Just like you pays sales tax for anything you buy online in your state, (there is a RL counterpart), access to PSTN should always be taxed. Either that, or standard PSTN based services need to have no tax on them. I'm sure businesses would welcome that, as taxes from varies entities often add 30 or 40% to their bottom line phone bill!
I think we would all agree, however, that it needs to be like service, IE connected to the PSTN. IP to IP connections should remain untaxed, as the end users have paid and possibly/probably been taxed for the transport already.
Corporations claim to be all about profit. I can accept that. I WORK for a decent sized corp. But if you don't nurture and maintain the community your profiting from, before long there won't BE a community. This is an incredibly short sighted response. Most people understand you don't shat where you eat.
Those of you who want to whine about how 'it's the parents responsibility', go ahead. I happen to think this store manager is right on the money. He actually CARES about his customers, which is something that is sadly lacking at most layers of business these days.
That right there will get him more business and more REPEAT business than all the marketing dollars that trickle down to his store from corporate.
I don't know where they learn it, but the lack of ethics, morality, or a sense of community consequences in the last 20 years or so of corporate history is just appalling. This is just one more example.
the reason I ask, is that ISPs don't buy Internet access based on transfer rate, they buy it based on throughput. Even if you are buying a 10Gig circuit, you would be hard pressed to get it at less than $8-$10 a Mbps.
Hosting companies use another business model completely, and how they charfe doesnt really apply to hooking bandwidth up to the network, if you see my point.
This may have been the way things were in the early days of cable, but that is no longer the case. The differences in infrastructure between DSL and Cable installations, from a bandwidth perspective, are minimal now. When cable was CABLE all the way out to a neighborhood, that little DS3 feeding your DSLAM seemed like a lot of bandwidth. Now that they have 10Gig to the area, and 1 Gig to the neighborhoods, the ATM DS3s and OC3s feeding your DSLAM are much more likely to be overwhelmed than a cable system.
Guns are not 'designed to kill people' They are tools. Just like a car is not designed to kill people, but cars have kill far more people every day in 'civilized' countries than guns ever have. (the notable exception being open warfare).
I don't see anything extraordinary about vandalism. Being from 'the country' I don't see anything unusual about some jack ass using a fire arm to do it. People have been putting holes in road signs with varmit rifles and pistols ever since we started installing them in the country.
I'm sorry the time since Amerika was a wild, untamed country has been so much shorter than from where ever your at. Its going to take us a few hundred years more to 'grow' out of our liking to be able to take care of ourselves, and not rely on The Church, The King, or some other 'higher authority' to make sure we are taken care of.
Having such lethal instruments in our possession makes the US a dangerous place to live. don't come here.
Its really simple, actually. Used to be, when your kid did something questionable, some one's parents would call you and say 'did you know bobby has been doing 'x'? '
Yes, believe it or not, it used to be common for parents to know the parents of the kids their own children hung out with!
Now days, people simply don't want to get involved with other people. Its too much work. Too much hassle. They don't want to be accused of being 'racist/biased/judgmental'. Its just easier to let someone else deal with it.
So that's exactly what a couple of parents did. They called the school and said 'we heard this might be going on, YOU had best look into it!'.
At which point, the entire fear and punishment thing kicks in. Once some kind of government or bureaucratic force gets involved in a situation, it instantly becomes a game of CYA. It no longer has anything to do with the original complaint, it has everything to do with who might conceivably be harmed/offended/sued over the actions of the official!
If you don't want to see this happen, encourage your parents to know the parents of your friends. Parents, get to know the family of your kids friends. Don't get the school or the law involved in your personal business. Too often these days, people call the cops first and try to work things out later. Once you get the law involved, it's too late to say your sorry and go back to being friends again.
Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service
1) Dont do anything illegal. We will rat you out. 2) If you want to run an ISP, thats fine, we have special rates for heavy users 3) If your usage for your web host exceedes a reasonable percentage of our available bandwidth, we reserve the right to raise your rate.
No one seemed to have any issues with these simple rules.
Cringly is even getting bitchslaped for being an ignorant dumbass over this on his own website. Serves him right.
For non-network important 'stuff', it's all pretty much best effort.
Things that are important to the day to day opperation of the network (route updates, SNMP/Managment traffic) have to have priority over 'customer' traffic. But so what. That is such a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the multi-meg service people get...
