networkingpipeline.com — FCC Chief Kevin Martin yesterday gave his support to AT&T and other telcos who want to be able to limit bandwidth to sites like Google, unless those sites pay extortion fees. Martin made it clear in a speech yesterday that he supports such a a "tiered" Internet.
Mar 22, 2006 View in Crawl 4
slopchopMar 22, 2006
Here is an idea for google, and the likes. Pull the plug on these companies that would try to fracture the greatest invention of the century, by not offering there services to them. These companies would then see a huge exodus of there clients for companies with some sense of sanity and respect for a free, single Internet. Sure it would hurt the consumers with this company in the short run, but in the long run I could see these select, greedy, companies, rethink there business strategies. Maybe they could think somewhat innovatively and improve there services to help drive there business and improve there bottom end.
xiataMar 23, 2006
Big business... big brother... can't really tell who anymore, can we?
pgm_01Mar 23, 2006
The ZDnet article clearly says two important things:1) Charging content providers to differentiate their services on the AT&T network would simply help AT&T find a commercial solution to the problem, he said.2) "We need to make sure we have a regulatory environment (in which network operators) can invest in the network and can recoup their costs," he said.AT&T claims that they have spent money investing in fiber that is being used to send traffic to Google and other high bandwidth applications. AT&T wants to be able to charge Google a fee for the capacity that AT&T had to add and the FCC thinks this is a great plan. This of course, is a very bad plan, unless you happen to be AT&T then it is an excellent plan. The tiering would be at the Google end, not the consumer end. Google has been told that they have a business in a dangerous neighborhood and if they want to be protected from harm, they should just give AT&T money and all will be OK.
neurokaotixMar 23, 2006
The FCC hates communication.
dpmunkyMar 24, 2006
since when does the FCC know whats best for you, me, or any of the rest of us?
rhawk301Mar 24, 2006
Reference digg.com retraction<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/technology/FCC_Chairman_Misquoted_Digg_has_Foot_in_Mouth_#c1299112">http://digg.com/technology/FCC_Chairman_Misquoted_Digg_has_Foot_in_Mouth_#c1299112</a>
hmtksteveMar 24, 2006
A thought just occurred to me on why so many people do not understand where the telcos are coming in this discussion.In the past, Telcos have had massive amounts of trunking that they used to connect to other telcos and there is the method by which phone calls work. If you call your friend in the same city, no big deal, odds are that you both belong to the same telco.If you call your friend in the next state, he may belong to a different telco. That other telco will now charge your telco a small access fee to connect to their network. In most cases the amount of calls going back and forth is not one-sided so the two telcos do not look at this as a revenue stream. One month they may charge the other telco for overage, the next they may get charged...Either way, you and your friend are already paying for your phone service, whether you are paying a flat rate or per call is not important...Now, here comes the Internet...You pay your ISP for a monthly bandwidth account. The website you are going to also pays it's ISP a monthly bandwidth account. Just like phone service, right? Well... yes and no... Because you pay a flat fee you do not get charged anything extra no matter how much you use. Most web hosting companies sell fixed amounts of bandwidth. The company I use gives me around 50GB of transfer bandwidth per month, if I go over, I pay more.If I am a big ISP and route a ton of traffic, I want my cut! It works that way with long distance calls. If you call from provider A to provider B but part of the traffic goes over provider C's network then provider C gets to charge provider A for use of their network. This sort of paying has generally been hidden from customers as it is done on such a massive scale.The same thing goes on with Internet backbone companies. I recall last year there was a fight among two big backbone companies over inter-connect charges. One company said the other was using more of their bandwidth then they were of the other company's... To a point where it was a financial issue. What did they do? They cut that company off of the Internet! (or at least from their part of the Internet by denying all ip traffic that originated from that company from using it's network.)I think this is the issue here.You have AT&T and Verizon saying, "Hey, we own most of the backbone here... Google uses our backbone much more then we use theirs. We want to be able to charge for this imbalance." This is not a case of making the end-user pay more, but a case of making people at the backbone/major ISP level pay more when there is an imbalance.AT&T and Verizon are thinking like telcos and the old long distance architecture. They know that when one of their customers orders a song from iTunes perhaps 100K of traffic will flow to the iTunes ISP's network from them but 3MB of traffic will flow back. This causes a network trade imbalance of 2.9MB! They want the other ISP to pay for the imbalance. It is as simple as that.
mrmorden76Mar 27, 2006
I found the original bill <a class="user" href="http://www.politechbot.com/docs/wyden.net.neutrality.bill.030206.pdf">http://www.politechbot.com/docs/wyden.net.neutrality.bill.030206.pdf</a>
xalorousMar 27, 2006
I found my way to this digg article from a wired.com article discussing BT (British Telecom) enforcing THROUGHPUT limits for their customers. Specifically, they're referring to residential user accounts. How do I know this? I lived in Belgium, and they had a 20 Gig monthly throughput limitation. This is the telecom's way to control network utilization.Most of the replies here are off on a tangent disussing how internet providers are going to try to shaft websites. So off-target. Most websites probably already have throughput limitations in their packages anyway. This kind of action is targetted at the end user. The consumer, yes, you and me.Lets say your cable company decides to implement a 20 gig monthly limit on all broadband connections, and to allow you to purchase more at a rate of $1 per gig. Further, assume that you like to collect linux distributions and live cd's. Lets say you average 20 of them a month and they average 1.5 gigs each. Surcharge of ten bucks for the extra ten gigs you just downloaded. Further assume you use bittorrent, and maintain a 1:1 ratio. Oops, 40 extra gigs (1.5*20= 30 gigs downloaded, plus 30 gigs uploaded, minus your original 20 gig allowance). 40 extra bucks on top of the 30-50 bucks you pay for high speed internet.And guess what, they have the right to set their policies and prices as they wish.That sound you hear is the death throes of the "unlimited internet".