Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Fri Feb 27 17:27:08 UTC 2015

That statement completely confuses me.  Why is asymmetry evil?  Does that not reflect what "Joe Average User" actually needs and wants? The statement that the average users *MUST* have the same pipes going UP as he does going DOWN does not reflect reality at all.  Do a lot of your users want to stream 4K video to their friends UHD TV?  Given that all transmission media has some sort of bandwidth limit it would seem to me that asymmetry is actually more fair for the user since he gets more of what he needs which is download speed.  There is no technical reason that it can't be symmetric it is just a reflection of what the market wants.  As an ISP I can tell you that a lot more people complaint about their download speeds than their upload speeds.  Do you think that you (or the average home user) would be happier with 27.5 down and 27.5 up vs your 50 down and 5 up you have today?  Don't tell me you want 50 down and 50 up because that is a different bandwidth total that requires a faster transmission media.

Do you actually believe that average users are suffering with a 5 mbps upstream?  I don't. I just don't see the average user "freely interchanging ideas" at more than 5 mbps.  I don't feel like "Big Brother" forced me to watch Netflix and my next door neighbor just doesn't provide a lot of engaging HD content that I just must see.

By the way, most carriers have plenty of symmetric offerings, it is just that they are marketed as business class not because we are evil but because that is the normal usage case.  Remember that most offerings were symmetric up until DSL became available which allowed us to provide the faster downloads users actually wanted.  Modems and TDM circuits were symmetric and everyone hated the fact that all this upstream went unused while people longed for better download speeds.

Actually if the traffic patterns were actually more symmetric, the carriers would be happier because it would create a much more any-to-any flow and this net neutrality garbage would never have been an issue.  In the real world, there are actually a handful of sites pushing tons of bandwidth in one direction to a lot of users.  That is what it is until "Joe Average User" starts creating engaging content.

>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 and more conducive to the Big-Brother™-seal-of-approval mindless >consumption of whatever content THEY™ deem necessary and sufficient to keep the bread and circus masses dull and uninvolved.  >Plus, the slow uplink speeds make remote backups dreadfully impractical for the home user.  So let's see some symmetry in the >offerings, ISPs, ok?

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL