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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?"
I would. My family wouldn't. And it will be so with most of those "dark masses" we keep hearing about.
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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.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
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."
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.
The prices in USA really scares me.
I am paying around $30 for 10Mbps, guaranteed, both directions. For around $50 I can get 100Mbps.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
For the skinny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering