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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."
...is what you used to call 'regular service' yesterday.
Case in point: Data caps. there were no data caps before, services wee running just fine...and somehow, a couple of years later, you need to pay more for the same data transfer.
It's artificial shortage is what it is.
I am glad that someone did some academic research to prove this, but it seems unnecessary. Isn't the entire point of eliminating network neutrality just so that carriers can charge more for their existing bandwidth? They slow down a site, then charge you to restore the speed back to what it originally was. Or they charge you a fee to make your packets a higher priority than your neighbor's. Either way, no infrastructure changes were required. The highway analogy the article uses is spot-on.
Can someone explain to me why Republicans keep spewing this illogic about Net Neutrality? Why all the hate and rhetoric? It's really a very simple, and should be a non-partisan issue.
Industry is a bunch of spoiled children these days. They cry and scream and throw a tantrum, threatening to take their ball and go home unless they get bribed with candy to behave. Remember a time when all it took to get a business to make a wise move was prove it would make them more money? Neither do I.
Not without a decent spectrum allocated for it. The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz band at our current power restrictions don't allow for very good distances, unless you have a very clunky antenna that you wouldn't find on a mobile device.
Developing an ad-hoc mesh network has many issues to take into consideration, including dealing with the fact that there will be people who are using an unfair amount of resources and no single transmitter can be trusted to keep any information secure or even 'truthful' about who it is.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I, for one, am totally shocked.
Shocked I tell you.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
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?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The main problem is that the US -does- sell much of our food overseas, but that price point is based on the subsidized price. The price gap isn't recaptured in the form of tariffs. Many countries don't invest in agricultural and associated legal infrastructure at home because there's no way for anyone to grow crops cheaper than the US can sell them.
Cut the maize- grow healthier grains, healthier fruits and veggies- why are my tax dollars going towards making my neighbours into fat pigs?
It gets better. Wait until the USA has national healthcare. They they'll use tax money to make people fat (maize), then use tax money to deal with the health issues from being fat! PROFIT!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
They aren't providing a service; they are manufacturing a scarcity of service. Any producer or provider will ultimately do this if they are not regulated in some fashion. They will build out a minimum of infrastructure for a maximum of profit. And they will never stop raising fees. Our great-grandparents understood this, so electrical utilities and such are government-regulated monopolies. Some things can't be covered by free market economics. Wiring all homes is one of those things.
Here's simple logic on 'carriers' or ISPs:
ISPs either have a monopoly or pseudo monopoly (in practicality) or they have competition. Therefore, there are two types of situations:
1. Monopolistic - Upgrading networks not necessary
2. Market-based - Carriers must upgrade networks to compete or lose customers
In either situation, there are two types of sub-situations:
1. Net-neutral - Carriers must upgrade networks to satisfy bandwidth demand, content decided by individuals
2. Prioritized - Upgrading networks not necessary, low-priority traffic dropped, content decided by corporations
What we have now in most of America is Monopolistic, Net-neutral. Carriers are arguing for Monopolistic, Prioritized. Consumers demand Market-based, Net-neutral. What should we get? Market-based, Either. What will we get most likely? Monopolistic, Prioritized.
The fact we even need a study to prove that the carriers are lying is ridiculous. The best incentive to force ISPs to upgrade their networks is MORE and DIVERSE competition. It is not free-market competition when the only 'normal bandwidth' Internet access at home for a consumer is a choice between either the local cable company or local telco. It is not free-market competition when the only cellular bandwidth is a choice of 1 of 3 major carriers that control hardware and software of the devices and lobby in unison to our government. Carriers are essentially arguing to continue a monopoly and ignore advances in technology that allow unlimited upgrades in bandwidth.
Instead of arguing net neutrality at all, if our lawmakers started making it easier for some competition in the marketplace, ISPs that do not deliver all traffic quickly would die off.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Today most homes is either hooked directly up on fiber or hook up on cobber with translation to fiber not very far away... I'm guessing here, but I think ad hoc wireless networks, would be crazy unreliable, slow, insecure and have an extreme latency...
Ahh-well the government will love then that not only do corn fed cattle have higher fat contents then grass fed cattle- they also require higher levels of antibiotics.
These antibiotics in farming is what leads to super bugs and antibiotic resistance in bacteria... which leads to... ... higher health costs and prescription costs.
Government should double subsidies on maize immediately to help make the loop complete.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
No sir I dont like it.
is that there's a good reason to prevent over farming. Over farming tobacco turned Virginia into a desert in the 1800s. Plus in agriculture you sometimes have to get people to grow food that's not profitable but that people need to eat, e.g. it might be a bad year for potatoes, but we still need potatoes.
The trouble with net neutrality, indeed with any concepts on the Web, is that we're brushing up against a post-scarcity economy here. There really isn't any analogy that works because we've never done that before.
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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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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".
What if the hogs are providing a very useful service? How do you distinguish between a torrent and a game server?
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.
If it's 802.22, it's both for this specific circumstance of "creating our own ad hoc internet without relying on expensive cables".
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That works out really well. Without that, the market rules. If one year there is a drought, for instance, prices will jump as there will be shortages. The next year, all kinds of new people will try to get 'in' on the high prices and end up with a bumper crop, which will depress prices instead. Maybe to the point of bankrupting farmers, closing farms, etc. The next year after that, not enough of a crop is produced, and we have more shortages. Up and down, up and down. Not something we want happening to our food supply.
I'm probably not explaining it well enough, but that's the general idea - simple economics, lots of players looking for an edge - if we leave prices unsupported, we'll have chaos. And hunger. And if we end up hungry here, what about all the places depending on our exports?
Precisely, if those nations are unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure to feed themselves then it's rather unlikely that they'll invest in the infrastructure to produce goods to trade for food. It's not a lack of people or ability so much as the corruption and war that prevents it from happening. Few populated parts of the world are genuinely incapable of producing their own food for long periods of time.