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What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing
The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."
You're like all the developers I work with in cube land. Sometimes the truth we can implement in the real world is not the same truth that exists in your mind. This is *ok*. It doesn't mean we have failed. It just means we are making progress. And progress is good, no?
I need ammo!
What?
Ars Technica's article included MP3 Audio clippings of the hearing.
Demented But Determined.
1 ) Bell telephone companies.
2) Congress
3) dot-com commerce sites.
4) Internet2
5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."
I don't know. I myself can see all those as part of the big problem, of course, but I'd rather just point my finger at guys like this:
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen: "I don't think we're restraining the customers from using the service in accordance with the way we're selling [sticking] it to them."
Careful What You Wish For....
Network Neutrality refers to ISPs double dipping on charging/extorting fees for both users paying for their connections and web sites paying for prioritization of traffic according to origination and destination. It does not refer to protocol-based QoS. It does not mean a flat, unmanaged, unQoS-ed Internet. By repeatedly and deliberately misusing this phrase, its importance is being weakened.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I think Comcast will get a slap on the wrist, and throttling will resume. That's how the government has been operating for the past 7 years. Why should I expect them to change now?
Thats the FCC will do, Jack ... The majority of their hearings either come up unresolved or contrary to the public good. Business intrests win out more often then Joe citizen under the current administration... Though unlikely to change much even after administrations change... Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.
...or option 3, they can charge based off of usage (hopefully with a peek/off-peek difference for pricing)
...or option 4, they can reinvest their massive profits into bulking up their infrastructure so they don't have to worry about volume.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
"The whole debate an extension of the years-old tussle over whether Net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit network operators from prioritizing traffic as they wish, are necessary to safeguard the Internet's historically open architecture."
Not perfect, but at least the article gets the core idea mostly right. Usually, it gets totally butchered, you know?
How to Download YouTube Videos
Basically.
Look, Comcast is just being pissy because they dont want to put in new lines. End of story. In my area (as with MANY others) cable companies are bought out all the time. Comcast bought Adelphia, who had bought GE Communications probably 5 years before that. Comcast KNOWS that if it puts the money into upgrading its capacity, it will bankrupt, and some new, fancy cable company will come in, but its newly installed lines for pennies on the dollar, and take over. Problem solved for 5 years.
I don't care for Verizon personally, but they're doing the right stuff with this FiOS. They're laying down fresh fiber to eventually replace their old copper lines. The interwebz aren't getting any smaller, so this is the way all ISPs will have to go sooner or later (without some miracle in wireless tech).
Furthermore, I am paying for an unlimited service. Thats what its called and advertised as, unlimited. Well, fucking with my speeds and sending fake reset packets, well, that seems like a limit to me, doesn't it?
I envy you people that CAN bitch about other sucky ISPs, because Comcast is the only one I'll ever be able to bitch about here.
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
6. Comcast, AT&T, verizon continue aggressive bittorrent blocking. Qwest refuses to do that and continues its old policy of allowing all.
Verizon doesn't block BitTorrent, they won't even send you so much a letter for downloading over 1 tb.
If companies offered a choice would we still care?
Or are we worried that all providers will go the way of #2 and the price of #1 will inflate as supply dwindles?
-David
Nothing. Both money and time will be wasted on the hearings, but no changes will occur. Network shaping will persist, because the ISP's don't want to spend the money to upgrade their infrastructure.... unless they can get the government to pay for it, and then charge the end users more money for it.
WTF is a notch in a gun? Is that a good or a bad thing?
expandfairuse.org
Prof. Timothy Wu, the man who DID first coin the term "Network Neutrality" testified at the hearing, and he seemed perfectly satisfied that discriminating against users' BitTorrent uploads is a fine example of a Network Neutrality violation.
... who already have defined ways for applications to identify time-critical, jitter-sensitive packets and have defined what carriers should do about them.
In your example, the incentive is MONEY gained by charging content providers extra fees for carriage and then giving their traffic preferential treatment.
However, in the Comcast example, the incentive is MONEY saved by eliminating BitTorrent traffic and then putting off the new plant installations installations and additional transit fees that would normally have been paid to handle user demand.
So what's the real difference?
And nobody wants an unmanaged un-Qos'ed internet. But most people think that how the Internet works is the job of the IETF and the Internet Standards
Otherwise, how do you write software for an world-wide internet when half-a-dozen ISPs and transit providers on any given path want to "tune" the higher-level protocols to their own secret views on how the Internet ought to be prioritized?
Yet. What Comcast has been doing is cheap, and nasty: they're not traffic throttling, they're traffic poisoning by forging RST packets. I doubt Verizon's staff want to start down that road, but they're in a better fiscal position to do real traffic monitoring, and with their new fiber infrastructure, they'd better do something to shape it or the kids with the external Terabyte hard drives sharing warez and movie collections and trying to mirror PirateBay are going to flood their most critical connections.
Interestingly, it's going to be a problem overseas, too. An acquaintance in London is complaining about how the release of Iplayer has sucked up all the bandwidth in his neighborhood, and it's interfering with his on-line games. I wonder how the Brits will deal with their tax-funded television stations getting bandwidth shaped?
All it does is get the high-volume users to be more active at the beginning of their billing cycle, which will STILL impact 'the network'. It will just impact it for a shorter period of time. And if billing cycles are staggered, there will always be some BitTorrent users sucking up gobs of bandwidth, causing trouble, you know their drill.
Volume caps are a lie. The sad truth is that Comcast is acting as if they can't actually deliver what they say they can - all the Internet you can ask for. The truth is that no network has an infinite capacity, not even the South Korean and Japanese 'wonders'. It's just that Comcastand others have not kept up with demand.
Imagine if the cable companies had to carry full-bandwidth HDTVfor every channel, and I mean 1080p, not the MP4 dreck they foist on us now. This would cut their channel capacity by 50-75%. And no one would tolerate it. Same price for a quarter the content? And just because theh didn't have big enough pipes? We would correctly tell them to make the pipes, and then they can charge us.
As it is, throttling Internet bandwidth isn't even giving those who would the chance to pay even more.
Comcast is so out on a limb here.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
They're ripping out the copper (regulated) to put in (unregulated) fiber, so they can build a network like the cable company and do whatever the hell they feel like, not unlike Comcast.