"Customer Tiering" + "Provider Tiering"
= No QoS Fee at First/Last Mile + QoS at Backbone
Me to, "vehemently oppose Whitacre teiring as bad for democracy, bad for business, and, in the end, bad for the broadband providers themselves."
Period.
As "One of the two Democrats on the FCC, Jonathan Adelstein, said network neutrality could be resolved with more bandwidth. "You don't need to worry about priority access if you've got 100 megabits going to the home," he said. "Hopefully as we get more capacity those kinds of questions become much less significant."
But you can never get unlimited bandwidth for the backbone and the long haul - at least for the next 10 years to come.
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QoS“Customer tiering” is when a provider sells different speeds at different costs, e.g., A 1.5 mbps pipe to the home costs $29/month, a 5 mbps costs $50/month, and a 100 mbps costs $100. The customer chooses a speed and pays for it, even though the pipe could provide higher speed. But all the bits coming down or going up the pipe are treated equally by the ISP.
“Provider provisioning” is where a provider of content or services invests money to make his content or service move faster or more reliably using technology available to everyone. For example, iTunes using Akami or caching to move content closer to subscribers. Here, the provider makes the decisions, but all bits are handled equally by the networks they pass through.
“Whitacre tiering,” named in honor of AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, the first and most enthusiastic proponent of the practice, is where an ISP decides to prioritize packets based on payments from third parties or from a desire to favor its own packets/content/services over that of others. |
