throttle some sites.

Re:uhhhm, what?

[volkris]

What?

What about the concept of net neutrality is incompatible with a charge?

Yes, you want internet service that has the quality of network neutrality... so you are being asked to pay for that feature. There's nothing contradictory in that.

And extortion? Yeah, the same way McDonald's "extorts" money out of me when I ask for extra cheese.

Re:uhhhm, what?

[Mister Whirly]

Amen. I guess information really doesn't want to be free. I was always confused about how people took "net neutrality" to mean "net neutrality with absolutely no extra charges, just benefits". You get what you pay for people...

neutral network only in the network..

[CrAlt]

"Yep! Your data will not be shaped, limited, or blocked in ANY WAY on our network.
PS: We can not guarantee neutrality outside our network. "

Sounds like a great plan! Most people only want to send their wAreZ/mp3z down the street anyways right??
There is no way this ISP could fail. :)

Not bad, actually

[ejito]

A 7Mb/s connection isn't a bad deal at $60 in the US. I bet my roommates and I pay over 40 for our cable host (not my choice) at only 2Mb/s shared (it might be more, but I've never seen it go over that). Companies up the charges after the first 3-6 discounted months on annual subs.

I looked at the company's site, and they don't do annual subscription deals, so I think they might have a hard time convincing new buyers, but it looks good for those wanting to jump ship off of restrictive providers.

The free Ubuntu CD they give to their customers is kind of... uh... weird. I guess if someone couldn't download an OS or get a friend to burn a CD it'd be nifty, though rare.

Re:Not bad, actually

[theazreal]

The owner probably figures that if you care enough to switch to his provider on the mere hope that it -might- stay relatively free of commercial interference, you've probably been meaning to switch to Linux anyways.

Profit

[ls354]

Just another way to profit, Own most of the infrestructure and it may work

Sort of competitive

[tehwebguy]

The lower plans seem crappy, but the 7 MBPS for $60.00 isn't half bad, is it?

Re:Sort of competitive

[the_arrow]

The prices in USA really scares me.
I am paying around $30 for 10Mbps, guaranteed, both directions. For around $50 I can get 100Mbps.

Re:Sort of competitive

[Bob9113]

The prices in USA really scares me.
I am paying around $30 for 10Mbps, guaranteed, both directions. For around $50 I can get 100Mbps.

You think that's scary? You should try buying prescription drugs here.

Re:Sort of competitive

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

The prices in USA really scares me.
I am paying around $30 for 10Mbps, guaranteed, both directions. For around $50 I can get 100Mbps.

I'm curious. You didn't name the country where you live. Are you also afraid of doing that?

Re:Sort of competitive

[tomz16]

Nope, not bad at all... I pay $50/month for 10meg/384k from Time Warner. (it used to be the same price for 3meg/384k as little as 2 years back)

The 384k is really what gets me...

Re:Sort of competitive

[Barny]

And I pay $130AU (around 100US) for 1.5Mb/s limited to 60GB/month plan that is, according to my isp, neutral.

Of course I live in the 3rd world internet dictatorship of Australia, so its about right.

Just to point out, the whole "net neutrality" thing is that data hosts pay more to get better tubes to their customers (wee, I love this analogy), why can't the client do the same? For fucks sake, the ISPs should be needing to change their pants at this thought, not only can they collect extra money from the service provider (google, etc) but they can charge more to the consumer AS WELL for what is essentially the same connection they PROMISED you when you signed up.

Damn, whoever thought this one out has really done their homework :)

Re:Sort of competitive

[thanatos_x]

"I'm curious. You didn't name the country where you live. Are you also afraid of doing that?"

Yes, Yes he is. He doesn't want a massive wave of slashdotters migrating there.

In all reality, I'd suggest he's posting from Sweeden, but I know there may be a few other European countries with such fast access and Japan and S.Korea almost certainly have it.

Re:Sort of competitive

[the_arrow]

Yeah, I kind of forget that... Sorry!
The country in question is Sweden, as one one poster already guessed. :)

Um....

[Spy der Mann]

isn't requiring a fee PRECISELY what Net Neutrality is against?

Re:Um....

[cyberjock1980]

You know what I would pay a fee for? My internet connection to actually be what I paid for! I never get the 'theoretical' maximum. In fact sometimes my webpages barely load. The fee I pay to get the 'supreme speed' should guarantee me that speed. Isn't that why I pay the extra $15 a month for the upgraded internet??

Re:Um....

[QuantumG]

Heh, next you'll be wanting some kind of quality of service guarantee. Why not just demand fiber to the home for $30/month.

Re:Um....

[dodobh]

No. Network neutrality basically says "You paid for this bandwidth, use it as you like". Non-network-neutrality says "You paid for the bandwidth, but you can use it only for services we offer (or for connections to our partenrs. For anything else, here's a small fraction of your bandwidth".

What the non-neutral offer does is basically say "We can give you unlimited traffic, but only at $SLOW speed and for broadband speeds, you only get partner access". Essentially, instead of raising prices, they are making additional plans and pushing everyone down the ladder.

Re:Um....

[Liinux]

Why not just demand fiber to the home for $30/month. That would be nice and isn't totally impossible. The big national Telco over here offers fiber to the home for the equivalent of $25 for a 0.25/0.25 line. A 10/10 line is $40 though and a 100/10 is $45.

That doesn't inlude the cost to get the fiber actually installed, mind you, but when it is installed by someone it stays there and you can get these subscriptions.

Re:Um....

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense to the original poster, but who the hell is modding this insightful?

Of course net neutrality isn't against paying for an internet connection.

I think its worth it

[Anonymous Coward]

I would, Cox communications is my current ISP, and they are horrible, in every aspect.

Sharing?

[j1m 5n0w]

Do the terms of service allow sharing your connection with your neighbors? Not having your ISP discriminate on the basis of what technology you're using or who you're connecting is a good thing, but do they discriminate against certain (legal) uses?

dyslexia.

[bmo]

I read it as cowpi.

must...sleep.

--
BMO

Re:dyslexia.

[sqrt(2)]

You're not alone, and I slept for 15 hours last night.

Re:dyslexia.

[dch24]

The story is tagged "copoi"... Romanian for hound? What does that mean?

The beginning of the end of neutrality...

[cyberjock1980]

If this really takes off we're screwed. The internet was formed on the basis of neutrality. We then argued over having tiered internet. But now we're being offered(or attempting to be offered) internet that is neutral. We now have tiered internet folks. We have the ISP that promises net neutrality, and 'everyone else'. It's just a matter of time before 'everyone else' = 'non-neutral ISP'.

So we've got 2 tiers set up already. How many will we have in the end?

Er...Speakeasy?

[msimm]

Aren't they still in the game? Did I miss something and they started shaping traffic? Otherwise this sounds 100% gimmick.

Re:Er...Speakeasy?

[3waygeek]

They're still in business -- I've been with them for 4-5 years now (ever since Telocity left the biz). However, Speakeasy's prices are a bit higher than these guys are promising.

Re:Er...Speakeasy?

[Skreems]

They also make no guarantees of net neutrality. They don't do traffic shaping, but they won't commit to never do traffic shaping. I even tried to ask them about their stance towards it, and their reply was essentially, "here, have this marketing-drone non-answer".

The local monopolies still own the layer 1

[lanner]

I'm sold on paying a little more for an ethical network operator, but they really can't deliver on their promise. This is because they don't own the hardware transport. And, ultimately, if the monopolies (both cable and telco) want to twiddle with my bits, they can do so all the way down to layer 1.

Right now I have Qwest DSL in very-downtown Phoenix Arizona. I'm literally two blocks from the local baseball park. The only ISP options that I have are Qwest with an 7Mbps down/800Kbps up ADSL line or Cox with a 10Mbps down/1Mbps up DOCSIS cable line. That's the best that America can do in a major metro area, which is pretty crappy. I'm more unhappy with the upload than download. Covad just *might* have a DSLAM somewhere nearby, but they would still have to lease Qwest's copper 24 gauge pairs.

