Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Fri Feb 27 22:49:23 UTC 2015

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 3:53 PM, Scott Helms <khelms at zcorum.com> wrote:
> "My point is that the option should be there, at the consumer level."
>
> Why?  What's magical about symmetry?  Is a customer better served by 
> having a 5mbps/5mbps over a 25mbps/5mbps?

If the option sells, it will be offered.  It didn't.  We offer symmetric DLS residentially and it went over like a lead balloon.

> "There are so many use cases for this, everything from personal game 
> servers to on-line backups, that the lack of such offerings is an 
> indication of an unhealthy market."
>
> Until we get NAT out of the way, this is actually much harder to 
> leverage than you might think.  I don't think there is anything 
> special about

NAT is not that big an issue any more because everything from game server to backup software can deal with it.  No need to re-invent the wheel to get around NAT.  In fact, for backups it is completely a non-issue since there is going to be a client initiating the data push to a cloud server.

> symmetrical bandwidth, I do think upstream bandwidth usage is going up 
> and will continue to go up, but I don't see any evidence in actual 
> performance stats or customers sentiment to show that it's going up as 
> fast as downstream demand.

Of course, upstream bandwidth will increase but downstream will increase as much or I would suspect even more.  It is very simple to explain.  A song is uploaded to iTunes once and downloaded millions of times.  An HD movie is upload once and view many times.    Essentially whether it is music, video, web content, or any other media, it is normally an upload once download many operation.  

I am not saying that sometimes a residential user's traffic is not symmetric (Skype calls etc.) from time to time.   It is just not what most residential users are concentrated on.  As soon as people become more interested in high upload speeds, the market will react.  In fact, most carriers would love a more symmetric user to user environment because most carrier backbones have to be very over-engineered based on traffic toward the consumer.

Steven Naslund 
Chicago IL 