Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sun Mar 1 03:23:22 UTC 2015

On February 28, 2015 at 16:50 nanog at ics-il.net (Mike Hammett) wrote:
 > Spoken by someone that apparently has no idea how things work. 

Now there's a deep and insightful refutation.

 > 
 > 
 > 
 > ----- 
 > 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* 

-- 
        -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*