You see, nobody else can own the lines that come to my home, and neither Qwest nor Cox are going to turn over their copper line that they buried for anything short of a court order. Other possible means of a communication media might be wireless radio, power lines, or (in the very-imaginative but more-possible-than-you-might-think spectrum), flushing a fiber optic line all the way down to the sewer system where it could be aggregated to some central point.

ATM is a real technology that has the possibilities of taking that layer two connection and making it portable, rendering the layer 1 less relevant, but ATM is a train wreck of a technology. It works for some of Asia, where it is popular, but it's a really horrible standard. Unfortunately, ATM has really gone to hell in the USA. This is mostly due to the fault of the equipment manufactures who could not deliver reasonably priced hardware and software, the ATM specifications horrible requirements (cell overhead, the need for hardware switching, and the horrific unnecessarily-complicated standards), and the resulting bad taste left with network admins/engineers like myself who just don't think of it as viable any longer.

In summary, I'm still screwed. I can't use BitTorrent for legit or illegal usage without having my rate limited and I can't serve up a decent website because of a crappy upload speed.

Re:The local monopolies still own the layer 1

[jonwil]

The thing about Covad though is that even though Qwest would still own the copper pair, Covad would own the DSLAM and the routers and IP hardware. Unless there is something else in there, Qwest never even touches your data at the IP level (and can't do anything nasty to it)

Re:The local monopolies still own the layer 1

[sjames]

Of course, Qwest and Cox enjoy rent free right of way access through and over everyone's yards for their wires, but they believe the world owes it to them. That's the essence of the argument in favor of open access. If that free right of way went away, the local encumbant here would be in a very expensive mess if I told them "pay up or come get your wires off of my property" or even if I chose to charge them a "reasonable digging fee" for messing up my newly seeded lawn next time they need to make a repair. Even having to call in advance and make an appointment for free access to my (and everyone elses) yard would cost them a small fortune.

Yes, those costs would show up in customer billing, but if I'm not their customer...

In other words, they owe their very existance to a public givaway.

Re:The local monopolies still own the layer 1

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a shame that throttling occurrs there are legitimate uses jamendo comes to mind which uses bittorrent. riaa and mpaa are really loosing their arz and they've got to "charge extra" to compete, ie..guaranteed net neutrality for a fee

Re:The local monopolies still own the layer 1

[lanner]

You are correct, but if Qwest refuses them access, then Covad is SOL. Also, where is Covad going to put a DSLAM? In a Qwest POP, usually. No access, no DSLAM.
I'm not sure where the FCC currently is on the issue of CLECs having access to the ILECs network. It seems to flip flop around, but I'm pretty sure it's on the side of Qwest right now. As for Cox, they don't let anyone touch their stuff.

I'd just like a nice little pull box between each home and the block corner, where it can be aggregated. However, this is probably more difficult than it sounds. I don't know -- I'm not an outside plant person.

It's as neutral as it gets..

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it "net neutrality" if you have to pay extra lest your packets be lost?

It's not as if Copowi has two plans, a neutral one and a non-neutral one. It's that it's actually costing them this much, because they don't own the fiber, as the first poster pointed out. Essentially, they're buying from the Mediacoms and the Comcasts of the world, and reselling it to you as completely neutral, at least at their end.

So it does raise the question of whether Copowi itself is paying extra to their upstream providers for a "neutral" Internet. But I'm guessing they just pay for what they use, just like you do with a hosting provider.

I also fail to see how the ISP can "guarantee" net neutrality. They can do nothing if their upstream provider decides to throttle some sites.

I'm guessing that most upstream providers actually have some competition -- after all, it's easy for an ISP to lay some fiber to the other upstream across town than it is for an individual consumer (who's limited by who owns their cable, or how far it is to the DSL box).

And while they could theoretically filter anything, I bet they wouldn't -- all their filtering is done at the consumer level. That's where their hardware is -- at their own local ISPs.

Well, if these guys were near where I live, and even halfway competitive... Ordinarily, I'd much prefer a 100 mbit FTTH connection that feels like 20 mbit than a 7 mbit DSL connection that really is 7 mbits. But short of that, I'd be willing to pay a little extra, on the premise that these guys may eventually gather enough money to start laying fiber of their own, or at least threatening to.

It's one thing if Comcast can threaten to cut off Copowi's pipe and force all their customers to switch to Comcast's own consumer ISP. It's quite another if Copowi can threaten Comcast -- keep it neutral or we switch to another upstream provider, or build our own pipes, and take all your consumers with us.

Maybe I just want to believe, though.

Two things...

[PontifexPrimus]

Two things:

• If you have to pay someone not to do something that's harmful to me that's not "staying neutral". That's "accepting a bribe".
• How are they guaranteeing that the other networks their traffic is routed through will play ball? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know it only takes one robber-baron to squat in the way and throttle traffic that displeases him / isn't paid for. Unless the ISP can prove that only their lines used from start to finish point their "net neutrality" fee means squat as long as any one provider can break the system.

I really don't think you guys should start going down that slippery slope...

I already pay more than this...

[tuxlove]

I pay more - a lot more - for a lot less speed than these guys advertise. Sign me up!

If only it was really that easy out here in the boondocks.

Re:I already pay more than this...

[scooter.higher]

I feel your pain:

http://home.shentel.net/site/Internet/Access-HighS peed.cfm

Network neutrality?

[hatchet]

It basically means, they promise to not do traffic shaping of any kind on user's data. Which is BAD. Such networks would be DDOS attack prone and pretty much unstable.

Do it ourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Let these pricks charge for "net neutrality" on their lines. Lets start setting up a giant peer to peer wireless mesh network and we can bypass these asshole telecos completely. see how they like it when not only are they not getting money for neutraliy but they are not getting money PERIOD.

yeah yeah far fetched but with the way prices will be increasing is it really...

Re:Do it ourselves

[CompMD]

Already done where I live. City of 75,000 people, plus a university with 30,000 students. 600 mesh node radios across the city. They are growing by the day and the local cable company isn't exactly thrilled.

No

[rm999]

Because the internet is currently neutral (at least by most ISPs). I won't pay more for something I already get - I'm not an idiot.

Another example of a businessman using internet buzzwords to make a quick buck.

Re:No

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

And the parent post is another example of a /.er painting the exploration of new markets, and the creation of competition, as a souless money-grabbing scheme.

Re:No

[rm999]

How about instead of trolling you actually respond to what I said? If the internet is currently neutral (I am pretty sure it is), why should people pay extra for the level of service they currently get? And besides, how can a service provider control the neutrality of the entire internet?

Re:No

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

How about instead of trolling you actually respond to what I said?

I'm not trolling. I honestly believe that /. as a whole is extremely biased against businesses. If no-one provides a neutral net connection, it means market stagnation, with all the companies far too greedy to listen to the needs of the consumer. If someone goes out on a limb to offer a neutral net connection, pushing net-neutrality into the market place where it can compete and potentially prove itself, the companies are making a quick buck and are (again) being greedy. Personally, I'd rather see a company try something different and fail, rather than not try at all.

If the internet is currently neutral (I am pretty sure it is), why should people pay extra for the level of service they currently get?

This is completely separate from my original point, but you demanded my opinion, so I might as well give it. Most ISPs are not neutral. Most seem to shape Bittorent traffic, so your argument is fallacious from the outset. But essentially what you're paying for is the guarantee that it will not shape or prioritise any traffic (at least without warning). Whether it's worth the extra expense is a matter for the free market to decide, but it it's at least good that it can decide.

Re:No

[bateleur]

but it it's at least good that it can decide.

Or should that perhaps be: "it would be good if it could decide".

Individual purchasing decisions in a free market are a great way to arrange transactions affecting individuals. What bothers me about net neutrality is that some decisions about network architecture may be made on a "typical consumer" basis. If the typical consumer turns out not to care about (or even not to understand) net neutrality then the option for an individual to choose net neutrality could disappear (or effectively disappear due to costing orders of magnitude too much).