A real question for vonage : Why dont you have a bandwidth tester on your network that your customers can hit? Better yet, something that produces latency and jitter stats?
That would settle this whole argument once and for all. the closest I could find on their site was this:
Take a factory turbo car, a window switch and some extra injectors (any NOS kit can supply those), turn up the boost and do a little dyno tuning, and Viola.
Instant massive power.
it also helps to put a good sized inter cooler on the system, and maybe a water mister on the Intercooler too.
Noncompetes are just a way to keep you from using your talents against your former employer.
I would tell the company that if they want to keep you from working for a competitor for a year, you expect an appropriate severance package if you are terminated.
I would also clarify that if you choose to leave on your own, your non-compete ONLY applies to projects/customers you are currently working on, not future or potential projects. MAKE IT CLEAR that you retain the right to work for a competitor if you choose, but will not be working on any business you helped bring your former company.
If they will agree to those stipulations, you should be ok.
And of course, you can just not sign it, or agree to work for them on a contract basis.
QoS compliance _is_ measured everyday, but only for services that are _purchasing_ it. (Im speaking of backbone networks here, not LANs)
What I fear this regulation might attempt to impose is some kind of _proof_ of QoS compliance for EVERY location on the network across every network on the Internet, regardless of their contracted service.
The great thing about the Internet is that it is pretty much raw bandwidth, with very little service guarantee. attempting to impose a government regulated QoS system on this model is a frighting idea.
Thats the problem with government regulation. You cant just tell the customers 'the EF queue on your connection has 80k reserved, so you can do VoIP'. If there is no regulation, you can DO that, and not worry about documenting it to hard, if the customer has problems, you troubleshoot, fix, and move on.
Once you get the government involved, you have to generate a paper trail, show the performance of each CoS on the backbone, and basically prove that you are NOT unfairly dropping some one's packets, no matter who they might be, because at any moment, one of those providers could swoop down with your local Federal Agent on their arm to demand you stop unfairly dropping their VoiP packets. At that point, you are guilty until proven innocent.
I think we are in violent agreement about infrastructure as well. I'm not so concerned about network infrastructure, as I am about reporting structure, however.
Who uses DS3s anymore? Gig-e connection? 100M Ethernet?;) (I kid! I kid!)
Thats what the carrier I work for uses for most of their Corporate Customer connections all over a large number of metro areas.
I havnt worked with anything as slow as a DS3 (by choice) in about 4 years.
Ok, so, assuming this legislation passes, how are you going to enforce it? how are you going to PROVE its not being followed?
When the underlying transport you are using is INHERENTLY best effort, ALL services are sub-sets of best effort! The Internet is a best effort delivery.
Currently, ISPs have ZERO control over what goes on outside their own networks.
So how is this brilliant idea supposed to work? Are we going to try and mandate that carriers agree upon set bandwidth guarantees between each other? How is that going to work? Doesn't this mean carriers are going to have to start charging each other more for 1) Integration and Management 2) Some kind of SLA verification system 3) more infrastructure to support the higher classes of service?
We haven't been able to make this happen at the carrier level yet. There isn't any REASON to want to do this, because THE INTERNET IS BEST EFFORT SERVICE. If someone wants the higher performance, guaranteed bandwidth type of product, that is done with a different kind of service, and you buy it from one carrier, so its properly integrated.
Why don't we write some laws that force people to use screwdrivers as hammers while we are at it.
I disagree. Let's say one area has both DSL and Cable IP as choices for high speed internet access. Let's say that the DSL company implements your fear scenario. They will block any blogger that does not pay to reach their customers. If I am the cable IP provider then I will not do this and then make this clear in my advertising campaign. My ads would say: Do you want the entire internet? Then signup with my cable IP service. Customers will flock to me.
You are assuming consumers have a clue. The success of AOL in 'packaging' part of the Internet would lead me to believe otherwise. Have you paid no attention to the lesson of Jobs? Having the best technology, or even the best solution does NOT = profit. Having the best marketing does.
I have a lot more faith in the invisible hand of the free market than I do in corrupt politicians whose hands are dirty from counting bribe money.
Amen, brother. Amen.
I would be all for preserving a 'best effort' service, available for all. But I would think broadband companies would offer to prioritize VoiP packets on their network, for ME, if I was willing to kick them a couple of dollars a month extra. I don't think that's unreasonable, I'm asking them to use a less profitable model, over-subscription wise, than they had originally planned. Despite what some people think, bandwidth DOES cost money to create and maintain.
