Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 05:09:58 UTC 2015

> On 27/Feb/15 19:13, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> > Consider a group of 10 users, who all create new content.  If each one
> > creates at a constant rate of 5 mbits, they need 5 up.  But to download
> > all the new content from the other 9, they need close to 50 down.
> >
> > And when you expand to several billion people creating new content,
> you need
> > a *huge* pipe down.  Bottom line is that perfect symmetry isn't needed for
> > content distribution - most people can't create content fast enough to
> > clog their uplink, but have trouble picking and choosing what to
> downlink to
> > fit in the available bandwidth.
> 
> Isn't this a phenomenon of the state of our (uplink) networks?
> 
> Remove the restriction and see what happens?

Only partially.  It is also a phenomenon of having built the first
broadband networks with that asymmetry, which in turn discouraged a
whole host of potential applications, which in turn creates a sort
of bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy:  broadband networks don't see
much call for tons of upstream because it wasn't available, and so
there aren't lots of apps for it, and so users don't ask for it,
and so the cycle continues.

In many cases, users who had high upstream requirements have been
instead working around the brokenness by, for example, renting a
server at a datacenter.  I know lots of gamers do this, etc.

So even if we were to create massive new upstream capacity tomorrow,
it might appear for many years that there's little interest.  Consider
streaming video.  We theoretically had sufficient speed to do this at
least ten years ago, but it took a long time for the technology to
mature and catch on.

However, it should be obvious that the best route to guaranteeing that
new technologies do not develop is to keep the status quo.  With 
wildly asymmetric speeds, upstream speeds are sometimes barely enough
for the things we do today (and are already insufficient for network
based backup strategies, etc).  Just try uploading a DVD ISO image
for VM deployment from home to work ...

The current service offerings generally seem to avoid offering high
upstream speeds entirely, and so effectively eliminate even the 
potential to explore the problem on a somewhat less-rigged basis.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.