From the telco point of view
From the telco point of view, “consumers” are connected to “content” over the internet by three different pipes: (1) the big connection between “content provider” and a backbone; (2) the backbone itself (the biggest pipe of all); and (3) the connection between the “consumer” and the backbone.
The network neutrality debate is about the third segment — the piece between home and backbone. That piece is offered by (at most) a duopoly in the U.S. — large cable and phone companies who aren't competing very hard. The Bells are the result of anticompetitive behavior (and are quickly re-monopolizing), and the cablecos have been the beneficiaries of exclusive franchises for a long time.
The telcos say: Don't create regulation that is worse than the problem! So far, all these abuses you're worried about are theoretical. Google is well-armed — they can sue if there's a problem in the future. And “consumers” are used to reaching Google and other “content providers,” and they'll complain if they can't.
The two simple, sound-bite responses to the telco point of view:
1. You've Told Us to Assume Abuses. Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T, said: “There seems to be a mentality [on the part of online companies] that they can put more and more through our pipes for free. . . We're the ones who built the network. You cannot make that sort of investment if you can't make a return on the capital. They're more than welcome to use our networks, but if they do, they're going to have to pay. It's not free.”
This means that carriers plan to charge “content sources” for crossing their broadband access points to reach “consumers.” That's differential treatment. In the context of the market control that the telcos have, that will be immediately abusive — of course they'll favor their own content and try to make exclusive deals.
2. Don't Turn the Internet Into a Cable System. What's all this about “consumers” and “content”? We know that Americans like to post material of their own online. Almost 50 million of us have already done that, and teenagers have grown up with interactive media — almost 60% of them have created and shared content online. We're users, not consumers. You're dimming our expectations — we don't expect to be able to upload with ease, and we wish we had the same kind of broadband access as South Korea.
A third, meta-is-bettah point is this: The telcos are wrong to think of the internet as a combination of three pipe segments. Instead, as David Weinberger says:
The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care.
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6 Responses to “From the telco point of view”
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A few criticisms:
1. It's inaccurate to refer to “the backbone” as though it's a single entity–it's a large collection of diverse networks owned by a variety of players.
2. The network neutrality debate should be about the third segment, but most of the bills in Congress define broadband more broadly so that they potentially affect all three categories of pipes (mistakenly, in my opinion).
3. The fact that consumers also post content doesn't by itself change the eyeball/content provider distinction. Much consumer-posted content (YouTube, Google Video, blog posts, message boards, etc.) is put on servers on content providers. It's pretty easy from a backbone provider perspective to see the difference between an eyeball customer and a content provider customer–the eyeball customers are pulling in a lot more data than they're pushing out, and vice versa for the content customers. The big exception is peer-to-peer filesharing, which ends up being a wash from the backbone provider perspective because it's eyeball-to-eyeball traffic that doesn't hit the content provider networks (though it will cross backbone provider networks as it transits between different eyeball providers).
BTW, you're still blocking any comments or trackbacks from me that reference my blog in the content URL.
Thanks — this comment got through.
Oh, I also intended to comment on this claim:
“That piece is offered by (at most) a duopoly in the U.S. — large cable and phone companies who aren't competing very hard.”
This is not correct, at least under the definition of “broadband” being used in proposed net neutrality legislation. At my blog I posted a list of options for broadband in the metropolitan Phoenix area that I can get at or near my home (and I didn't count all of the business options that I can bring to my home over Qwest last-mile circuits, including T1s from a variety of ISPs): Qwest DSL, Covad DSL (a business option over Qwest copper), Cox cable, Sprint Broadband (residential wireless point-to-point), Sprint EVDO, Verizon EVDO, Alltel EVDO, HughesNet satellite, and City of Tempe metro wireless (doesn't actually reach my home since I'm a few miles west of the Tempe border, but I'm frequently in Tempe so it's a service I could use). The City of Chandler also plans to build a municipal wireless network.
So your “at most” qualification is incorrect.