I also dont think its unreasonable for ATT to tell yahoo, google, vonage and the rest to buy service direct from ATT or RR, or Comcast, if they want premium access to that customer base.
Everyone I have seen that rails 'for' a government net neutrality mandate seems to think that ATT et.al. are going to magically implement some kind of filtering system that will keep competition out. Considering that most of the major players you guys are citing as 'victims' are ALREADY customers of ATT and the rest, and are ALREADY paying for access to the network, I just see hysteria over an ATT execs misunderstanding of how one of his products work.
Bandwidth costs money. Priority Bandwidth SHOULD cost more money. However, just like regular access to the network, BOTH parties get to pay for access.
Dont you know, anyone running MPLS as their core network is already prioritizing traffic on their backbone?
Big supprise, Internet access has the highest packet loss on the backbone. It is totally 'best effort' service.
All because some droid at ATT got told about the cool things that ARE being done with QoS, CoS, and Tail Drop, you guys have your panties in a wad over something that simply isnt practical.
Then he further displays his ignorance, by claiming they arnt getting paid for other companies use of the network??? We all know that is clearly NOT the case. Everyone pays for access to the network.
Being able to differentiate traffic on the network is a HUGE value add carriers need to be free to offer to customers. Otherwise, the only way they can make themselves more attractive is by spending billions in infrastructure upgrades, while all the while being told thier prices are too high. If they think they can make money selling higher quality bandwidth on their network, why should we be passing laws to stop them?
As long as access to that bandwidth is available to anyone who wants it, there should be no problem.
Will it jepordize some companys? Yes, absolutley. The same way these pump and dump dial up providers did in the mid 90s, offering $9 a month dial up access, if you paid a year up front. Folks that were in the access business for the long term had to quickly change the way they did business to be able to survive in the face of such insane pricing.
There is little revolutionary in this 'problem'. Its just the network growing up a bit more, and certainly not in an un-anticipated direction. Honestly, why do you think we invented IPV6, QoS markings and queuing systems for IP?
To those who believe this can only lead to a monopolizing of internet voice by the last mile carriers, I ask you, what has changed? Voice, as an application, has long been designed to favor the regional or local carrier. Even the current laws concerning transporting voice 'long distance' acknowledge doing a call over VoiP is still a long distance call, and that fees that apply to a normally trunked call apply to voip trunked calls.
To those who fear content providers will be squeezed out, I say, fear not. The Google's and Yahoo's of the world are premier customers of the network. Not only do they already get better pricing for access than anyone else, they have plenty of documentation showing the value they bring to a carrier's network. Do you really think any carrier in their right mind is going to try and figure out how to double charge these guys, in an effort to do what? Add money to the bottom line? or totally piss them off to the point where they simply stop serving that carriers customers? Whoops! Now your network doesnt talk to yahoo, google and microsoft? Your network now has zero value to me, Buh by!
It works both ways, friends. Never Fear. The Internet routes around these issues all on its own. The only protection it needs from government, is in its physical infrastructures. The rest seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely!
What do you expect? We have moved from a scientific method based education to a faith based education. Students are not expected to demonstrate understanding of theory in a practical sense, but are being run through a mill, where they are expected to regurgitate the 'right' answer, without necessarily understanding how it came to be accepted as the right answer.
As Kirk once said to a Jr. Officer "You have to know WHY things work on a Starship".
I have paraphrased that countless times to Jr. Engineers, fresh out of school. (Obviously, Data Networking isnt nearly as complex, science wise, as other types of design, but still, if you dont have the basics, you may not understand running USTP 3 feet over an MRI is a BAD thing to do, much less why!)
Or how bout just basic logic? I once watched a group of recently graduated 'engineers' try to fix the same piece of network by reconfiguring the router over and over again in the exact same way. I watched this for 2 hours before I came over and asked what they were doing.
I asked them if they checked the cable. (You old schoolers can quit reading here) All 3 of them nodded their heads distractedly as they tryed to intuit how they were mis-typing a route command.
I silently walked over to the ethernet cable hanging half out of the plug into the switch they were working with and plugged it in. (while they all watched).
As I walked past them back to my own design problem, I muttered to myself "Its always the damn cable"...