This is the kind of situation where it seems to me that governments and/or other non-commercial bodies have a role to play. Internet connectivity is (was?) a kind of communications standard. Screwing around with that traffic (whether by shaping, filtering or whatever) undermines that standard. And in many cases (at least theoretical if not yet practical) the company responsible is effectively running a monopoly from the perspective of individual consumers, so there is a valid case for government involvement to protect the consumers involved.

If that happened I think it might even create business opportunities. Then instead of stealthily crippling everyone's internet, companies could openly offer limited internet packages sold based on features other than bandwidth. For example, I'd love to have $10 off my monthly bill in exchange for a formal "no torrents" restriction, since I don't ever use them.

Re:No

[Igmuth]

Why would the ISP charge you $10 less for not using torrents, when they could add the restriction, while keeping your price the same. The they could (and likely would) charge $10 more for the people who want to use them.

That being said, both of those concepts are actually a step closer to what I would like to see as a likely outcome of net neutrality: charge people for what they use. If i download 1 TB, charge me for 1TB. If I only download 50MB, charge me for that. If I want to request the highest QOS priority for all of my packets (VOIP) then charge more then if I only demand a low QOS priority (torrents).

Re:No

[rm999]

"This is completely separate from my original point,"

But that is exactly what the post you responded to was about. Reread what I originally said. And most ISPs do NOT shape bittorrent traffic - while it may be an increasing trend, currently a lot of big ISPs (like my AT&T service) don't shape BT.

Uh

[omgamibig]

Isn't the whole point of net neutrality that you don't have to pay extra for it?

Sure, and here's your free lunch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but we all pay for Internet access. Some pay more, some pay less, but we all pay.

If we didn't, there would be no Internet. It's simple math -- even my little home network doesn't run unless I plug the switch in, thus using electricity and adding to my electric bill.

We aren't even against paying more. I mean, nobody wants to -- classic NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) reflex -- but realistically, someone has to pay, and ultimately, we're better off if it's us.

What we are against is all the bullshit that people can do in a non-neutral network. It does revolve around money, but it has much more serious implications than a heftier Internet bill. It actually seriously threatens freedom of speech.

There is a much longer discussion to be had here, but I'd rather not do it as AC, and I don't trust this (borrowed) computer any more than I have to.

Not bad compared to DSL, either.

[Mr2001]

I just canceled my DSL from Qwest, which was over $50/mo for "up to 7 Mbps" (actually about 5.5 Mbps). Now I have 6 Mbps service from Comcast, which is $20/mo for six months and then about $45/mo, and in practice it's a bit faster than 6 Mbps, thanks to "PowerBoost".

Wait a second ...

[Ihlosi]

... isn't "paying for net neutrality" pretty much the same as "paying for a better service in a non-neutral net" ?

And, still, how are they guaranteeing that the other networks my data travels through are also treating it neutrally ? They can't ? Oh well ...

Depends on who's paying

[Asmor]

The opponents of net neutrality are all about getting the content providers to pay, not the subscribers. Basically, Verizon et. al. are getting paid by the customer to provide a service: bandwidth. However, greedy bitch it is, Verizon wants to get paid by Google and other content providers for allowing them to provide content to their customers. See the issue here?

To put it another way, let's say that I open an account with FedEx so that anyone can send me packages, and the shipping price will be billed to my account. However, FedEx sees me getting lots of packages from the Swiss Colony, and even though I'm already paying for the shipping, FedEx doesn't think its fair for the Swiss Colony to send me so much stuff without them getting yet another cut, so they threaten Swiss Colony to delay my delicious, delicious beef logs a couple weeks, "to ease congestion."

Re:Depends on who's paying

[volkris]

You talk like there's something wrong with that. There isn't.

FedEx, in your simplistic analogy, is having trouble. The congestion is real, and it's hurting service. In fact, you've yourself have complained about the delays. So what's the company going to do? How's it going to afford to improve service?

Well, it could raise the flat rate it's charging you for unlimited mail reception... but it knows that you're already annoyed at having to pay that much. Plus, Swiss Colony could pack their logs in smaller boxes and combine orders, and it would help the congestion, but why should it? It pays nothing either way, so it has little reason to cooperate with the shipper. Furthermore, your neighbor would be annoyed at having HIS flat rate go up just so you can get your beef logs faster.

The obvious answer is to ask the sender to pay some of the cost as well. It makes perfect sense.

And, taadaa! that's how FedEx works currently.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[enrevanche]

I think that's "to ease indigestion"

Re:Depends on who's paying

[dkf]

In the current ISP model, both customers and content providers already pay. In effect, both pay for connection to the backbone. (Yes, Google pay for their bandwidth.) But some ISPs think that they should get paid from both sides despite not being the backbone. That's wrong: they should ask their customers for the money instead. That the customers might instead say "I'll go elsewhere and get worse service for less cash!" is just tough. But that's the essence of a free market.

The real problem is that the market in the USA isn't nearly free enough.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[aaronl]

What? You either pay to ship a package with FedEx, or you pay for someone else to ship you a package with FedEx. At no time do both sides pay to ship a package.

If FedEx needs more capacity to keep up with their shipping business, then they buy more capacity. In the short term, there might be delays, and this would cost them money in revenue, or they would realistically pay overtime instead. It may need to increase prices to pay for this upgrade, but probably won't, since that might lose them customers to UPS. Instead, it will probably make a capital improvement and write off the costs on its taxes, and then have more capacity all the time.

The obvious issue is that in your scenario, the guy with the unlimited reception free for shippers either cancels his FedEx and calls UPS, or files a lawsuit for breach of contract. Free reception would mean the shipper isn't charged, and you just decided to do so. You don't need more capacity, but you just lost a lot of revenue, and you don't get to write off your upgrade. Oops, that was probably a bad business decision, since there are probably a lot of other people doing similar things, and you'll need to upgrade in the future anyway.

Dell, and I'm pretty sure Dell is a big shipper and receiver, does RMA all the time with receiver-pays shipping. You don't pay to ship to them, but they certainly receive *a lot* of packages, sometimes from the same place. The same is true for *every other company* that does this sort of thing. Receiver pays means shipper doesn't pay.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[Asmor]

Excellent point, I completely forgot to add that the content providers pay for bandwidth as well, and usually more strictly than consumers, to boot; I know my crappy vanity website has an actual bandwidth meter that I never even get close to, but AFAIK no US ISP has official bandwidth limits (de facto under the table limits, of course, are another story entirely...).

Interestingly, a friend of mine in New Zealand often complains to me about how he's close to hitting his monthly bandwidth cap, after which he still has a connection but it's severely degraded (kind of like going from broadband levels to dial up levels).

Re:Depends on who's paying

[volkris]

Where to begin...

At no time do both sides pay to ship a package.

Right... so? I'm not aware that FedEx offers a "pay for people to ship anything to you for free" plan, which is required for the analogy to work. So while we're talking about improving on an imaginary situation, what does it matter that the improvement is imaginary as well?

It brings up another nonsensical piece of the NN crowd's argument: paying twice. Geez, they hammer that phrase into the ground and yet it's completely worthless. Not only is it not the case (the parties are paying for different parts of a transaction), but it's worthless anyway. What about splitting the costs among different beneficiaries makes it wrong?

Might as well point out that under network neutrality ideas the costs will be split among ALL internet users. Paying twice? Try paying millions of times.

If FedEx needs more capacity to keep up with their shipping business, then they buy more capacity.

Yes, right, exactly as I said.

It may need to increase prices to pay for this upgrade, but probably won't, since that might lose them customers to UPS.

That's not how money works.

Instead, it will probably make a capital improvement and write off the costs on its taxes

That's not how taxes work.

Seriously, once you figure out how the world works maybe you're realize how dumb this whole network neutrality argument is. Then you'll stop being a stooge for certain media companies, and you'll stop begging for higher internet bills.

Most importantly, of course, you'll stop begging to increase MY internet bills.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[Anonymous Coward]

The opponents of net neutrality are all about getting the content providers to pay, not the subscribers.

