[sllug-members]: Comcast has problems

[Corey Edwards]

On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 13:32 -0700, Lonnie Olson wrote:
> Do you really want a complete idiot (Congress) to write the laws that 
> tell ISPs what they can, and cannot do with their links?

Oh c'mon. They're not complete idiots. They can tell the difference
between dump trucks and tubes. An amoeba can't do that.

>    I personally 
> like traffic shaping, prioritization, and such.  It makes my customers 
> very happy when their VOIP connections don't get lagged behind all the 
> bittorrent traffic.  So far, all Net Neutrality bills would explicitly 
> forbid me to do any traffic shaping.  Now that is bad.

You have a valid point. To take the devil's advocate, let's say ISP
Alice decides to offer a VoIP service to her customers. Alice sees that
other services like Vonage and Skype are using up all the bandwidth. Is
it fair for Alice to put her VoIP packets ahead of Vonage and Skype? If
she doesn't, is it fair that she's paying the cost of supporting someone
else's services? When there's not enough bandwidth, service for
everybody starts to suck. Shaping is just a way to even out the suckage.

> Currently, we live in a free market.  That means you can switch ISPs if 
> you don't like their style of prioritization/shaping, or even that of 
> their upstream providers.  I would definitely switch my backbone 
> connection, if they start deprioritizing Google.  My customers would be 
> mad if I didn't.

Not everyone has that luxury. Is Internet access becoming such a
necessary tool that we feel it should be available to everyone, much
like we decided the telephone or snail mail should be? Consider how much
fun it is to deal with the phone company or go to the post office. Is
that really the direction we want the Internet to head?

I'm still not decided on the net neutrality debate, so I'm most
interested in your response.

Corey