What I found most gratifing about that experience was watching one of the same engineers do something similar to another fresh out of school kid about 3 years later:)
Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley!
Wow, I dont see that at all. It would be more like you were paying for half a two bedroom apartment (the bottom half) and your roomate let you use the 'nice' room when he wasnt there.
If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted.
Thats the definition of 'best effort'! It means your carrier is making ZERO promisses about delivering your packets ANYWHERE. Maybe you need to re-examine your definition.
Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.
You do understand it correctly. All packets have an equal chance of being dropped on any segment for any reason.
However, 'each packet being treated equally' is not what the applications being used on the network require anymore. Realtime services require prioritized processing. It does no good for an ambulance to sit in traffic. The application (transporting a possibly dying person to medical care where they can be saved) REQUIRE prioritization over other traffic. Thats why the law requires you to yield right of way to emergancy vehicles.
In order to provide a similar infrastructure on the internet, the carriers have to implement not only a prioritization scheme, but all the support services to validate, document, and maintain those schemes. All of these things cost money. It is NOT wrong to want to get paid for your work.
The only way you can currently get this type of service, however, is to buy it directly from the carrier in question. Carrier to Carrier QoS isnt implemented yet, as carriers havnt figured out how to pay each other for it yet...
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.
Simple, they want access to lower latency for streaming media services. Normal Google/Amazon services would not be affected. In addition, due to the nature of CoS SLAs, the ONLY way Vonage is going to be able to get any type of legitimate binding promise from ATT is if ATT is thier ISP. THAT is what I meant by 'access to the same infrastructure' all they have to do is purchase it.
You are acting like the big telcos want to take something away, which is NOT the case. They simply want to be free to add another layer of service onto the existing infrastructure which they built and own, without having people scream that they are being screwed.
The FACT is, in order to enhance the ability of the current network to deliver realtime media, you either have to fund more infrastructure upgrades (throw bandwidth at the problem) or turn on some kind of prioritization (QoS/CoS) on the network. Thats the technical FACTs of the problem. The excercise of funding and marketing such a solution is what Net Neutrality SHOULD be about. Instead, people are twisting it to sound like it's about free network access for all.
If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?
Your already paying all those people, indirectly. You pay Covad, your ISP, who is purchasing/swaping bandwidth from BBn, who is swaping/purchasing bandwidth from L3, who is SELLING bandwidth to Google. The ISP is acting as your agent and doing a bulk purchase aggreement for access to other networks interconnected by other carriers.
Kinko's pays FedEx on your behalf, so you dont have to deal with them. Nothing stops you from taking your business to FedEx directly. And FedEx has content priority. you pay more, your package goes through faster. What a concept! A PROVEN, ACCEPTED business model!
Your details have helped illustrate my point very well. That being that 'net neutrality' as currently being discussed is a pointless attempt to control something which doesnt need to be controlled.
The network has evolved. Nothing is keeping the carrier's network from continueing to offer best effort service at the same price they have always done.
CoS is a way of keeping bandwidth prices low, as it allows the carriers to gain better use of edge oversubscription. If they are forced to continue this rediculous growth model of simply building more bandwidth, your going to be seeing some serious price hikes, now that the false competition has gone out of business.
Lets face it, the folks that undermined the market in the late 90s are long gone. They took thier investers money, built a 'brand', and sold it off to someone interested in long term sucess. In the meantime, they changed the expectation of the consumer of what they could expect for thier dollar. Like so many things associated with money in the late 90s, these were FALSE expectations.
Now that thier is service differentiation coming available, there are a lot of hurdles to jump. Consider:
CoS STOPS at a carrier edge. If Vonage wants to have low latency QoS to all of ATT customers, it's going to have to buy service direct from ATT, and stipulate they want low latency on it.
Today, Vonage can simply get 'best effort' internet from anyone, and service ATT customers. THAT WILL NOT CHANGE.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
Slashdot Mirror
how can you possibly believe that. When we are hearing how little broadband penetration we have in this country? Both of them cant be true.
Just like you pays sales tax for anything you buy online in your state, (there is a RL counterpart), access to PSTN should always be taxed. Either that, or standard PSTN based services need to have no tax on them. I'm sure businesses would welcome that, as taxes from varies entities often add 30 or 40% to their bottom line phone bill! I think we would all agree, however, that it needs to be like service, IE connected to the PSTN. IP to IP connections should remain untaxed, as the end users have paid and possibly/probably been taxed for the transport already.
