Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Fri Feb 27 17:13:36 UTC 2015

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 12:03:35 -0500, Bruce H McIntosh said:

> The REAL evil in the ISP marketplace is, of course, essentially entirely
> unremarked-upon - ASYMMETRY.  For the Internet, as such, truly to live
> up to its promise to continue to revolutionize the world through free
> exchange of ideas, information, data and so forth, Joe Average User
> *MUST* have the same pipes going UP as he does coming DOWN.  Just as an
> example, my service at home is what, 50 down/5 up?  That structure is
> less conducive to free interchange

Consider a group of 10 users, who all create new content.  If each one
creates at a constant rate of 5 mbits, they need 5 up.  But to download
all the new content from the other 9, they need close to 50 down.

And when you expand to several billion people creating new content, you need
a *huge* pipe down.  Bottom line is that perfect symmetry isn't needed for
content distribution - most people can't create content fast enough to
clog their uplink, but have trouble picking and choosing what to downlink to
fit in the available bandwidth.

You'd be better off arguing from the basis of protocols and applications that
need symmetric bandwidth (for instance, heavy use of Skype and similar, but
with HD video - you'll need as big a pipe for your outbound video as you need
for the inbound). Similar considerations will apply to at least some gaming
models, bittorrent, and so on. You already noted the remote backup issue - keep
focusing on that sort of thing.

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