I think the smart thing for the content providers to do in this case is to pass the costs directly back to the subscribers. The reason the networks feel they can squeeze content providers for more money is that most of their subscribers won't complain because they never see the bill. But the subscribers still pay for it indirectly by viewing more advertisements, paying more for products and services, and having less choice in content (since smaller content providers will be forced out of the market).

So a simple solution for content providers is to pass the "enhanced network service" bill right back to the subscribers. Imagine going to YouTube and seeing the following message:

"We have detected that your service provider uses networks owned by ___, which offers suboptimal network performance for YouTube unless a fee is paid. Click here to pay the fee."

This approach lets consumers know that something is going on, and maybe they'll complain or switch to a better ISP. Of course, this approach will only promote neutrality if there is some choice in networks...

Re:Depends on who's paying

[aaronl]

No, there isn't really the equivalent of 1-800 service for packages. There is receiver pays, though, and that works fairly close, though it does have to be more intentional. There isn't any penalty for volume, either. Also, my point was that FedEx would rather take a loss on the infrastructure upgrade, and write that loss off, rather than raise rates to cover the one-time capital expenditure, but lose customers from price hike.

And paying twice is *exactly* what they are trying to pull.

As a residential customer, you pay the ISP for an "unlimited" line. They assume you aren't going to saturate the link, so they overbook and figure they'll make up costs on high numbers of low volume customers. If the average customer is uploading more data, then the ISP will get charged more by the backbone provider, and the rates will have to go up to compensate. Most likely, they will force those particular subscribers onto a more expensive plan. The ISP is charged by the backbone provider for the link, plus upstream usage.

You charge the serious customers, mostly businesses and content providers, for data use, generally upstream capacity. Or they charge for a burstable line, and you get metered data use. Either way, the data transfer *INTO* the backbone is paid for. Transfer around on the backbone is covered through peering arrangements.

So the data going onto the backbones is being paid for by the originating ISP, which is charging the content producers as appropriate. The data traversing the backbones are not being charged for. The data coming off the backbone is being paid by the customer to the ISP to cover link costs.

If you charge the content creator to *send* the data, and then the content creator to have a customer *receive* the data, and then the customer to *receive* the data, you are charging twice. This is EXACTLY what they are trying to do.

More to the point, if I place a phone call to a land line, I pay for the time, and the receiver of my call does not. If I place the call to a mobile user, I pay for the airtime, and they pay for the airtime, but I pay for the call. The mobile phone scenario is what we use for Internet, too. We both pay to be online, and the originator of the data pays to send. They want to *change* this so that we both pay to be online, and they pay to send the data, and I pay to receive the data. This isn't how *ANYTHING ELSE* works, and for good reason.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[cdrguru]

Problem is, the ISPs are convinced they have to maintain low-low-low prices for the consumers or they will just be on dial-up. I know a large number of people that is true for. The "mission" is to get everyone off of dial-up and on to some other service. After dial-up is gone (because nobody uses it anymore) they can then raise the prices and nobody will have a choice. It is also once they get you hooked, they know they have you.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[cdrguru]

I agree with you 100% ... except I think the bills are going up no matter what.

Scenario #1: ISP isn't able to shift costs away from consumers and the price of Internet service generally goes up.

Scenario #2: ISP is able to shift costs away from consumers, keeping their loss-leader priced low to build market share. Unfortunately, the shifted costs come right back to the consumer as higher prices for whatever. And when Google charges more for ads, don't you think the retailers are going to charge more for their stuff?

We have been living in a debt-financed dream for a while now and it is finally beginning to sink in that while you can put off paying for a while eventually someone has to pay.

Re:Depends on who's paying

[volkris]

Wow... your ignorance and delusion is just... wow.

You typed so much, and wound up with nothing but a huge mess of faulty logic, misunderstanding of the world, and parroting of corporate claims.

And yet, I know this is the level of most people who support network neutrality.

Internet in Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys I feel for you. I live in sweden about 30 min from the city in a semi country side area and I have a fiber connection. I can get 100MB up and down for under 50 Dollars but i only have 10MB UP and Down and i pay around 30 Dollars.

Net Neutrality has not been an issue I dont think but I may have to do some tests or some research.

Is this a huge problem over there? Does it affect everybody?

Anyway I've been reading a bunch of articles on slashdot about this subject and it seems like a tough situation. And i guess if alot of people supported this company and the are real perhaps they can make some sort of difference. I suppose the media and awareness created by this company would be the biggest contributer to the fight.

Re:Internet in Sweden

[XavidX]

Do you think other people in the world accessing sites in the USA are also affected by this "Content Filtering" that these bastards do?

Re:Internet in Sweden

[nekozid]

It's the ISPs doing the packet shaping not the backbone owners, they rent the same resource as your ISP but that's for them to do as they please with.
They can't touch stuff they don't own but local loops etc. are fair game.

Err, no

[Moraelin]

Err, no, because it's not the same guys.

It's sorta like this. Let's say there are two pubs in your neighbourhood:

1. The Broken Bell, cheap, but treats their beer like it's a potted plant. They water it generously. And I wouldn't touch their stronger drinks if you value your eyesight. At any rate, what you actually get in that glass isn't what they advertised, by far, and not the quantity they advertised either.

2. The Belching Hydra, doesn't do any of that crap, but, of course, then their prices are higher. Or rather, their prices are the natural ones, since they can't cost prices by doing the bad stuff.

I can't see how you could say that the latter is doing the equivalent of taking a bribe.

Mind you, in an ideal RL, or even in the less ideal Europe down here, we'd just pass some government regulation and send the cops or the consumer rights agencies after the crooked barkeep. On Slashdot and with it's nerdy population fond of utopian extremes and no shades of grey in between, someone (or a lot of someones) will scream, "noooo! Governments are evil! If you let the government do anything, there's no stopping until you have a verbatim copy of the USSR or Nazi Germany! The free unregulated market can solve anything by itself!" Never mind that it's what created this fuckup in the first place, and the whole push against net neutrality is asking the government to remove the regulations and let them be as crooked as they want to.

But in the meantime or if that's not an option, well, it's up to you to decide whether you want to support the former and save a few bucks, or the latter and pay more for the privilege. But saying the latter is like extortion just isn't right.

Re:Err, no

[Baba Ram Dass]

Never mind that it's what created this fuckup in the first place, and the whole push against net neutrality is asking the government to remove the regulations and let them be as crooked as they want to. Wrong. The local government not going after the false-advertising bar for fraud caused the problem. A free market only exists when there are laws against crooked behavior like fraud and theft.

Re:Err, no

[Moraelin]

The local government not going after the false-advertising bar for fraud caused the problem.

Pretty much, yes. And now they're lobbying the federal government to remove those laws and rules altogether.

A free market only exists when there are laws against crooked behavior like fraud and theft.

Very much so, no arguments there. Try to explain that to _some_ of the slashdotters, though ;)

What's net neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we should stop using the term specifically and dubiously introduced by greedy and 'entitled' driven telecoms monopolists in the US to confuse the issue.

It's for telecom companies to come up with plans that attract paying consumers in a free market, not legislate about net neutrality and other spurious and self created issues to protect their effective monopolies in a broken US system.

Sure there is a cost of business and infrastructure but isn't that why I am paying my telecom provider to connect me online to Google and why Google is paying to have me connect to their website. Nobody is out to get a free lunch here, we are all paying customers and we pay a significant amount for our monthly plans.

If that's not enough for ISPs to make a profit they have to increase rates and justify that to their consumers in the free market, without a cartel or monopolists, where competitors can see an opportunity if consumers are being overcharged and step in to deliver more value for money. Of course this presumes regulation and free market is working which it clearly isn't in the US.