I'm not buying there anymore.
Corporations claim to be all about profit. I can accept that. I WORK for a decent sized corp. But if you don't nurture and maintain the community your profiting from, before long there won't BE a community. This is an incredibly short sighted response. Most people understand you don't shat where you eat.
Those of you who want to whine about how 'it's the parents responsibility', go ahead. I happen to think this store manager is right on the money. He actually CARES about his customers, which is something that is sadly lacking at most layers of business these days.
That right there will get him more business and more REPEAT business than all the marketing dollars that trickle down to his store from corporate.
I don't know where they learn it, but the lack of ethics, morality, or a sense of community consequences in the last 20 years or so of corporate history is just appalling. This is just one more example.
the reason I ask, is that ISPs don't buy Internet access based on transfer rate, they buy it based on throughput. Even if you are buying a 10Gig circuit, you would be hard pressed to get it at less than
$8-$10 a Mbps.
Hosting companies use another business model completely, and how they charfe doesnt really apply to hooking bandwidth up to the network, if you see my point.
This may have been the way things were in the early days of cable, but that is no longer the case. The differences in infrastructure between DSL and Cable installations, from a bandwidth perspective, are minimal now. When cable was CABLE all the way out to a neighborhood, that little DS3 feeding your DSLAM seemed like a lot of bandwidth. Now that they have 10Gig to the area, and 1 Gig to the neighborhoods, the ATM DS3s and OC3s feeding your DSLAM are much more likely to be overwhelmed than a cable system.
How did you come up with $1/GB?
Guns are not 'designed to kill people' They are tools. Just like a car is not designed to kill people, but cars have kill far more people every day in 'civilized' countries than guns ever have. (the notable exception being open warfare).
I don't see anything extraordinary about vandalism. Being from 'the country' I don't see anything unusual about some jack ass using a fire arm to do it. People have been putting holes in road signs with varmit rifles and pistols ever since we started installing them in the country.
I'm sorry the time since Amerika was a wild, untamed country has been so much shorter than from where ever your at. Its going to take us a few hundred years more to 'grow' out of our liking to be able to take care of ourselves, and not rely on The Church, The King, or some other 'higher authority' to make sure we are taken care of.
Having such lethal instruments in our possession makes the US a dangerous place to live. don't come here.
Maybe because it was just vandalism.
So quantum entanglement is a new encoding system for optical data transmission. I wonder what the top end of the bandwidth would be...
It should be something pretty massive, assuming you can keep the photonic loss between objects to a minimum, yes?
Its really simple, actually. Used to be, when your kid did something questionable, some one's parents would call you and say 'did you know bobby has been doing 'x'? '
Yes, believe it or not, it used to be common for parents to know the parents of the kids their own children hung out with!
Now days, people simply don't want to get involved with other people. Its too much work. Too much hassle. They don't want to be accused of being 'racist/biased/judgmental'. Its just easier to let someone else deal with it.
So that's exactly what a couple of parents did. They called the school and said 'we heard this might be going on, YOU had best look into it!'.
At which point, the entire fear and punishment thing kicks in. Once some kind of government or bureaucratic force gets involved in a situation, it instantly becomes a game of CYA. It no longer has anything to do with the original complaint, it has everything to do with who might conceivably be harmed/offended/sued over the actions of the official!
If you don't want to see this happen, encourage your parents to know the parents of your friends. Parents, get to know the family of your kids friends. Don't get the school or the law involved in your personal business. Too often these days, people call the cops first and try to work things out later. Once you get the law involved, it's too late to say your sorry and go back to being friends again.
Man, that takes me back.
Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service
1) Dont do anything illegal. We will rat you out.
2) If you want to run an ISP, thats fine, we have special rates for heavy users
3) If your usage for your web host exceedes a reasonable percentage of our available bandwidth, we reserve the right to raise your rate.
No one seemed to have any issues with these simple rules.
Cringly is even getting bitchslaped for being an ignorant dumbass over this on his own website. Serves him right.
let me restate.
r y=46&nav=102
For non-network important 'stuff', it's all pretty much best effort.
Things that are important to the day to day opperation of the network (route updates, SNMP/Managment traffic) have to have priority over 'customer' traffic. But so what. That is such a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the multi-meg service people get...
