Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 23:14:18 UTC 2015

You do of course realize that the asymmetry in CATV forward path/return path existed LONG before residential Internet access over cable networks exited?  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 28, 2015, at 5:38 PM, Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 
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