Just like the US financial industry has been overly creative with 'risk' and 'debt' so is the telecom industry with net neutrality and this is not good for consumers and the US as bastion of free markets should step in and punish monopolists out for a free ride or cease to call itself as such. This is not credible, nobody else is talking about this apart from the US, are ISP's outside the US not making money? Do you really think for all these years since the internet we have a bunch of bumbling and charity driven ISP's out to deliver unprofitable services without a business plan? But now thanks to US greed more of them are going to start talking about this, and thats bad for everybody.

Re:What's net neutrality?

[kindbud]

Of course this presumes regulation and free market is working which it clearly isn't in the US.

I guess you didn't get the memo. "Free market" means no government regulation of business whatsoever.

Needless to say, your pronouncements are rather confused as a result.

Re:What's net neutrality?

[cdrguru]

You don't really think the amount you are paying your ISP is anything close to what the service is really costing them to provide, do you? Look at the difference between your "home" DSL plan and a "business" DSL plan. Why are the businesses paying $80 a month and the home user is paying $14.95? It isn't because the business is getting anything additional for that price.

It is because large ISPs in the US are still building market share and holding prices to absurdly low levels to convince everyone they have to be connected to the Internet. Right now, a significant number of people want dial-up and only dial-up because it costs them next to nothing for it. Would they take something 10-20 times faster if it was free? Sure. Would they be interested at $80-100 a month? No way. So you see the teaser offers that keep getting extended in large metro areas for less than $30 a month.

Now somebody is noticing they are going to have to start saying they are losing money and either have to raise prices or get the money to cover operations somewhere else. Yes, you could say it is their own fault for getting into "building market share" instead of building something that pays for itself. But this is where we are now.

Will this be anything like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this be anything like "unlimited usage", except, well, it isn't really unlimited? Net neutrality up to the point of whatever provider this ISP is using to connect to the backbone?

To answer the question, no, there's no chance in hell that I'd pay $60 for 7Mbps DSL. I pay the equivalent of US$50 for 100Mbps fiber (up and down) here in Tokyo. I've measured 65Mbps throughput, and it really is unlimited. I know the infrastructure is more distributed in most parts of the U.S. than it is in Tokyo, but that still doesn't justify a higher cost for less than 1/10 the speed, and a promise that is questionable at best.

We shouldn't have to pay that for this

[Jugalator]

Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?

No, because I get "network neutrality" for $49 / month at 100 Mbps here. :-p
(advertised FOIS bandwidth; in reality and across the Atlantic more like 20-25 Mbps max)

Ridiculous pricing. They need to get going at building FOIS networks since these are when in place far more cost efficient than those DSL lines.

Re:We shouldn't have to pay that for this

[Opportunist]

Where do I have to move? I pay 60 bucks a month for a measly 1mbit (download. Upload is 256k, on a good day).

That's not net neutrality

[danaris]

It's worse than that, ShaunC.

See, even if company V (rolling their eyes and sighing in exasperation) decides to be nice and let company C keep its promises, company A over there, though whose pipes 75% of the traffic from companies V & C must flow, is still trying to make a few extra (million) bucks screwing everybody else in the world, and they're throttling YouTube, but prioritizing MySpace because they paid up.

Dan Aris

Five years ago...

[Elemenope]

I'd have agreed with you. Now? I think you underestimate just how much people have realized that Internet access is important to their lives, even if it isn't a technical 'necessity' in most cases. It's much like cell phones: they used to be regarded as merely a convenience (and an ostentatious one at that) but now you are the weirdo on the block if you don't have one, a crazed luddite. I think the same is basically true now about e-mail and Google access.

Re:Five years ago...

[Znork]

"It's much like cell phones"

Cell phones? Cell phones you can still easily do without.

A more valid comparison would be to say it's much like books. Or libraries. Or an education. Saying that internet access isnt important is like saying knowing anything isnt important.

Cell phones are still just mostly a convenient way of communicating when you happen to be away from the internet (altho that may change in the coming merger between cellphone and computer/network tech).

The internet, on the other hand, is a paradigm shift in the dissemination and accessibility of human knowledge, and far, far more important.

Re:Five years ago...

[Elemenope]

You misunderstand. I'm not saying that cell phones *are* important or necessary. I'm saying that, as opposed to five years ago, the general sentiment of the public has come to regard them as important and perhaps necessary. There are in fact many occupations now where you would not maintain your employment if you were not accessible by phone or e-mail; it is a social and employment expectation of access. That was what the original post was about: the supposed inability of the general public to identify internet access as something important enough to protect and guarantee, which I think as I indicated their devaluation is overestimated.

Re:Five years ago...

[lucas teh geek]

alright then, perhaps it is just the luddites in power here in australia that give me that impression

Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[OneMHz]

Isn't the point of "Net Neutrality" that people DON'T have to pay extra to guarantee that your bandwidth isn't throttled?

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[Qzukk]

No, the point is that what you pay for is what you get, rather than you paying for a service, and whether you get that service or not depends on whether amazon, itms, youtube, et al pony up "their share" on top of what they're already paying for their connection.

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[onemorechip]

So with this new approach, I pay so that Amazon doesn't have to. Sounds like the burden imposed by non-neutrality is just being shifted from content providers to end users.

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[Qzukk]

I pay so that Amazon doesn't have to

Sure, if you want to live in your own little fantasy world, they don't have to pay a cent.

When you join us back in the real world, you'll find that they have been paying. They're paying a pretty penny for their OC-12s and their redundant connections and so on. They'll still be paying for the bandwidth that they use, even under this "new" approach.

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[onemorechip]

Of course they pay for the data lines, but that has nothing to do with net neutrality, and those aren't the fees I am referring to. Nice job of completely missing the point.

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[Qzukk]

those aren't the fees I am referring to. Nice job of completely missing the point.

If the fees Amazon pays for the lines to transfer their data are not the fees you're referring to, you'll have to first make your point by explaining what fees you're talking about before accusing me of missing whatever point you had.

Re:Isn't this kind of an oxymoron?

[onemorechip]

Read up: Net Neutrality. Bandwidth != access. Non-neutrality can take many forms but it usually means a scenario where some form of discriminatory pricing for access is in effect. In the context of this discussion, it refers to ISPs taking money from content providers for access to end users (not for bandwidth, which they are already buying), vs. those end users paying extra to their ISPs in order to be excluded from the harmful effects (i.e., "protection money").

$60 for 7Mb/sec?

[Lookin4Trouble]

Where do I sign up for this deal??? Oh, damn, not in Virginia.

Sucks living in the east-coast version of Silicon Valley and only having dialup.

Re:$60 for 7Mb/sec?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Loudoun county and have an amazing FIOS connection that's a MUCH better deal than $60/7mb. Where the hell do you live in 'Northern Virginia' (Fairfax County, small parts of Loudoun, Arlington, nothern PW county) that only can receive dial-up, or are you just trolling? Being 20 minutes away from West Virginia doesn't really count either. As far as I know the "east coast version of Silicon Valley" is the areas I stated above. Ashburn, Reston, Fairfax, Vienna, Tysons Corner, etc.

Presumably they signed a contract....

[Joce640k]

Presumably they signed a contract which mentions that sort of thing.

Re:Presumably they signed a contract....

[The One and Only]

That's a lot to presume, but in the interest of assuming good faith, perhaps we should do that in the absence of evidence.

Re:Beer

[McGiraf]

3. Both of them are supplied by Budweiser, how do you distinguish between water diluted with water, and undiluted water?

Wait for the boogeyman

[mattr]

Having started an ISP with famous investors too dumb to put their money where their mouth is I can tell you why I worry about these guys. Certainly, if you are on Comcast and can move to them, go for it. The problem is, you know that $200 Billion people are talking about? The 200 gigabucks that went up in smoke? Look this isn't Cheech and Chong. Money doesn't fly away. What if the big boys actually did invest in fiber and equipment, but they just don't want to roll it out unless they are dragged out and screaming? That's a lot of money. The big boys are waiting to see how far they can push it, and when something starts to look interesting, if they can they will smash it. Welcome to the ISP business.