A real question for vonage : Why dont you have a bandwidth tester on your network that your customers can hit? Better yet, something that produces latency and jitter stats?
That would settle this whole argument once and for all. the closest I could find on their site was this:
http://www.vonage.com/help.php?article=497&catego
which is weak. It shows my 10M ethernet internet access with a D/L speed of 2.74M and and upload speed of 4.76 Mbs...
Give us a break.
Maybe it was really UFOs from area 51 that were causing his fax not to work?
Carriers have always prioritized packets on their backbones. but not Internet packets. those are all best effort.
Nothing new, though, honestly.
Take a factory turbo car, a window switch and some extra injectors (any NOS kit can supply those), turn up the boost and do a little dyno tuning, and Viola.
Instant massive power.
it also helps to put a good sized inter cooler on the system, and maybe a water mister on the Intercooler too.
Noncompetes are just a way to keep you from using your talents against your former employer.
I would tell the company that if they want to keep you from working for a competitor for a year, you expect an appropriate severance package if you are terminated.
I would also clarify that if you choose to leave on your own, your non-compete ONLY applies to projects/customers you are currently working on, not future or potential projects. MAKE IT CLEAR that you retain the right to work for a competitor if you choose, but will not be working on any business you helped bring your former company.
If they will agree to those stipulations, you should be ok.
And of course, you can just not sign it, or agree to work for them on a contract basis.
QoS compliance _is_ measured everyday, but only for services that are _purchasing_ it. (Im speaking of backbone networks here, not LANs)
;) (I kid! I kid!)
What I fear this regulation might attempt to impose is some kind of _proof_ of QoS compliance for EVERY location on the network across every network on the Internet, regardless of their contracted service.
The great thing about the Internet is that it is pretty much raw bandwidth, with very little service guarantee. attempting to impose a government regulated QoS system on this model is a frighting idea.
Thats the problem with government regulation. You cant just tell the customers 'the EF queue on your connection has 80k reserved, so you can do VoIP'. If there is no regulation, you can DO that, and not worry about documenting it to hard, if the customer has problems, you troubleshoot, fix, and move on.
Once you get the government involved, you have to generate a paper trail, show the performance of each CoS on the backbone, and basically prove that you are NOT unfairly dropping some one's packets, no matter who they might be, because at any moment, one of those providers could swoop down with your local Federal Agent on their arm to demand you stop unfairly dropping their VoiP packets. At that point, you are guilty until proven innocent.
I think we are in violent agreement about infrastructure as well. I'm not so concerned about network infrastructure, as I am about reporting structure, however.
Who uses DS3s anymore? Gig-e connection? 100M Ethernet?
Thats what the carrier I work for uses for most of their Corporate Customer connections all over a large number of metro areas.
I havnt worked with anything as slow as a DS3 (by choice) in about 4 years.
Thanks for clarifying my point.
Ok, so, assuming this legislation passes, how are you going to enforce it? how are you going to PROVE its not being followed?
When the underlying transport you are using is INHERENTLY best effort, ALL services are sub-sets of best effort! The Internet is a best effort delivery.
Currently, ISPs have ZERO control over what goes on outside their own networks.
So how is this brilliant idea supposed to work? Are we going to try and mandate that carriers agree upon set bandwidth guarantees between each other? How is that going to work? Doesn't this mean carriers are going to have to start charging each other more for 1) Integration and Management 2) Some kind of SLA verification system 3) more infrastructure to support the higher classes of service?
We haven't been able to make this happen at the carrier level yet. There isn't any REASON to want to do this, because THE INTERNET IS BEST EFFORT SERVICE. If someone wants the higher performance, guaranteed bandwidth type of product, that is done with a different kind of service, and you buy it from one carrier, so its properly integrated.
Why don't we write some laws that force people to use screwdrivers as hammers while we are at it.
I disagree. Let's say one area has both DSL and Cable IP as choices for high speed internet access. Let's say that the DSL company implements your fear scenario. They will block any blogger that does not pay to reach their customers. If I am the cable IP provider then I will not do this and then make this clear in my advertising campaign. My ads would say: Do you want the entire internet? Then signup with my cable IP service. Customers will flock to me.
You are assuming consumers have a clue. The success of AOL in 'packaging' part of the Internet would lead me to believe otherwise. Have you paid no attention to the lesson of Jobs? Having the best technology, or even the best solution does NOT = profit. Having the best marketing does.
