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The Danger In Exempting Wireless From Net Neutrality
nmpost writes "Nearly two years ago, the FCC outlined its rules for net neutrality. Notably absent were rules for wireless networks. There are several legitimate reasons that the same rules applied to wired networks can not apply to wireless networks. However, the same danger lies in leaving wireless networks unguarded against the whims of its administrators. As we move more and more towards a wireless dominated internet, those dangers will become more pronounced. We are going to need a massive investment in infrastructure in this country regardless of net neutrality rules. Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed. This is where allowing internet providers to regulate themselves becomes an issue. Self regulation usually does not end well for the consumer. Imagine allowing power plants and oil refineries to determine what chemicals they could pour into the air. Would they have the population's best interest at heart when making that determination? In the future when the infrastructure can match the demand, what will stop internet providers from picking winners and losers over their wireless networks? As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC, a conflict of interest begins to emerge. There would be nothing from stopping one of the big wireless providers like AT&T or Verizon from scooping up a content provider and prioritizing its data speed over the network."
It is unreasonable for them to throttle anything due to lack of infrastructure while simultaneously sporting enormous profit margins.
You can have one, but not both. If they need more infrastructure they should build it.
Wireless networks suffer from congestion a lot more than wired networks. I don't think it's unreasonable for carriers to want to throttle traffic on wireless mediums to ensure mr tethered torrenter isnt destroying everyone else's connection.
Keep in mind that on wired or wireless networks, Net Neutrality is NOT treating all packets the same. VoIP and Video are among those applications that are time sensitive. You need to apply QoS to prioritize that type of traffic. Where NN comes in would be something like this: Say your ISP charges $50/month for internet, and limits you to 250Gb per month. Instead of subscribing to their TV service, you want to use Netflix or Hulu. Under this scenario, their data limit may keep you from using Netflix as much as you'd like. OTOH, they don't charge against you cap to use their TV service. Oh, but you can buy additional data for, say, $10/10Gb more. What they're doing is making sure that the additional data charges are so expensive that it's cheaper to buy their TV service, keeping out competition.
It's OK to throttle traffic on congested networks to make sure that everyone has access, but it's another to use data limits to keep out competition for other services.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
I could solve all the problems associated with these profiteering asshats with a simple solution: Allow people to be licensed to broadcast internet. Right now amateur radio can't offer internet access. If private persons were allowed to do with a larger spectrum space what they can do right now with wifi, I suspect that their entire business model would implode.
Mesh networking is a mature technology -- and it doesn't require the infrastructure these companies offer. Make it legal for people to build wireless communities. But I guess that would be too radical of a concept for the FCC; They seem only interested in appearing to support the common citizen, rather than actually supporting them. There's no profit in handing over spectrum to "the public", the group the FCC claims to represent, and whom the FCC mandate the spectrum is actually owned by, for which the FCC is merely an administrator of.
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Name one time in the history of the internet where demand for bandwidth has slowed? The size of content outpaces the increase in bandwidth that technology provides. Remember when you could install your OS with a floppy? Try a DVD now. The current Debian dist is 8 DVD's, over 300GB.
This line of thinking never quite works.
A doctor doesn't NEED wireless internet, but they certainly would like it since it makes a great number of things easier and more convenient. If the providers can update their infrastructure to accommodate traffic but choose not to the doctor is NOT going to go out and build their own network. It would require a complete change in their life and learnings to do so. It's not a reasonable thing to ask.
Much like if a software engineer gets a headache. They don't NEED it but some medicine would definitely be nice to alleviate the pain. However, pharmaceuticals are artificially pumping up the price. The software engineer is not a doctor nor a chemical engineer. Vindicate the pharmaceuticals by saying that the doctor is free to drop their life and go a completely direction to fulfill this one need is just silly.
So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now?
Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
It's not ok, but that wouldn't be the "porn downloaders" fault. It would be the fault of the network operators who oversold services they couldn't adequately provide. If they have too many customers in an area they need to build more towers. If you sell someone a service you need to provide what you sold them.
Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed.
Um, NO?
