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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (12656)	1/3/2006 5:14:15 PM
From: tech101	Respond to of 46821

Access Neutrality -- American Telecommunication Industry Is At the Crossroad Again Imagine the following scenario: one of the interstate highway owners installs a toll booth at your driveway and charges, or even blocks if they will, whoever comes to your door – postman, delivery truck, garbage collector, your guests, … even your own cars unless the car comes from the toll booth installer’s interstate highway – just because it happens to also own your driveway. That is the scenario to our telecommunication industry and Internet access environment if the incumbents succeed in their effort to charge content providers based on the incumbents’ preference and discriminate what users access based on the source of the data as declared in the widely cited Nov. 7, 2005 interview with BusinessWeek Online by the AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr.: "What [Google, Microsoft, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it." When we talk about “Network Neutrality”, we actually and unconsciously think about the Internet “Access Neutrality” because the Internet backbone consist of tens Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3 carriers and content providers pay based on use, rather than flat fees or free. The failure to address Access Neutrality is the primary cause why America’s broadband and Internet access have lagged far behind; It is also the culprit that spoiled the 1996 telecommunication deregulation and made all the CLECs, including AT&T and MCI disappear; Again, without access neutrality, a local phone call 12 miles away now costs 3-5 times more than a call to Europe, Australia, Canada, and many Asian countries with a calling card. A family’s driveway is not an open space for competition. It is a limited and unique resource. The local access and First/Last Mile to the Internet is our driveway to the freeway system. 100 mbps is about the bandwidth for any individual and family needed for the foreseeable future. A FTTH or DOCSIS coaxial cable is all we need to access any contents on the Internet – perhaps backed up by Broadband by Power Line (BPL) and WiMax. How many driveways do we need for each family? How many fiber or coaxial cable do we need to each family to access the Internet and the outside World? "The threat of Internet discrimination is a real and present danger to consumers," as Putala of EarthLink said. EarthLink would not object to having phone companies offer "different speeds and different pricing of Internet service ... to all consumers to accomplish network management," he said. "But once a consumer has purchased the right to use the express lane, they should be able to use that express lane for all applications, not just those applications their ... provider would prefer." By the incumbents’ plan, every content provider has to pay dearly to access their customers. If they want to build their own access, they would have to bear the high costs and cause enormous waste of resources, potentially destroying our environment by digging our curb and driveway many times. In the meantime, all the competitive carriers could disappear because of the high cost to access end customers. Could American bear such consequence? The access to the Internet needs control over such thing as spam, virus, …… or even illegal peer-to-peer traffic in that matter. However, the access should be controlled by the family itself, or put in an independent entity. Leave the control of our access and the First/Last Mile to the incumbents, who also own part of backbones and are entering contents distribution business is a serious conflict of interest. Why not let us have a public auction for the right to build the high-speed First/Mile to every home for true "access neutrality" if the incumbents are unwilling to do it? Why not allow our municipal to do it just like our electricity and sewer system to take back and control our own “information driveway”? If British people can successfully separate the First/Last Mile from BT and implement access neutrality, why can’t we American? American telecommunication industry is at the crossroad again. In conclusion: 1. Network Neutrality is actually Access (Firs/Last Mile) Neutrality. 2. The access line (First/Last Mile), like a family’s driveway or sewer, is a limited resource. 3. The access line should be controlled by an independent entity or by the municipal, like the driveway to the family itself. Tech101

To: ftth who wrote (12656)	1/19/2006 9:08:05 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

ftth, I began drafting a response to this excellent post of yours back in December, but it went off into entropy somewhere. But this was classic ftth. Kudos! That ISPs would be called upon to determine what is lawful and what is not is not in their purview. It demands that they perform deep packet inspection, for one thing, and it also presumes a level of oversight and authority that they do not possess. Furthermore, it imposes a burden on them for which they will never see any compensation, which would have the effect of putting additional undue stress on their financials at a time when they can least afford it. That said, the simplest way for an incumbent to 'degrade' service is to simply let traffic build up and not do anything about it. No capacity adjustments, no route tuning, no filtering of spam (or lessening it), etc. When these lapses occur the worst effects of the 'best effort' model become apparent, and those who pay for prioritization can still get through unscathed. But what if traffic doesn't increase to those levels? The incumbents aren't going to leave anything to chance, which is why we see the beginnings of other assurances being implemented, such as IMS. Who knows what path to the future this set of specifications will take, if gone unchecked? I don't. But this much I do know: There's an awful lot to those specifications to allow anyone who wanted to seriously become pro-actively restrictive toward users who refuse to come up with the vig. FAC