I have a lot more faith in the invisible hand of the free market than I do in corrupt politicians whose hands are dirty from counting bribe money.
Amen, brother. Amen.
I would be all for preserving a 'best effort' service, available for all. But I would think broadband companies would offer to prioritize VoiP packets on their network, for ME, if I was willing to kick them a couple of dollars a month extra. I don't think that's unreasonable, I'm asking them to use a less profitable model, over-subscription wise, than they had originally planned. Despite what some people think, bandwidth DOES cost money to create and maintain.
I also dont think its unreasonable for ATT to tell yahoo, google, vonage and the rest to buy service direct from ATT or RR, or Comcast, if they want premium access to that customer base.
Everyone I have seen that rails 'for' a government net neutrality mandate seems to think that ATT et.al. are going to magically implement some kind of filtering system that will keep competition out. Considering that most of the major players you guys are citing as 'victims' are ALREADY customers of ATT and the rest, and are ALREADY paying for access to the network, I just see hysteria over an ATT execs misunderstanding of how one of his products work.
Bandwidth costs money. Priority Bandwidth SHOULD cost more money. However, just like regular access to the network, BOTH parties get to pay for access.
Net Neutrality is a slogan. It means nothing.
Dont you know, anyone running MPLS as their core network is already prioritizing traffic on their backbone?
Big supprise, Internet access has the highest packet loss on the backbone. It is totally 'best effort' service.
All because some droid at ATT got told about the cool things that ARE being done with QoS, CoS, and Tail Drop, you guys have your panties in a wad over something that simply isnt practical.
Then he further displays his ignorance, by claiming they arnt getting paid for other companies use of the network??? We all know that is clearly NOT the case. Everyone pays for access to the network.
Being able to differentiate traffic on the network is a HUGE value add carriers need to be free to offer to customers. Otherwise, the only way they can make themselves more attractive is by spending billions in infrastructure upgrades, while all the while being told thier prices are too high. If they think they can make money selling higher quality bandwidth on their network, why should we be passing laws to stop them?
As long as access to that bandwidth is available to anyone who wants it, there should be no problem.
Will it jepordize some companys? Yes, absolutley. The same way these pump and dump dial up providers did in the mid 90s, offering $9 a month dial up access, if you paid a year up front. Folks that were in the access business for the long term had to quickly change the way they did business to be able to survive in the face of such insane pricing.
There is little revolutionary in this 'problem'.
Its just the network growing up a bit more, and certainly not in an un-anticipated direction. Honestly, why do you think we invented IPV6, QoS markings and queuing systems for IP?
To those who believe this can only lead to a monopolizing of internet voice by the last mile carriers, I ask you, what has changed? Voice, as an application, has long been designed to favor the regional or local carrier. Even the current laws concerning transporting voice 'long distance' acknowledge doing a call over VoiP is still a long distance call, and that fees that apply to a normally trunked call apply to voip trunked calls.
To those who fear content providers will be squeezed out, I say, fear not. The Google's and Yahoo's of the world are premier customers of the network. Not only do they already get better pricing for access than anyone else, they have plenty of documentation showing the value they bring to a carrier's network. Do you really think any carrier in their right mind is going to try and figure out how to double charge these guys, in an effort to do what? Add money to the bottom line? or totally piss them off to the point where they simply stop serving that carriers customers? Whoops! Now your network doesnt talk to yahoo, google and microsoft? Your network now has zero value to me, Buh by!
It works both ways, friends. Never Fear. The Internet routes around these issues all on its own. The only protection it needs from government, is in its physical infrastructures. The rest seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely!
What do you expect? We have moved from a scientific method based education to a faith based education. Students are not expected to demonstrate understanding of theory in a practical sense, but are being run through a mill, where they are expected to regurgitate the 'right' answer, without necessarily understanding how it came to be accepted as the right answer.
:)
As Kirk once said to a Jr. Officer "You have to know WHY things work on a Starship".
I have paraphrased that countless times to Jr. Engineers, fresh out of school. (Obviously, Data Networking isnt nearly as complex, science wise, as other types of design, but still, if you dont have the basics, you may not understand running USTP 3 feet over an MRI is a BAD thing to do, much less why!)
Or how bout just basic logic? I once watched a group of recently graduated 'engineers' try to fix the same piece of network by reconfiguring the router over and over again in the exact same way. I watched this for 2 hours before I came over and asked what they were doing.
