Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 09:29:39 UTC 2015

> On Feb 28, 2015, at 01:22 , Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 28/Feb/15 10:51, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> Competition? What competition? I realize you’re not in the US,...
> 
> Yes, I know competition in the U.S. is not where it ought to be :-).
> 
> My comment was more global, as we all use the same technologies around
> the world, even though you do get varying levels of market conditions as
> such.
> 
>> so perhaps there is some form of meaningful competition in Mauritius.
> 
> I am based in South Africa, which isn't saying much.
> 
> The .mu domain throws everyone off :-).
> 
>> 
>> There is no such thing in the US. It’s oligopolies at best and monopolies at worst.
>> 
>> We have, unfortunately, allowed the natural monopoly that exists in infrastructure (layer 1) to be leveraged by private enterprise to form an effective monopoly on services.
> 
> I'll continue to postpone my immigration to those unions :-).
> 
>> The point here is that adequate up and adequate down are not necessarily defined by having them be equal. Yes, you get better uplink speeds on symmetrical technologies. That’s sort of inherent in the fact that asymmetrical technologies are all built for higher downstream speeds and lower upstream speeds.
> 
> I agree.
> 
>> 
>> My point is that in the vast majority of cases, a hardware limitation where the downstream is faster than the upstream is not inappropriate for the vast majority of content consumers. The problem is that in most cases, consumers are not given adequate upstream bandwidth, regardless of the size of their downstream bandwidth.
> 
> This is where I disagree, because we are making the case for (the vast
> majority of) customers based on the technologies they/we have always used.

This is where I disagree with you.

Look at it this way… I bet even you consume far more content than you produce. Everyone does. It is the nature of any one to many relationship.

We consume content from many sources. We are but one source of content.

Even if everyone produced the same amount of content, mathematically, you’d be consuming more than you are producing if everyone consumed everything.

If you have an example of any concept of an application where an end-user is likely to need the same amount of bandwidth upstream as they do downstream, I’m all ears. Your first example utterly failed. Do you have a better example to offer?

> We have seen what can happen to GSM networks when you put a smartphone
> in the hands of an ordinary Jane. Not even the mobile operators saw that
> one coming.

Even phones consume asymmetrically and almost entirely down-stream.

> Let us open up the uplink pipes and see what happens. If we keep on
> thinking that the patterns will always be the way they are today, the
> patterns will always be the way they are today.

I’m all for bigger uplink pipes, but insisting on symmetry is absurd.

> 
>> 
>> If you had a good solid 256Mbps up and 1Gbps down, I’m betting you would be a lot less upset about the asymmetrical nature of the circuit. Even if you continued to complain, I think you will admit that the vast majority of users would be quite happy. I know I would and I’m pretty upstream-heavy for the average residential user.
> 
> Yes! I would be very happy with that if it were reasonably reliable, or
> degraded in a way that would at least leave me reasonably happy.

Not sure what you mean by “degraded in a way that would make you happy”.

> 
> Symmetric circuits significantly reduce the likelihood of degradation on
> the uplink more than asymmetric circuits do. So an asymmetric service on
> a symmetric network is more likely to perform better than any service on
> an asymmetric network. Ultimately, that is my point.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Owen