Posted on 12/02/2005 8:23:48 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
A senior telecommunications executive said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates.
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This proposal will be about as popular as spam and pop-ups.
HHMMMMM....don't they already get charged, i.e. via the technology they purchase/lease/develop???
"You can have it fast, or you can have it cheap. You can't have it both."
So how do you "give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users" without "degrading performance" of some OTHER sites?
we can and do. this would be a tax . They used tar and feather clowns like this.
That said, they can try and charge what ever they like. It's their business. But the competition may just not be so stupid.
You might want to change to an ISP that wasn't in thrall to a large customer.
This is happening at the other end, where the consumer is getting the content. If BellSouth, Verizon, Sprint and AOL/RoadRunner all started doing this, a company would have to pay a lot extra for the majority of broadband users in the US to visit their site without having to wait. IOW, pay to keep the status quo.
Read the whole article to also see they want to degrade others' VOIP offerings over their network so they can push their own. So in my case if I buy Vonage it won't work very well in comparison to TWC's digital phone service, which costs more.
I pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth, and I expect that pipe to be neutral, not to care what packets I push and pull through it (well, unless they get a complaint that one of my computers is part of a DDOS botnet, then I could understand).
If you hear that line, it's time to find a new provider of that particular service.
agree
That's on their end with their provider, and I'm sure Google already pays plenty. With this they'll also have to pay the major consumer ISPs so the content will get to consumers as fast as it does now.
Free market. Let these idiots try and watch them lose market share.
ping
Yeah, but the local ISPs are already paying the major ISPs for their bandwidth. Expecting their customers customers to pay them too is just insane!
Imagine Ford selling a tow truck to a mechanic, only to come back a couple of years later and demand payment from his customers too.
Once the end-user ISPs pay for their bandwidth, that should be the end of the transaction. If they aren't charging enough for the bandwidth then they should raise their prices, if they can.
"Mention extortion again and I'll have your legs broken."
Easy, reduce the amount of hops needed.
A lot of sites are completely distorting what this is about. Anyone who maxes out their connection on bitTorrents know that their VOIP and HTTP suffers. What this does is propose letting content providers pay more to make sure their packets don't get bogged down and get priority.
'With this they'll also have to pay the major consumer ISPs so the content will get to consumers as fast as it does now.'
Nothing in the article even suggests that.
He must sit around day after day dreaming, scheming and praying he can come up with something new to screw a consumer with and earn himself a bonus check, or maybe just to retain his standard paycheck?
EIther way, when a tech starts plotting new billing procedures, software barriers are the first things created.
Thanks....I wondered HOW that worked......now I know...although, it seems like that's kind of NORMAL advertising practices.....the MORE you PAY, the MORE you get SEEN/HEARD......
"Thanks....I wondered HOW that worked......now I know...although, it seems like that's kind of NORMAL advertising practices.....the MORE you PAY, the MORE you get SEEN/HEARD......"
Well, that could be true, but they also charge separate for advertising.
Actually, I think the issue is: Should a search engine return links to the pages that best match the query, or should it return the links that pay the most.
I suppose it is a matter of the definition of "Search Engine" but when I use a search engine, I think it should give the best links. Silly me, I expect the search engines to do what they are supposed to do.
Suppose you wanted to search through old emails in outlook and the program only returned the ones for which the sender paid extra. It sure isn't a real search, now is it?
You can already prioritize traffic based on access control lists (ip addresses) and protocol types. Of course for an internet site to defeat this would simply require the registration of new DNS entries, then the ISP would have to reconfigure their routers.
It does smack of B2B extortion though.
Nah, this is about manipulating routers to filter or delay packets. It would be completely out of the end user's control.
Ah Ha.....
So......which search engine do you use most???
As a consumer, I pay for x speed. I can buy faseter, I can buy slower, but for x dollars I get y speed. Now if you want to create a differential in download performance within the speed that I am paying for, you have to slow down the downloads for some to creat a relative improvement for others. The only alternative would be to in effect upgrade all users, and then throttle down some services to current levels - in effect giving me a $20 to $40 a month upgrade.
Now could they charge Yahoo enough per month to make up for tens of thousands of $20 upgrades? Probably not. So the logical conclusion is that they will have to slow down some, not speed up the others. And at that point, I'll shop at the local cable provider.
This isn't like capitalism where everybody can win. This is a finite bandwidth pie, where everybody gets an equal slice, and he wants to give a bigger slice to those who pay for it. Some getting bigger slices means the others will get smaller slices. IOW, pay or have the experience of your customers degraded.