My list has been quibbled with by Douglas Ross on the grounds that most of these don't count as broadband for some reason for another (in fact he really wants to dismiss anything short of fiber to the home, a standard by which there are *no* broadband options in Phoenix), which I find disingenuous given that they meet the definition in the net neutrality legislation.
(P.S., my previous comment got through because I changed the “contact URL” to point to something other than my blog, which is at lippard.blogspot.com.)
Jim -
Your comment on broadband availability overlooks a significant portion of the US - namely, rural America.
Certainly, major metropolitan areas have a good selection of broadband providers. This is not true for most rural areas, where the selection is frequently limited to either the incumbent telco, or the cable company, and frequently not both.
Wireless providers, including 802.11, EVDO/EDGE/etc and even pre 802.16 WIMAX providers, have serious limitations: line of sight and terrain, particularly in the Western States and the Appalacians, prevent wireless deployments.
The real story is that for nearly all of rural America, broadband availability is extremely limited and there is little to no competition here.
Nor is there ANY incentive on the part of the telcos or the cable companies to serve rural areas. Nothing in any of the legislation currently under consideration changes this, and I believe this is a much bigger problem than “net neutrality”.
As a network engineer, I view with high amounts of scepticism the plans of the telcos to discriminate traffic across their large backbones. It has been conclusively shown for many years now that a “dumb” network at high speeds is much more effective, efficient and reliable than a “smart” network which attempts to prioritize packets based on content.
Roger: Rural communities having two or fewer options doesn't change “at most…duopoly” into a true statement. I'll certainly agree with you that there are locations with 1 and even 0 options. But I recently saw an estimate somewhere that more than 60% (not sure if this was the exact figure but it was >50%) of zip codes have 4 or more broadband options.
Sounds like you'd like to see a universal service fund for broadband.
As for QoS, any proposal that bans what my employer, Global Crossing, does with it today strikes me as idiotic. We carry public Internet, VoIP, IP-VPN, and IP-Video traffic over the same core network, using QoS to give preference to VoIP, IP-Video, and IP-VPN over public Internet in conditions of congestion (which we try very hard to avoid, but it happens–e.g., a nice-sized DDoS attack can make it happen). Dave Siegel has covered this in a bit more detail at http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/tiered-peering and Xiao Xipeng has discussed it here (PDF): http://www.eurongi2006.upv.es/download/Xiao_Xipeng_NGI2006.pdf
I'm not sure about USF for universal broadband. However, if we are going to give carte blanche duopoly to the bells and the cablecos, I think they should be required to build out to serve ALL of their near monopoly areas.
I don't think any legislation aimed at the TCP/IP stack is appropriate. I was not for any of the recently proposed “net neutrality” legislation because I think no one in Congress has any idea what they're talking about.
I appreciate the pointer to Dave Siegel's blog. He makes many good points. The key one is this:
“Global Crossing continues to have one of the highest quality Internet backbone in spite of it being in the lowest priority class, because we continue to design the network to perform at a high level of quality.”
While I can believe this is true for Global Crossing - however I don't have any direct experience with your employer - I wholly believe this statement is not true of any of the bells.
The at&t backbone network, from a customer perspective, is most emphatically not designed for high performance. I do not believe that they are capable of doing QoS to the level that you describe at Global Crossing. I believe this is true of Verizon and BellSouth as well. Qwest may have somewhat better handle on network optimization.
The cablecos may have QoS capabilites up the sleeve with DOCSIS 3.0 - from their customers to their network centers - but I don't believe their backbones are optimzied for QoS either.
Both of these groups of companies make lots of posturing about “not limiting any traffic” but I believe with their current network topologies they are not prepared to implement the level of QoS they want to, and it will directly impact their consumer and business customers negatively.
I believe that there are opportunities here both for companies like Global Crossing and smaller ISPs who can buy bandwidth from high-quality network providers, to sell to discriminating customers who do not want the limited broadband service that the bells currently offer.