Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 22:38:34 UTC 2015

Can we stop the disingenuity?

Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from
deploying "commercial" services. As were bandwidth caps.

One can argue all sorts of other "benefits" of this but when this
started that was the problem on the table: How do we forcibly
distinguish commercial (i.e., more expensive) from non-commercial
usage?

Answer: Give them a lot less upload than download bandwidth.

Originally these asymmetric, typically DSL, links were hundreds of
kbits upstream, not a lot more than a dial-up line.

That and NAT thereby making it difficult -- not impossible, the savvy
were in the noise -- to map domain names to permanent IP addresses.

That's all this was about.

It's not about "that's all they need", "that's all they want", etc.

Now that bandwidth is growing rapidly and asymmetric is often
10/50mbps or 20/100 it almost seems nonsensical in that regard, entire
medium-sized ISPs ran on less than 10mbps symmetric not long ago. But
it still imposes an upper bound of sorts, along with addressing
limitations and bandwidth caps.

That's all this is about.

The telcos for many decades distinguished "business" voice service
from "residential" service, even for just one phone line, though they
mostly just winged it and if they declared you were defrauding them by
using a residential line for a business they might shut you off and/or
back bill you. Residential was quite a bit cheaper, most importantly
local "unlimited" (unmetered) talk was only available on residential
lines. Business lines were even coded 1MB (one m b) service, one
metered business (line).

The history is clear and they've just reinvented the model for
internet but proactively enforced by technology rather than studying
your usage patterns or whatever they used to do, scan for business ads
using "residential" numbers, beyond bandwidth usage analysis.

And the CATV companies are trying to reinvent CATV pricing for
internet, turn Netflix (e.g.) into an analogue of HBO and other
premium CATV services.

What's so difficult to understand here?

-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | bzs at TheWorld.com           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die    | Public Access Internet     | SINCE 1989     *oo*