Now if these guys are going to try and tie in last mile people with great service and maybe value added (how about 2 free locally served movies a month, etc.) then they might have a future. Or if they could spam access to people wirelessly with some amazingly cheap technology, maybe. Maybe they could also have a chance if they are spinning off the hardware to someone else and they just have to sell "virtual" service. And maybe if they build a nationwide grassroots league (a federated little league if you will) peering with similar companies, they could even offer higher speeds and lower latency possibly. Or maybe if they could get some nice deals with municipalities or academia. Well maybe. I'd go with them if I was unhappy with my U.S. provider, though I'm not in the U.S. now, but long term? Their website says how it will be good for the long term. Personally, I've seen costs drop every 3 months, if it makes sense in the short term and you are getting really hassled with your ISP fine. But I think the only way to get good service is to legislate it. There are too many maybes, and too many big boys with big bank accounts who are just playing a cynical game until you show up on their radar.

I'd actually save money

[Xzarakizraiia]

I'd save about $20 on the 7Mbps line, if they didn't charge me for a telephone line at the same time. I pay over $80 a month for 7Mbps because our DSL provider (Embarq) requires you to get a basic phone line as well. I don't even have a phone hooked up to it. I don't know if this is a technological restriction of DSL or just them trying to gouge as much money from me as possible, but either way I don't like it and have no say in the matter, as they're the only high-speed provider that has lines in the building. I've got two roommates, and we're all college students. I think we could afford Copowi, and that says a lot about their pricing scheme to me.

Re:I'd actually save money

[dwye]

> don't know if this is a technological restriction of DSL

It is. They cannot block phone access via DSL, even if you ARE pinky-swearing not to use it, any more than a water company could sell deionized water and not let you drink it (deionized water is the really pure stuff used in medical and scientific testing, purer than merely distilled or double distilled). What they COULD do is sell you a cheap phone line (in terms of monthly fee for connection) with very high per-minute charges so that you would not be tempted to use it, but that would probably cause complaints from the majority of their customers, who still put phones on phone lines.

Dismal Science's answer..

[phunctor]

Until the consumer-perceived value of bulky traffic is balanced (by the consumer) against the cost of receiving it there can be no market-driven innovation, and the vendors will continue to harvest the herd scientifically.

In places like Korea where government intervention subsidizes urbanites' Gbps with rice farmer's won, the pain of this may be diffused and invisible. For a while.

On the service provider's side of the coin, any pricing solution will be gamed. If your pricing doesn't have a viable relationship to the cost of providing the service this gaming will put you at a competitive disadvantage.

After a while this will converge to some combination of account fee, connection fee + usage charges, same as it ever was. Only bundles with usage caps can be free of usage charges, which in that case will be cross subsidized from the account & connection fees.

Somebody's got to pay for the actual costs. The globally optimal payer is... you.

--
phunctor

Re:Dismal Science's answer..

[cdrguru]

Well, yes and no. The optimum solution from a marketing perspective is to push as much of the cost to a cost-insensitive market as possible while keeping the cost-sensitive players from seeing it. This is clearly how to pass a "price increase" without the consumer understanding that it is a price increase - they aren't seeing it directly.

Re:Dismal Science's answer..

[phunctor]

Call me a crazy optimist but I have doubts about a business model based on anesthetizing your customer base. What happens when they _do_ notice they're being screwed? Oh. More Brittany cooters. Never mind, I get it now.

--
phunctor

Net Neutrality for a fee? What a deal!

[adamchou]

I'm giving away free IPODs........... for a fee

Well, but if they offered more . . .

[kildurin]

Like anonymity, no record retention, agreement not to tap or packet inspect ever? At least a guarantee to work with the EFF before ever working with the government. Why can't it be the whole package? I might see it then.

Re:Well, but if they offered more . . .

[dwye]

> Like anonymity, no record retention, agreement not to tap
> or packet inspect ever?

Illegal. If you want them to be able to do this, lobby Congress. I am sure that organized crime will give you support for your position (which is another reason why it will never happen, btw :-). Until then, accept that any time someone in the business wants to look at your stuff, they can, whether it is because of a court order, being cooperative with law enforcement agencies, or a sysadmin wanting to monitor your unencrypted traffic to feed his delusions of godhood. They might be punished afterwards, but there is the problem of the bell that cannot be unrung.

If you want to be secure from any monitoring, there are ways, but you probably want to live a more normal life.

Not Neutrality

[njfuzzy]

This is not Net Neutrality. This is what Net Neutrality is trying to avoid-- A tiered Internet, where the people who pay more get unfettered access.

Rather like the Mafia..

[Rexdude]

I understand that the ISP has no control over the infrastructure and so on..but why are we suddenly having to pay for this? The whole net neutrality issue sounds like telcos wanting to grab a piece of the pie. Rather like the mafia. You don't pay for any additional value or better service, you're ending up having to pay MORE to continue to get the same service as before. Extortion. In short, pay the local mafia goons so that they don't come break your legs. When was net neutrality even something to be questioned, say 4-5 years ago?

Um... Peering?

[camperdave]

One problem with your analysis: You are not taking peering into account. The tier one providers, like sprint, verizon, British Telecom, etc, are networked together in a mesh. Same thing for the tier two providers. Any ISP worth its salt has connections to multiple peers and upstream providers. If someone in the mesh starts throttling traffic, the excess will just take another route.

Re:Um... Peering?

[TooMuchToDo]

That's a big no-no, because of these things called peering agreements. You have to meet fairly strict ratios to have an ongoing peering relationship (traffic being passed between two networks should normally be fairly equal in both directions). You just can't dump however much traffic you want on any one of your peers.

For the skinny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

Re:Um... Peering?

[Llarian]

No, it will not. Peering is based on BGP, which doesn't do any sort of dynamic load balancing. Its effectivly a link-state protocol, as long as the peer with the best path (and other metrics that're not related to the current performance of the link) is still up, the traffic will prefer that peer, regardless of throughput.

However, peering agreements typically have clauses that prevent any sort of traffic shaping.

Wait.. this isn't neutrality, is it?

[webrunner]

I thought the whole issue with net neutrality was being charged more for premium access based on content.

Even if it's through different companies, you're still paying more for equal access to that content through this scheme. "pay more for Net Neutrality" is an oxymoron!

That's what I thought I was paying for

[Anonymous Coward]

It was my understanding that when I paid my ISP I was paying for them to deliver what I asked for over the Internet regardless of what other networks they had to get it from. As long as they were carrying youtube traffic because I requested it then it's my traffic that I dun already paid for.

BestBuy

[Anonymous Coward]

The old Speakeasy is dead. Speakeasy got bought up by Best Buy recently. While the name and the support are still around, you can figure out how long it will be before Best Buy management screws it up. I give it a year at most.

In the meantime, I'm going over to Sonic.net.

seems kinda similar to here

[compro01]

well, here (saskatchewan), 256Kb is $23, 1.5Mb is $35, and 7Mb (currently being rolled to 10Mb) is $70 and no caps or throttling as far as me or anyone else i know has been able to discover.

regulation = good, competition = good, regulation+competition = f****** awesome for the consumer.

Doesn't seem that simple, really.

[Loosifur]

Without owning the actual lines himself, all he can do is guarantee that Copowi will not itself grant more bandwidth to certain customers, right? As I understand it, Copowi buys a certain amount of bandwidth from Verizon, say, and then guarantees that none of that bandwidth will be "favoritized", for lack of a better term, downstream. That's a fine idea, but for real net neutrality he'd have to buy all of the bandwidth available (assuming of course that he could), or run his own lines (same assumption). Neither are possible, let alone cost effective. So running with this, let's say that up until it hits Copowi, MSNBC gets favorable bandwidth allocation over, say, the YMCA. What's Copowi gonna do, throttle back access to MSNBC to "level the playing field"? Plus, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole issue, but if MSNBC pays more for bandwidth, shouldn't they get it? I mean, that's the whole free market deal, no? And how would bandwidth be adjusted for traffic? I assume more people visit the MSNBC site per hour than, say, IHOP's. Shouldn't MSNBC have more bandwidth to work with?

