Net Neutrality is More than Meets the Eye

RealClearPolitics ^ | June 1, 2006 | Ken Yarmosh

[advance_copy]

Hey, what happened to the "bandwidth glut"?

[Minus_The_Bear]

I initially opposed Net Netraulity but when I found out Clinton spokesman Micke McCurry was heading the opposition it made me think.

[ChadGore]

It's about software objects, and both parties know it.

Anyone who has spent any time on a 1G Ethernet network understands it.

Let's take http://maps.Goggle.com as an example.

When you "click and drag" the map around, the adjacent part of the picture loads so fast in a cable connection that it's almost like it was on your hard drive, in other words latency is less than ~50 ms.

This is no big deal today, each little image is not that big, and it is transfered so fast and reliably that it's taken for granted by the user. The Telco and not google, has delivered latency so low that it makes their "application" run fast, and google makes a lot of money from it.

If every time you clicked and dragged you got a flickering add-vert from SBC, you'd know who was delivering the content.

As we scale from Meg to Gig to Peta speeds, the value of latency in the software development world goes up.

If the telco was smart, they would edit the google HTML on the fly and insert their own advert into every other frame of the redraw for 0.01 second and then start negotiations for it's removal.

[Wuli]

I have just as fast of an Intenet experience with my DSL line from Verizon as do all of my neighbors with cable modems and any of my friends in the NYC metro area with cable modems (I've tested all of them).

It is my experience that the touted distinctions in speed between cable modems and DSL is a distinction without a practical difference.

The only faster experience I ever had is with an Internet connection achieved by a fiber-optic cable and router system connecting to a fiber-optic intranet backbone on the campus of Columbia University. Their campus backbone has a direct fiber-optic connection to the Internt through servers run by NYSERNET - New York State Education and Research Network. NYSERNET built and operates the lower NY state primary segment of the Internet on massive servers in the Columbia School of Engineering. That operation was established in 1987 and was upgraded many times since then. It was more like "sitting" on the Internet than "connecting" to it.

[Wuli]

Glut or not glut, it has to be maintained, and paid for. Maybe you'd like to start a venture capital firm, buy some of the "glut" and charge less for access through it than the telecoms? Oh, they're already losing money on it, so if you charge less, how will you profit from it?

I think part of the glut is still there, due to cable and wireless and due to advances in technology on the software side of sending the content.

Other technological advances, like sending digital signals directly in the electric grid, represented by an identifiable wavelength (signal) (tested at speeds faster than DSL or cable modems, on standard copper electric wires), indicate the telecommunications back bone"glut", built out in the late 1990s could last some time.

Of course, additional innovations could, somehow, make as yet unforseen advances that turn that "glut" into a shortage (temporarily).