Net Neutrality imho is the deleterious treatment of competitive traffic, not the beneficial treatment of your own. As long as competitors can make the same deal, or continue to operate, Net Neutrality isn’t violated.
And how much traffic does cellular involve, well, with tethering and femtocells, I guess you can obtain unlimited?
I don’t buy the argument that we should reinvent the Internet because some applications work badly on congested networks (eg VoIP and streamed video). My view is that
- Users understand and accept variable quality as the price of the huge choice afforded them by the open Internet. 2.5 billion paying customers can’t be wrong.
- Most of the time, on decent network connections, stuff works acceptably well
- There’s a lot that can be done with clever technology such as adaptivity, intelligent post-processing to “guess” about dropped packets, multi-routing and so forth, to mitigate the quality losses
- As humans, we’re pretty good at making choices. If VoIP doesn’t work temporarily, we can decide to do the call later or send an email instead. Better applications have various forms of fallback mode, either deliberately or accidentally.
- Increasingly, we all have multiple access path to the Internet – cellular, various WiFi accesses and so forth. Where we can’t get online with enough quality, it’s often coverage that’s the problem, not capacity anyway.
- Anything super-critical can go over separate managed networks rather than the Public Internet, as already happens today
Excellent. Many good points on the topics.
Last year, when Comcast acquired NBC Universal they had to agree to terms as set forth by the Department Of Justice and the FCC regarding how they would treat competitive content delivered over their network. One of the points in that document says that, “Comcast shall not prioritize Defendants??? Video Programming or other content over other Persons??? Video Programming or other content.” While Comcast agreed to these terms and said they would not prioritize their video traffic over someone like Netflix, that’s exactly what they are doing.
Hamish MacEwan 