Of course, he couches this in "Let's first give everybody a smaller slice (give the consumer less for his money right now) and then let companies pay to get bigger slices."
In addition, he wants to purposely shrink the slices of services that compete with their own services (VOIP), and that sounds severely anti-competitive to me.
As stated earlier. No mention of reducing QoS is mentioned in the article.
Backbone providers don't get swamped. If every backbone had it's bandwidth pegged then it'd be reasonable to argue that ensuring packet prioritization degrades others, but that's not the case. All this is doing is suggesting content providers can pay more to make sure their pings don't drop.
Where did he say anythign about degrading anyone elses service?
LOL!!!!!!! That was a good one!
CA....
Funny, that matches the joke at Slashdot, "It sure would be tragic if your users started getting 1500ms ping times, wouldn't it mister dot com?"
Where did he say anythign about degrading anyone elses service?
That was clearest in the subject of VOIP, "Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering."
That's because BellSouth will be giving priority to it's own offering. Just like when BellSouth offers IPTV they'll be making sure that lag doesn't reduce the quality of the TV service.
Yep, anti-competitive, rolling back the the advances made by VOIP in breaking the stranglehold that telcoms traditionally had on telephone service.
So you want the gov't to come in and mandate BellSouth give worse service?
Bellsouth wants to give better service. What's wrong with that?
No, I want the law to remain as it is: providers give equal service. Imagine it at the .com level, you're already paying out the nose for bandwidth at your ISP, then along comes BellSouth, saying "Better pay more if you want our customers to still be able to get your vidoes fast." Or you're a VOIP company and they say "We know as a small, lean provider you offer better service than us at a lower price, so we're going to cut the quality of your service unless you pay up, making your service as expensive as ours."
Nothing about that sounds wrong to you?
Prioritized. It means given priority, in this case in a system with finite resources. If one thing is given priority, others must degrade.
The backbone providers aren't maxing their bandwidth. If you think BST doesn't have a good backbone then you don't know BST. This isn't Joe Bob's Cable Co. and Waffle Emporium. We can prioritize traffic out the whazzo and still have excess speed to spare.
Why prioritize if you have speed to spare? If everybody's already getting top-speed service, there are two options to give one person even better service: Upgrade the infrastructure, making companies pay to take advantage of the upgrade, or lower the baseline of service, making companies pay to get what they used to have. Nothing indicated they were planning on a major upgrade.
And you still think purposely cutting the quality of competitors' VOIP offerings in order to promote their own is legit?
There is one place in capitalism that the government does serve a good purpose: to prevent abuses from a monopoly. Bandwidth providers do need to be regulated to provide open pipe. This is like a company owning some roads and saying that only when car companies that pay a fee can their customers drive in the fast lane.
In many, many areas of the country high speed access is still a monopoly. I only have only one option. If my access provider decided to tier services (especially voip), it would completely prevent my use of other voip providers. The most competitive market will be one where bandwidth and content are kept separate.
' And you still think purposely cutting the quality of competitors' VOIP offerings in order to promote their own is legit?'
Once again, nothing suggests cutting speed of competitors.
This is about end users and their pipe. Priority doesn't matter much on the backbone because it's a really fat pipe. But if you're a Vonage customer if our VOIP traffic is treated as normal traffic it'll get dropped and lagged when you max out your normal connection on downloading files. But if Vonage pays a little extra to make sure their traffic gets priority then you VOIP will work wonderfully.
So either you advocate:
1. Bellsouth giving everyone priority thus giving no one priority
2. Or no one getting priority so everyone has to suffer with crappy VOIP service if they use their internet connections max speed.
Here's something that'll help you understand this better.
http://www.convergedigest.com/Bandwidth/archive/010910TUTORIAL-rgallaher1.htm
Saying that prioritizing trafic will slow down the rest is like saying Express Mail slows down regular mail.
Only what he said: "should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering."
But if you're a Vonage customer if our VOIP traffic is treated as normal traffic it'll get dropped and lagged when you max out your normal connection on downloading files.
Now you seem to be talking about the pipe to the house. My cheap home router has that feature. The Vonage VOIP routers they had at Best Buy for free with a service agreement have that feature. I set mine so that BitTorrent doesn't slow down HTTP, POP or SSL. I don't need my favorite e-commerce shopping site to have to pay my ISP to do that, because that means I pay more.
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