Surely

[ajs318]

Surely if you have to pay extra for it then it's by definition not "net neutrality" after all? Seems to me that if people have to pay extra for it, you're creating the same kind of two-tier internet that net neutrality proponents despise!

Still, a different kind of two-tier structure is exactly what I'm planning to offer sometime in the near future. For a fee, customers will receive access to a proxy server which blocks all known advertising servers (and quite likely, known malware servers as well). If people are prepared -- as evidenced by the popularity of Sky Plus -- to pay good money to be free of advertisements, I don't see why I shouldn't be getting a piece of the action.

St. Louis

[jrwr00]

I live near St. Louis Missouri (USA) and Ive got a 3.0mpbs/256kps Cable Line, From Charter. it seems to do just fine, it does not like a lot of connections like BT does, but only thing i can tell after reading there TOS, you would have to use your connection 24/7 maxed out, to have it disabled for the rest of the month (15TB) so far only thing I've noticed is it like closer servers then others, but around here the cable can suck at times, we share a line pretty much so, if my naber is download something and i am, we get about 1mpbs, he doesn't do much online anyway,

Paying either way it seems

[Jtheletter]

So let me get this straight, if we go with a major telco who throttles bandwidth to non-extorted - er, I mean non-partnered - sites then we have to pay them extra to really use all of our bandwidth. OR we can go with a company such as this one and... pay extra to use all of our bandwidth.

This really hasn't gotten us very far. I'm glad that a company is doing this, it's much needed, and actually gives us a chance to vote with our wallets. But until someone who controls the lines offers a similar competitive plan I think we're going to be stuck with a lot of '6 of one, half dozen of the other' choices.

Yes, but No.

[TemporalBeing]

Yes - I would be; however, that would only encourage them to further raise the rates to do so, and break down the "Net Neutrality" fight. However, there is still the dilemma of how to do it and really win.

And a good thing, too.

[Kadin2048]

This is common in the U.S. as well. In fact, except for places that have well and septic systems (which effectively are just "shitting in your backyard," only in a sanitary way), I think most places in the U.S. have metered service.

And it's a good thing, too. I've heard stories from places where service isn't metered -- it's just a flat rate paid by everyone in town -- and it's a terrible idea. It doesn't give the water company any incentive to fix leaks (because they just take the total cost of all the water that leaves their facilities and divide it by the number of people in town, while a metered system ensures that they only get paid for water delivered to the customer's premises, and water lost from the mains before it hits a meter is a measurable loss), and it encourages people to out-consume each other in order to get the most bang for their buck.

Metering sewer based on water consumption is a kludge, but given that metering the actual amount of waste put down the sewer pipe is difficult to do, it's not a bad idea. The assumption is basically 'whatever water you're using, most of it ends up going down the sewer,' so they charge you a per-1000-gallon rate for water supply and for the disposal of it later, as sewage. In my area (N VA), if you use a lot of water that doesn't end up in the sewer (for lawn watering or other irrigation), you can work with the water company and get a separate meter put on your outdoor tap, so that you don't get charged for its disposal. (Only worthwhile if it's a significant amount of water, though.)

Silcon.com

[ClioCJS]

I use Silcon. I pay about $60/mo for 3M down, 768K up. I use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time. Nothing gets slowed down. I've been doing this well over a year. I have multiple static IP addresses and don't have to deal with per-computer PPPOE bullshit like with Earthlink (worst ISP EVER, except for SpeakEasy who are total fucking liars). So anyway, go with a mom-and-pop. They work. Check their availability with http://www.broadbandreports.com.

I wouldn't, no.

[seebs]

Not really. If filtering becomes odious elsewhere, yes. Otherwise, no. Right now, I don't see much point.

How is this paying more?

[flibbidyfloo]

I already pay $50/month to Comcast for slower speeds than 7Mbit, so these prices don't seem unreasonable to me regardless of nuetrality. If they could actually deliver, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

If electricity were sold like net neutrality...

[doug141]

...We'd all pay the same subscription price, regardless of how much we used. We'd all hog it to the point of rationing to prevent delivery system collapse.

The sensible solution to the information bandwith problem is the same as the solution we have in place for our fully utilized energy grid: make users pay more at times of full utilization. Run bittorrent at night only and you might stave off that day a bit.

so do you really get 1.5 or 7MBPS?

[josepha48]

or will it be like my earthlink account, where I get anywhere up to 1.5MBPS? Right now I am getting about 800k, which is less than the 1.5MBPS they advertise. So, will this be a guarantee or an upto?

Re:so do you really get 1.5 or 7MBPS?

[vonsneerderhooten]

All of these people complaining that they aren't getting the full advertised speed of their residential lines. Why is this so shocking? These lines do not guarantee any amount of bandwidth or even uptime. Am I the only one around here that knows that the only way to guarantee bandwidth availability is with an SLA of some sort?

And I don't wanna hear a word about the price of a t line with an SLA being too expensive. This is the US, and our broadband sucks. If you don't like it, STFU and GTFO.

Why bandwith is a reoccurring cost.

[Kadin2048]

I think what he means regarding bandwidth being a 'running cost,' is that a low-level consumer ISP has to buy their connectivity from somewhere.

Let me illustrate how it works. I'll use the example of an old dialup ISP, because it's simpler. It used to be, back in the mid-90s, that anybody who wanted to could become a local ISP. You'd go and get a bunch of phone lines, a bank of modems, and a T1 or fractional-T1. Customers would call in, connect to your modems, and then you'd push their packets out the T1 to your ISP, generally a regional carrier, who would take them to a higher-level ISP ... who would be big enough to engage in traffic peering with other major networks.

Basically, the money flows up in this scenario. Customers pay you (the rinky-dink local ISP), and you pay your regional ISP for the T1 line, and the regional ISP pays to connect to the higher-tier network. (The highest-tier networks, the Tier 1's, don't pay anybody -- they basically have gentlemen's agreements and pass traffic to each other as peers and equals; hence "peering." But there's not much peering below the Tier 1/2 level, since the traffic is too unidirectional.)

Now, the customers pay a basically flat rate per month ($20/mo or whatever) regardless of how much they use, within reason. But the ISPs usually aren't so lucky. When you buy a T1/T3/OC-x or other significant connection, you pay for the connection itself, and for a certain amount of bandwidth. In many cases (particularly on the faster ones), the amount of transfer that's included is less than 24/7 saturation -- in fact, you'd want it to be less than saturation, because 90% of the time you won't be saturating it. You want to have some burst capacity for the 6PM hour when everyone comes home from work and checks their email, but you don't want to pay for that much bandwidth all the time.

So the cost of your upstream bandwidth is variable, not fixed.* If your customers start using a lot of traffic, suddenly you as the ISP end up paying a lot more to your provider for bandwidth. That cuts directly into your profit margin.

Now ... moving up from dialup ISPs to a high-speed provider like Comcast, they have problems that are even more severe, because they oversell their networks even more severely than dialup ISPs do. While a dialup ISP can only ever have (modem speed)*(number of modems) as a maximum, a broadband ISP could conceivably have (connection speed)*(number of customers). If everyone on the network decided to pull down 6Mb/s, everything would grind to a halt -- they don't have the capacity to the upstream providers for that kind of bandwidth. And even if they did have the physical capacity, they couldn't afford it with each customer only paying $60 a month. (Transfer isn't exactly cheap.)

However, depending on how a broadband ISP like Comcast has their network set up, they could probably rig it so that packets that go from one Comcast customer to another are "free," in that they don't go through a higher-tier provider. This requires that Comcast have its own internal network connecting all the neighborhood nodes, instead of just wiring them all directly to upstream ISPs without interconnection. I'm not sure whether they do this or not. I have a suspicion that they might, because I've heard that they're not throttling Bittorrent connections from one Comcast user to another. This makes sense, if those packets cost Comcast less than one going from a Comcast user to a Speakeasy user.

