Level 3 Communications Issues Statement ConcerningComcast'sActions

Tue Nov 30 11:57:56 UTC 2010

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:23:41 +0000
Ben Butler <ben.butler at c2internet.net> wrote:

> Part of the problem is the content providers do not encode properly, we have seen this all along with images on webs sties as access speeds have increased.  There is no penalty on the content provider for lazy programming, cpu cycles or codec licensing to stop them making the access network carry larger streams than nessacery.

Hi Ben,

Content providers do have some motivation to use resources, including bandwidth, efficiently:

1. it costs money to serve that content - bandwidth isn't free (not on my network anyway)
2. the consumers of that content may have restrictive access speeds or poorly performing access services.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that content providers will make their content as bandwidth-efficient as may be technically possible...

Greater bandwidth efficiency also comes at a price - newer technologies, greater computing resource, expertise, etc - and those costs may outweigh the benefit of enabling access for a portion of the end-user community.

You will see different approaches by different folks. This isn't much different from, for example, attitudes to AAAA records in DNS. Google are extremely cautious because they see great value in not disrupting the end user experience, whilst others are content to publish the records accepting that some end users may be affected.

If you believe that providers of oversized content should pay towards the recipient's and/or his/her agents' costs, it is perhaps suprising that you accompany so few lines of contribution to this discussion with such a large and unnecessary e-mail "signature" which includes several lines of HTML markup and misguided legal boilerplate, not to mention the failure to appropriately trim Patrick's comments to which you are responding.

d.