I asked them if they checked the cable. (You old schoolers can quit reading here) All 3 of them nodded their heads distractedly as they tryed to intuit how they were mis-typing a route command.
I silently walked over to the ethernet cable hanging half out of the plug into the switch they were working with and plugged it in. (while they all watched).
As I walked past them back to my own design problem, I muttered to myself "Its always the damn cable"...
What I found most gratifing about that experience was watching one of the same engineers do something similar to another fresh out of school kid about 3 years later
Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley!
Wow, I dont see that at all. It would be more like you were paying for half a two bedroom apartment (the bottom half) and your roomate let you use the 'nice' room when he wasnt there.
If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted.
Thats the definition of 'best effort'! It means your carrier is making ZERO promisses about delivering your packets ANYWHERE. Maybe you need to re-examine your definition.
Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.
You do understand it correctly. All packets have an equal chance of being dropped on any segment for any reason.
However, 'each packet being treated equally' is not what the applications being used on the network require anymore. Realtime services require prioritized processing. It does no good for an ambulance to sit in traffic. The application (transporting a possibly dying person to medical care where they can be saved) REQUIRE prioritization over other traffic. Thats why the law requires you to yield right of way to emergancy vehicles.
In order to provide a similar infrastructure on the internet, the carriers have to implement not only a prioritization scheme, but all the support services to validate, document, and maintain those schemes. All of these things cost money. It is NOT wrong to want to get paid for your work.
The only way you can currently get this type of service, however, is to buy it directly from the carrier in question. Carrier to Carrier QoS isnt implemented yet, as carriers havnt figured out how to pay each other for it yet...
So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.
Simple, they want access to lower latency for streaming media services. Normal Google/Amazon services would not be affected. In addition, due to the nature of CoS SLAs, the ONLY way Vonage is going to be able to get any type of legitimate binding promise from ATT is if ATT is thier ISP. THAT is what I meant by 'access to the same infrastructure' all they have to do is purchase it.
You are acting like the big telcos want to take something away, which is NOT the case. They simply want to be free to add another layer of service onto the existing infrastructure which they built and own, without having people scream that they are being screwed.
The FACT is, in order to enhance the ability of the current network to deliver realtime media, you either have to fund more infrastructure upgrades (throw bandwidth at the problem) or turn on some kind of prioritization (QoS/CoS) on the network. Thats the technical FACTs of the problem. The excercise of funding and marketing such a solution is what Net Neutrality SHOULD be about. Instead, people are twisting it to sound like it's about free network access for all.
If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?
Your already paying all those people, indirectly. You pay Covad, your ISP, who is purchasing/swaping bandwidth from BBn, who is swaping/purchasing bandwidth from L3, who is SELLING bandwidth to Google. The ISP is acting as your agent and doing a bulk purchase aggreement for access to other networks interconnected by other carriers.
Kinko's pays FedEx on your behalf, so you dont have to deal with them. Nothing stops you from taking your business to FedEx directly. And FedEx has content priority. you pay more, your package goes through faster. What a concept! A PROVEN, ACCEPTED business model!
Bill, thanks for the extra illumination.
Your details have helped illustrate my point very well. That being that 'net neutrality' as currently being discussed is a pointless attempt to control something which doesnt need to be controlled.
The network has evolved. Nothing is keeping the carrier's network from continueing to offer best effort service at the same price they have always done.
CoS is a way of keeping bandwidth prices low, as it allows the carriers to gain better use of edge oversubscription. If they are forced to continue this rediculous growth model of simply building more bandwidth, your going to be seeing some serious price hikes, now that the false competition has gone out of business.
Lets face it, the folks that undermined the market in the late 90s are long gone. They took thier investers money, built a 'brand', and sold it off to someone interested in long term sucess. In the meantime, they changed the expectation of the consumer of what they could expect for thier dollar. Like so many things associated with money in the late 90s, these were FALSE expectations.
Now that thier is service differentiation coming available, there are a lot of hurdles to jump. Consider:
CoS STOPS at a carrier edge. If Vonage wants to have low latency QoS to all of ATT customers, it's going to have to buy service direct from ATT, and stipulate they want low latency on it.
Today, Vonage can simply get 'best effort' internet from anyone, and service ATT customers. THAT WILL NOT CHANGE.
However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.
Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!