ISPs hate P2P applications like Bittorrent because they're bandwidth hogs, but more specifically because they result in a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their Internet gateways, which means more bandwidth costs for them. If you could set up a P2P app that only peered with other nodes on the same subnet or IP address range, the ISP's might care about them a whole lot less (though it depends how they have th

Re:Why bandwith is a reoccurring cost.

[RobBebop]

Thank you for the explanation (and the link to the article explaining SneakerNet costs - it was a good read). It seems like I was mostly wrong about bandwidth cost at everything but the highest level, and that I was right about BitTorrent with the assumptions that the peer groups are (a) within the same subnetwork and (b) the subnetwork is not overloaded.

In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.

Re:Why bandwith is a reoccurring cost.

[Kadin2048]

In theory, I would imagine BT could fairly easily be designed to try to find intra-subnetwork sources to download from and then meter itself when peaks occur... though I wouldn't be so bold as to assume that those features would be implemented in most of the P2P clients.

I haven't really kept up in the world of P2P apps, but I think that there are a few, designed and used mostly on college campuses (which generally have very fast, unregulated intranets but very limited/expensive gateway capacity) that allow for subnetted file sharing. I don't know the name of any, but I've seen some people using one [1]. It basically looked like an idiotproof distributed file system. You put the files you want to share in a directory, and then you point your client program towards a known node (maybe it does autodiscovery somehow, I'm not sure). When you connect, you get a list of all available files from other nodes, and you can download away. Basically the result is that everyone's shared files get dumped into one pool, that everyone can browse through and grab stuff from. Except for the fact that it's illegal, it's pretty neat -- it's not quite distributed file storage (a la Freenet), but it is decentralized, and I suspect it can easily be made into a darknet.

For a lot of the content that people want from P2P networks (movies, music, software), this model works pretty well. Particularly, and not surprisingly, music: take 100 or 1000 people's MP3 collections and dump them together, and you've got a pretty decent music library. I'm not sure how well it would scale for other types of content, though. But from a networking standpoint it's a pretty simple architecture.

But you're right, there's no reason in theory why you couldn't program a P2P client to strongly prefer other nodes within the same subnet, or to ratelimit connections outside the subnet much more harshly than close nodes. (The algorithms that most P2P software use to select nodes should already take into account some measure of network distance, so it would just require some tweaking there.) If what Comcast is doing to Bittorrent becomes the norm, I think you'll see more movement in this direction.

[1] Searching through Wikipedia's list of P2P applications makes me think that I might have seen Retroshare, but I'm not 100% sure.

Yes, and no.

[BlueCollarCamel]

I'd be willing to pay more for guaranteed net neutrality, I just can't afford it with the minimum wage I'm making.

abbreviation

[sh3l1]

The abbreviation should be COmputer POWered Internet

we're already paying them

[DragonTHC]

These fucking greedy bastards.
All users of Cowpie internet should drop them.
I pay for internet access.
I pay to transmit packets and receive packets.
Their demands that I pay ransom to insure that all my packets don't end up missing or delayed is just plain illegal.
That's like the phone company charging you more for calls you place to businesses.

The simple proof that this is extortion?

They have to implement the system which discriminates against packets. It's not built-in.

These mafia-like companies know they're not losing any money.
Their networks have fixed costs.
1. the cost of the equipment
2. the cost of the cabling
3. the cost of electricity to run it.
4. the cost of humans to monitor and repair it.
Those costs are fixed.
The money they bring in from subscription fees covers this.

pay us this money or your itunes packets could end up sleeping with the fishes, capisce?

This is the opposite of net neutrality

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

Tiered pricing in order to escape differential access to internet services is NOT network neutrality. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Calling this neutral, is like a mafioso coming into your business, and offering to treat you 'neutrally' by letting you live like any other citizen, as long you pony up. Thank you Godfather, for being so fair!

Oxymoron

[Orig_Club_Soda]

Paying for better access is exactly what Net Neutrality IS NOT.

Re:Oxymoron

[The Master Control P]

If you had read so much as the summary, you'd know the "fees" are because the entrenched monopolies are charging them high prices which they're forced to pass on, not the protection money extortion other ISPs talk about

That's private choice, not net neutrality

[MSTCrow5429]

That's not net neutrality. That's a private business with private property deciding how to allocate its bandwidth, just like anyone else. It's not the government taking private property by eminent domain, and forcing the private businesses to allocate bandwidth based on an "equal" basis, which is what net neutrality would do.

A good start.

[k1e0x]

This is a really good sign, I hope they are successful even if they don't control the backbone, because if they are then it will show the other telco's that this is something people want.

We don't need or want government regulation of the internet EVER. Remember the Prius? It was created by popular demand and had nothing to do with any government law. The people wanted it and someone went out and created it.

So long as we can keep AT&T from buying the entire world, we will be able to prevent a need for net neutrality as their competition will always try to get a leg up on them.

Why would I?

[edunbar93]

$34 for 256K DSL, $50 for 1.5 Mbs [...] Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?

Why? I'm paying $30 a month for 1.5 Mbps on a connection that's net-neutral. Of course, I live in Canada, where broadband isn't stupidly slow for too much money in the first place. Of course, were I to move to someplace like Korea, Japan, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czecheslovakia, Serbia, Poland, or a whole host of near-third-world countries that I can't spell in Central Europe, I would be able to get a broadband connection that's both cheaper and many times faster than those here. So who am I to brag?

NOT NET NEUTRALITY

[Anonymous Coward]

A scheme were only certain people get net neutrality and esp if they have to pay extra for it is by **definition** not net neturality.

Also, unless your isp owns all the "wire" to every internet connected device it doesn't matter if your isp is neutral or not. Unless all ISP's, backbone operators, and connected devices are required by regulation to be net neutral there is no neutrality.

When your packets leave that 2bit regional network they will get bandwidth shaped.

Thanks AC..

[msimm]

I must have missed that but it's good to know.

Do telcos monitor voice comm for illegality?

[Catbeller]

FTA: "The Copowi terms of service (TOS) provide some flexibility in these situations; the company tells users that they may not "violate laws, infringe the rights of others, interfere with users of our network or other networks, or otherwise violate our Acceptable Use Policy set forth on our Internet Services web site."

Telephone companies aren't required to monitor phone conversations of its users for illegality. This is because they are common carriers, a legal designation that relieves them of that responsibility. I don't recall anyone, Dillinger, Capone, drug dealers of your choice, or bordellos that have ever had their phone service terminated because they used it in service of a crime. They only cut you off if you don't pay up on time.

Yet somehow, ISPs, which are common carriers, monitor us in a fashion that would stagger George Orwell (even he didn't envision EVERYONE being monitored 24/7 in his most dystopic dreams). And we accept being made to stand at attention and have our privates searched continuously... for movie and record companies? Who make a fraction of what the computer and ISP industry makes? How mobbed up are those companies that everyone in Congress dances to their call?

I'd get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd get it. I'm paying like $55 now for my cable.. admittedly it's like umm, 5mibts? Or something. But I don't use more than 1.5mbits. Even when I'm bittorrenting, my torrents will basically top out at 2mbits at best anyway (note, in my area I do not thing the cable infrastructure is oversubscribed -- it's just that the torrents won't have tons of high-speed seeds.) My parents pay like $30/month or a bit more for 256kbps DSL; Qwest has a pretty tight leash on telecoms here so prices are high. I'd get DSL to save some cash over the cable but my line length is nearly 20,000 feet and Qwest won't even try it.

          However, if I could get it, the DSL is in fact network neutral -- getting DSL via qwest, they shape, but avalon.net does not.

What do you mean more?

[Kwesadilo]

From the summary:

Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?

Where I live, Comcast charges in the neighborhood of $60 per month for 6 Mbps (you actually get like 1 Mbps). And that's with the TV+Internet+phone deal. Verizon charges around $50 for 5 Mbps fiber. I think their DSL (I'm not sure what the bandwidth is, but I don't think it's more than 1 Mbps) is around $40.

For me, at least, this would be a pretty sweet deal even if they didn't promise neutrality.