Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sun Mar 1 11:40:31 UTC 2015

On 1 March 2015 at 03:41, Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com> wrote:

> Previously all residential service (e.g., dial-up, ISDN) was
> symmetrical.

The rot set in with V.90 "56k" modems - they were asymmetric - only the
downstream was 56k.  The only way to achieve this in the analogue realm was
by digital synthesis at the head-end, i.e. the T1/E1 handoff to the ISP.
The upstream from the subscriber didn't have a clean interface so was still
using 33.6k.

Sadly we don't have many "killer applications" for symmetric residential
bandwidth, but that's likely because we don't have the infrastructure to
incubate these applications.

It's a chicken and egg situation - of course the average consumer today
will say they "don't need" symmetric, but you could have asked them twenty
years ago and they'd have said they didn't need the Internet at all.  Or
smartphones.

This all suits the telcos and cablecos very nicely - they are happy when
their customers are passive consumers of paid content and services.  It
gives them control.

I don't think it's a conspiracy, but it suits the big players not to "fix"
the "problem" since they don't perceive it as being one.

Aled