Net Neutrality and Carrier Incentives To Invest

An anonymous reader writes "In policy debates before Congress and the FCC, the big ISPs and wireless carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Sprint) argued that net neutrality rules would give them less incentive to upgrade their networks. The reality is just the opposite, says Infoworld's Bill Snyder, citing a game-theoretic work done by two researchers at the U. of Florida's business school. If carriers can charge premium prices for expedited service, they have an incentive not to invest. Hmm, this reminds me of the agriculture business, where prices are sometimes propped up by paying farmers not to grow crops."

Comments

Open source internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

With wireless technology developing as it is, is there any chance that some day we can create our own ad hoc internet without relying on expensive cables and thus expensive carriers?

I suppose we would still need some kickass routers, but it's not like open source projects are completely devoid of money. Wikipedia has tons of hardware, no?

Re:Open source internet?

[jellomizer]

The internet is Open. The specs to communicate over TCP/IP are quite clear. The problem is who owns the infrastructure. Cables, Satellites, and the ability to bring them to peoples location costs money. Then they have the cost of maintaining their routing to other providers.
An Add Hock network can only go so far, once you scale larger then you get into more issues.
100 people all maintaining their own routers is fine.
1000 people you may need to find a good techie and pony up to give him a good router.
10000 More techies that you need to maintain the router. And you are start having complains on who's cable go where. Or crazy nuts afraid that their house is getting too much wi-fi radation.

The bigger it gets the most it costs and the more issues that happen. You will start to need Full time people working on this stuff, and they can't starve for the glory of keeping your internet up, they will need to be paid for their work...
Then when you are done you either have a set of big ISP that you probably need to pay $20-60 a month too or a government controlled internet, where you will get think of the children people yelling at the government to block whatever seems bad information to them at the time.

Re:Open source internet?

[Ash-Fox]

Certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think trust is something you'd deal with at the presentation layer. We've dealt with spoofing at lower levels in our existing setup after all.

The problem with talking about the OSI model is that our current networking technology doesn't even respect that model. I will note that I didn't say it wasn't impossible to deal with untrusted nodes, but it's something that we should take into consideration when developing a new networking environment such as this.

Back to your original comment, I think dealing with it in the presentation layer is a bit too high in my opinion, as it would require reworking essentially every application to offer some form of encryption. There wouldn't be a clear way to ensure that every application developer even ensures there is encryption. I would suggest producing something similar to IPsec which sits in the 'network' layer of the OSI model, where by user applications would need little knowledge of what network they're operating over to function and ensure some form of security by default.

The issue however is having some sort of global authority system that hands out registered assignments to devices to ensure no spoofing. An authority system like this would likely cause a new slew of problems however, mainly the faults of having to deal with a centralized system.

Dealing with this sort of system with issues such as a netsplit (where the authority is on the otherside of the split and new devices are added to the side you're on, unable to get assignments ends up being rather a complicated matter.

Re:Open source internet?

[Ash-Fox]

802.22

802.22 requires dedicated 'towers' to be setup, which can really only be done by big money, this does not work with the idea of "creating our own ad hoc internet without relying on expensive cables".

and limit the hogs.

What if the hogs are providing a very useful service? How do you distinguish between a torrent and a game server?

And someday the interference problem will be licked and we will have multiple users on the same frequency;

To be honest, a mesh network could be done far better using frequency-hopping spread spectrum radios, you could build the addressing scheme into the frequency hopping, this would allow software defined radios to listen in on specific broadcast messages, as well as provide a new form of security measures for dealing with secure communications between any single node or to a select many without much of an issue with interception.

802.22 doesn't really seem that developed for a technology for constantly changing mesh network, especially since it seems to expect some kind of dedicated infrastructure setup.

it's a software problem we haven't solved yet, not a physical one.

If it's 802.22, it's both for this specific circumstance of "creating our own ad hoc internet without relying on expensive cables".

Re:Farmer subsidies need to STOP

[Oswald McWeany]

The crazy thing about the subsidies is that they encourage the growing of things like maize over vegtables and healthy alternatives.

Maize- yes that wonderful grain that contains almost no healthy nutrition compare to other grains that is often served instead of vegetables.

From which at subsidized prices we get artificially low sweetners such as corn syrup, and because it is used as animal feed (cattle, pigs)- meat prices drop.

Not that there is anything wrong with protein- but it is the high fat that goes along with it that would be missing from more veggies instead of a 99cent ham burger- or a steak.

The subsidies, especially the ones tilted towards encouraging farmers to grow maize of all things does nothign but encourage the obesity epidemic.

Cut the maize- grow healthier grains, healthier fruits and veggies- why are my tax dollars going towards making my neighbours into fat pigs?

heres how this works.

[nimbius]

you start a business, and we impose regulations to prevent you from abusing your tacit monopoly be it global or regional. Comply with them or spend more lobbying dollars.

do not threaten the customers hoping they will back you. verizon and AT&T subscribers enjoy some of the shittiest wireless service in the first world, comcast customer experience is comparative to that of an internet subscriber in rural india. cox service, if it ever gets installed, is just as bad. Sprint does nothing more than bait-and-switch its customers hoping they remember the CEO chortling about some amorphous unlimited everything plan on paid advertising.

Not hard to incentivze them

[silas_moeckel]

Require some truth in advertizing from them. Enact legislation where if they do not meet there advertized speeds one average during peek times they are fined and eventually loose there monopolies. There networks are cash cows network upgrades are a simple matter of trending and re engineering for wired networks. They want to suck all the money they can out and avoid capx purchases to make there bonus bigger. Honestly most monopoly services should be bid out where the carrier offering the most for the least gets the contract. I would love to see AT&T loose out on DSL and have to give up that franchise, they have no cost of bandwidth (paying your sister company does not count) but aggressively limiter there subscribers.

Re:Farmer subsidies need to STOP

[geekoid]

Wrong.
Many starving areas don't invest because they have no stability to invest. Food is't a problem, delivery to the people who need to east it is.