Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 22:50:02 UTC 2015

Spoken by someone that apparently has no idea how things work. 

----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Barry Shein" <bzs at world.std.com> 
To: "NANOG" <nanog at nanog.org> 
Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2015 4:38:34 PM 
Subject: Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality 

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* 