Sorry about riffing on the Net Neutrality theme, but the embedded video is precisely the kind of silly propaganda that bothers me about the whole discussion. The video is inarticulately trying to make the argument that because Netflix uses more bandwidth than Linkpendium, they should be treated differently. Well, duh, they are. First, Linkpendium pays $1480/mo to get our packets to the peering point; I dont know exactly, but Ive seen estimates that Netflix pays around $20,000,000 per month to get their packets to the peering point. Second, on the peering-point-to-consumer side, AT&T and Comcast and all have bandwidth caps. That means you can surf Linkpendium 18 hours a day, every day of the month for a flat fee, but (depending upon your contract) if you stream video more than a couple of hours a day you may wind up paying extra for exceeding your bandwidth cap. Third, many (most?) Net Neutrality advocates actually put a little wiggle room in the all packets at the peering point should be treated the same. We understand that real-time applications like Internet telephone calling and Internet teleconferencing may need very high network priority, while batch peer-to-peer file sharing maybe ought to get a very low priority because it really doesnt matter if the file arrives in 24 minutes or 27 minutes. The real rule most Net Neutrality folks support is something like this: all traffic of a given type is given the same priority, regardless of source. That means your VOIP all works the same, whether you use Skype or Vonage or Ooma or whatever. Netflix would be treated exactly the same as Comcasts in-house streaming operations. And so on. This retains a free and innovative market in Internet services, prevents Comcast (say) from using its monopoly power to double-bill consumers, but provides wiggle room to allow real-time services to work well even when theres network congestion. (Though, truth be known, the solution to network congestion shouldnt be prioritizing packets; it should be adding capacity. Bandwidth is so incredibly cheap these days that congestion mainly means either incompetent engineering or business dudes absurdly sacrificing service to save just a few pennies.) https://youtube/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KeCj4y36UKM
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:35:43 +0000
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