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

[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

[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)

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]

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.

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."