Demand for bandwidth will always exceed supply. Because it's ridiculously easy (more often than not to the point of the application doing it by default) to use more and lower-latency bandwidth, while it is difficult and time-consuming to install more supply. And this becomes ever more true the farther you move up the tiers. Installing new high-quality GigE cards and 8-port switch in my office? Under an hour from opening the NewEgg box to a job well done. Rolling out 10GigE to the whole floor? All week for a crew of guys. Rolling out 100M or 1G fiber to whole cities? Years of work and the job's barely even begun.
And if anyone thinks demand will saturate, there are always applications waiting in the wings to use more bandwidth.
As conglomerates like Comcast gobble up content providers like NBC,
So, stop them.
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to acquire other corporations anyway. After all, they are people. And President Lincoln said people shouldn't own other people.
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem with the 2 things you mentioned is that we have regulation, we have a distorted market based on coercion
If it only wasn't for regulation, we would have a perfect world. Right? Haven't learned anything yet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
The purpose of a government is to maintain a free market via regulation and police and the justice system. Free Market does not exist without regulation. As soon as there are any major players in the market, they would just muscle out any competition, even if they have to do that literally.
Natural end of any purely capitalistic society is total monopoly, at which point it basically becomes a totalitarian government.
The biggest problem here is not controlling usage so there's less congestion. Providers already do that plenty with data caps.
The problem is providers telling you what application you can use that 2GB or 4GB you purchased for.
AT&T for instance, says that if you have a 2GB smart phone data plan, you can't tether your laptop. But if you have a 4GB plan, you can. What business do they have telling you if you can tether your laptop? If you want to sit there and use 30GB tethered, that should be okay; you'll just have to pay for the additional usage. This is understandable and makes sense.
They're doing it again with iOS 6, saying you can't do Facetime over cellular unless you upgrade to one of their sharing plans. They shouldn't CARE if you use facetime over cellular, because if you use too much data, you'll have to pay for it anyway.
Charge me $xx for $yy GB. That's fine. Just don't tell me what I can do with those GB. They're MINE, I paid for them!
You don't quite seem to understand why the free market doesn't work very well with markets like telecommunications, roads, etc. Sometimes the regulation is problematic, but often the market wouldn't even be viable without the regulation. The problem is that some markets are what are referred to as natural monopolies. Consider roads. How many sets of roads from different providers can any given location support? How many roads does the typical home have frontage on? Multiple sets of roads would also _have_ to cross. How would the property rights work? How expensive would all the tunnels and/or overpasses be? How would interconnects between the different providers work? Roads are natural monopolies, which means that, to be practical, they either need to be managed by government or by heavily regulated industries. The same holds for telecommunications. With wireless telecommunications there's only so much spectrum to go around. In a pure free market, there would be so much noise on the airwaves that cell phones probably wouldn't even be possible.
Net Neutrality means nothing anymore. The term was hijacked by strawman proposals that had nothing to do with the original concept. It used to mean that you can't prioritise data based on either the source or origin. The idea was that you couldn't prioritise your VoIP or movie streaming service unless you also prioritised everyone else's. The problem with this was that you could use some custom protocol for your service and then you could prioritise traffic for everyone who used that protocol (i.e. you), and degrade everyone else. So the definition evolved slightly to the requirement that you give equal QoS to all data in the same category. That, unfortunately, is very difficult to implement. With the current trend of trying to stuff everything over HTTP, it's often quite difficult to categorise traffic.
There was also an intentional attempt by ISPs to conflate Network Neutrality and lack of QoS in the minds of users. Network Neutrality did not mean that you had to treat latency-sensitive and jitter-sensitive traffic (e.g. VoIP) the same way you had to treat bulk transfers (e.g. software update downloads). The networks tried to pretend that it did, and so you get the nonexistent problem in an earlier post of porn downloads meaning you can't make telephone calls. In reality, it's fine to reserve, say, 10% of the total throughput for latency-sensitive communications and use that for voice traffic. The people doing the downloading have buffering and so don't notice the slight increase in latency or the extra jitter when people start and stop using the high priority channel. The voice users don't know that their traffic is higher priority, and it abruptly ceases to be if they cross some throughput threshold.
My biggest complaint is that ISPs are not required to publicly disclose their traffic management policy. If they were, then customers could make an informed decision (e.g. this ISP will cost you more because you can't use that VoIP provider with it and get adequate quality).
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