Brad Ideas - On the two-tier internet - Comments

Bandwidth

John Daly — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:24:02 -0800

Isn't an oc3 connection very expensive? Bandwidth at that speed is for large corporations with deep pockets.

They're already testing this...

Phaedrus — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 19:24:54 -0800

See www.numetra.com & www.interstream.com. Basically, it looks like they plan on throttling the peer to peer, leaving the regular broadband speeds about the same & letting the streaming video get guaranteed service. I doubt it will have any impact on our current broadband experience -- unless you already have 10 or 20 Mbps.

That would be hard to pull off

brad — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:33:31 -0800

Every ISP buys a pipe to one or more major peering points. Either they buy their own pipe, or they buy carriage from another ISP including the large telcos. Those pipes contracts, to the best of my knowledge, are priced on bandwidth, not on application. If a telco tried to change the pricing, the ISPs would switch to any available competition, and there is plenty of competition in this part of the field, and plenty of unlit dark fiber to compete with.

Google probably has its own pipes into the peering points, I would be very surprised if they don’t have pipes into almost all of them. It’s one of the reasons Google is always one of the fastest and most reliable sites. If I can’t ping google, the cause is almost always my own link, not any intermediate link on the net.

The only pipes the carriers own on which there is little competition are the first mile pipes to our homes. It is only on these that they can say, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

It isn't the ISP doing this...

Dan — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 13:45:51 -0800

It is large Tier I carriers like AT&T and Bell South. Chances are, your ISP "leases" a data pipe from one of the large Telcos. They would use this Large Data Pipe (a DS3, OC3, OC12 circuit) to connect your market to one of the Large Public Data Exchange points located in places like NY City, Washington, DC, San Jose, Atlanta, GA and Miami, FL.

The TELCO wants to charge EXTRA to bring GOOGLE and other "Content Providers" data to the Public Data Exchange point.

it is the large Telco's belief that since they own the lines, they have a right to prioritize the data flowing down those lines.

This, of course, ruins the current business model of places like Google and Blizzard and yahoo and will most definately drive up the cost of using the internet to individual users, resulting in pay per use subscription policies for things that have been traditionally ad based revenue generators.

Quite literally, this is the very last bastion of the free and open internet, and it's the large telco's that are doing this, not the ISP's.

good points, saw your comment on pulver

Alex Goldman — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 11:14:24 -0800

Like many observers, I think google should fight this now. I wrote an editorial about it: http://www.isp-planet.com/politics/2006/freedom.html. I think there are many young users who would never subscribe to an ISP that cut off or throttled google for their entire lifetimes.

[BTW would have preferred to use instead of strong but could not do so.]

On the two-tier internet

brad — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:20:11 -0800

Of late there’s been talk of ISPs somehow “charging” media-over-IP providers (such as Google video) for access to “their” pipes. This is hard to make sense of, since when I download a video from a site, I am doing it over my pipe, which I have bought from my ISP, subject to the contract that I have with it. Google is sending the data over their pipe, which they bought to connect to the central peering points and to my ISP. However, companies like BellSouth, afraid that voice and video will be delivered to their customers in competition with their own offerings, want to do something to stop it.

To get around rules about content neutrality on the network that ILEC based ISPs are subject to, they now propose this as a QOS issue. That there will be two tiers, one fast enough for premium video, and one not fast enough.

Today I’ve seen comments from Jeff Pulver and Ed Felten on possible consequences of such efforts. However, I think both directions miss something… (read on)