We want slower internet
60Write your Senator to preserve Net Neutrality
I know, it doesn't sound that interesting, but those of you who are familiar with the debate know it's huge.
Essentially the telephone companies and cable companies are lobbying for the right to be able to charge Internet users for "preferred" service. That means that a "preferred" customer's data gets prioritized over a regular customer's data. Or put another way, if two dsl customers want to listen to on-line radio, the one who is using a preferred service will be able to listen without skipping and buffering, but the regular service may experience skips, distortion, and sluggishness. If your service providers don't cough up the extra money to become "preferred", things like viewing photos on-line, downloading music, getting big attachments from your work e-mail, and working from home on citrix, or other remote office applications, is going to get more painful.
Usually, I'm all about the free markets. Certainly, the telcos are offering a service, and building out more capacity does cost them money. On the other hand, I worry about the impact on the expansion of broadband to more homes, the impact on consumer's ability to access their favorite applications and the impact on innovation on the Internet. Or put another way, allowing "preferred" services greatly benefits the ISPs and Telcos, while hurting most other business, and jacks up prices for consumers. Eventually, this sort of thing may have to happen to preserve the quality and speeds of the Internet. But doing so today could jeopardize emerging services and technologies that have the potential to solve the problem without rate hikes. Perhaps a 7 year provision for Net Neutrality is the best compromise, to allow other technologies to mature.
If you agree that we should leave broadband rates at the status quo instead of raising them, please write a personal e-mail in defense of Net Neutrality to :
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm
and
http://feinstein.senate.gov/email.html
If you want to read more, check out: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/29/NET.TMP
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I think a huge factor is Vonage, Skype and other internet telephony services. While these services may use more bandwidth than the average web surfing, it definitely doesn't make up for the loss to the telcos in marketshare. Like so many markets undergoing a paradigm shift, the telcos are trying to put up roadblocks and hang on to the "old ways." The ones that survive will ultimately embrace the new paradigm and use it to their advantage over their competitors.
Its a bump and shuffle that will be interesting to watch. And there will be no avoiding watching it as it will directly affect us all.
Don't let the telecoms ruin the internet. Hopefully some of these maggots and some more at the FCC will hang for complicity in war crimes.
working
Paul Edmondson says:
2 years ago
The key issue is who pays for the build out of infrastructure to support the growth of internet applications. The telcos buy everything from routers to fiber to move bits across the internet to their customers. Most websites have their servers in data centers where they pay for the transfer out of bandwidth. Once it leaves their datacenter the business no longer pays for the transfer of data.
It seems logical to me that if you have customers accessing the internet from your service and they are requesting bits from a website that it’s up to the website to get the bits out with good performance, or nobody would use their site, and then it’s up to the telco to ensure that they provide the rest of the transfer. The telcos already do this today by providing peering relationships so that latency are cost are reduced. So if customers of the telcos are demanding higher bandwidth applications, they should pay for the build out of their networks. If the website operators are building higher bandwidth applications, then they will have to pay to get the bits out to the telco. If the telcos don’t build out their networks, than customers will switch to someone that offers a better service. This seems like how it should work to me and does, so let’s leave it alone.