Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

Sat Feb 28 23:25:16 UTC 2015

On 02/28/2015 03:14 PM, Clayton Zekelman wrote:
> You do of course realize that the asymmetry in CATV forward path/return path existed LONG before residential Internet access over cable networks exited?

The cable companies didn't want "servers" on residential customers 
either, and were
animated by that. Cable didn't really have much of a return path at all 
at first -- I remember
the stories of the crappy spectrum they were willing to allocate at 
first, but as I recall
that was mainly because they hadn't transitioned to digital downstream 
and their analog
down was pretty precious. Once they made that transition, the animus 
against residential
"servers" was pretty much the only excuse -- I'm pretty sure they could 
map up/down/cable
channels any way they wanted after that.

Mike

>
> 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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