AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink

GMGruman writes "George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog post, for its new ads saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the under-served areas of the US. If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons."

Comments

Re:I'd like to see...

[ffejie]

Read the article -- they state that the debate over tiered pricing is over. The ISP will be implementing tiered pricing. The new debate is over how much can the government involve themselves in the matters of maintaining a network.

Re:Don't get it

[Svartalf]

Actually...the Post Office is a poor analogy.

1) You can buy better service (Priority Mail, Express Mail...).
2) There IS a lower class of service than First Class (Parcel Post...).

Re:I'd like to see...

[postbigbang]

WIth water, you get a specific pipe at a specific pressure (and temperature, probably) that yeilds a MAX of the water you can use.

With electricity, you get a specific MAX amperage of service that can be sustained.

Both utilities will charge you huge fortunes if you use the maximum output 24/7.

With broadband, you get a pipe that's capable of a sustained data rate. Upstream, however, data will come when it will come, subject to QoS or packet shaping. If you download at the max rate, 24/7, it's likely your hard disk will simply fill, and that's that-- your capacity has been reached.

What net neutrality does is to forward the idea that no matter where you want your data from, the carrier delivers a best-effort to deliver that data to you. In this scheme, it doesn't favor its product over another vendors; it's neutral as to the destination. Certainly latency, routing, and congestion issues apply, but it doesn't squish YouTube in favor of NBC (are you listening, Comcast?).

The aperiodicity of transaction means that congestion could be a problem, especially during the Superbowl or other 'events' where everyone's downloading at once. Otherwise, there's a fairly random distribution of duty cycle that allows bandwidth to be shared. However, older network designs, like ATM and a few others that are still carriers of data, aren't very good at doing that. Older routing equipment and ancient equipment (by modern standards) still presents a non-neutral bottleneck, although not one that's deterministic by data source.

So it's not like water and electricity, although it could still be considered a utility by other definitions. Communications ought to be a utility, and ought to be product source (e.g. the water, and the coulombs) neutral.

Here's the problem...

[rickb928]

ISPs DO IN FACT have to pay for the data you send and receive. Yes, they do.

Peering arrangements do not cover the cost of the connection to the NAP. If, say Cox Cable in Arizona wants to interconnect to the other Cox state networks, they can do so and it's just their way of dealing with interconnection. But when they decide to connect so, say MAE-West, they pay for the connection into the NAP. It may be an OC-148, or something truly studly, like a really hot fiber. These circuits are not free, as they require right-of-way, actual genuine fiber (which they may share sometimes with others in the jacket - true), and of course the hardware to make it work. Price out some of that some time.

Now, true, the cost is shared amongst the many many subscribers, and they could choose to peer in one NAP, though in fact that would be bad practice, with single point of failure stuff and all.

But the reality is that not only would Cox (as an example) have to provision enogh connections and capacity to at least prevent customers from flooding the lines with 'I can't get' calls, but most peering arrangements at the NAP require you to provide enough bandwidth to actually receive what other peers send to you (on request from your subscribers, usually) or they see you as not playing fair. This gets you either booted off the NAP or throttled (or ignored, see Cogent v Sprint) and your users get poorer performance. Providing adequate service in a NAP peering is non-trivial, and the big carriers do not let you off. If you're a small ISP, you usually partner with a bigger one to avoid this sort of thing. I know. I was a small ISP. My carrier was MCI for a long time, and they had me 3 hops from MAE-East, a nice multi T1 connection. When we downsized to BBN, we got a dual T1 that was 25 hops away from a midwest NAP, which was a little off the beaten path and increased our latency about 12ms on average. But it was cheaper. Boss wins.

The concept that somehow your ISP doesn't really pay for their ultimate connection to the 'Internet' is ludicrous and misleading.

And having said that, Cox cable is probably more interested in the high-volume users that 'distort' the local networks and might be causing congestion. This is where most 'oversubscribing' is noticeable, and where the pproblems for the ISP are most difficult, IMHO. And where they need to decide what level of service they wish to provide.

That should be interesting. That's where individual customers will be hurt, and will fight back.

And you wrote:

"ISP's per-MB usage charge is just added there to discourage customers to actually use their connection."

That's one pricing formulation. Another would be to price higher volume users to recover costs, while not discouraging them or losing them to competitors. This formula is not so commonly used, since real competition is ineffective in most of the U.S., though there are other pressures and this is not nearly so simple as most of us would like to believe. Of course, the impact is plain and obvious, so we tend to think that the cause is also plain and obvious.

Don't think I am defending packet inspection and service filtering, nor am I defending the US ISP marketers. But let's keep our focus on reality. They should be expected to carry any traffic their users request, without discriminating on the basis of volume or source, and they should either price their service as necessary (or desireable) or describe their services accurately so customers can make informed decisions and have reasonable expectations. And MOST importantly, they should not discriminate on the basis of the source of the data. For instance, throttle based on URL (hulu.com, for example) or traffic type (H.323, for example) and then offer an unthrottled service of their own which is substantially identical (HD video streaming, for example) and delivered via the same method (TCP/IP). This would be discriminatory in a way we should not accept - like restraint of trade, the ISP could throttle some vi