InternetWeek | News | Net Neutrality Finds Bipartisan Support

I’ve seen a few other comments on ‘net neutrality’ lately, but this article from Internetweek had a link to the telecom group against it, Handsofftheinternet. So I went to their page but it looks like it just got started because they say they are going to explain their side and then don’t.

It will be interesting to see what they will say to justify a tiered pricing model that will allow them to throttle services from some content providers while allowing those that pay extortionate rates to get through unthrottled.

The one element they do mention, and that I know is true, is that it takes a lot of capital to build a routing network and even more to maintain and upgrade to network to support new services. I believe the access pricing should be consistent across the board based of volume of traffic and quality of service.

I suppose it is the QoS that will lead the way with tiered pricing, but the only differentiator at this time should be streaming video/voice quality vs. bursty data packet quality. That’s a tricky road to navigate. Users who are doing Google, reading blogs, doing e-bay, looking at photos, etc are doing bursty data. They won’t notice if a packet gets lost and needs to be retransmitted. That’s what IP is for. The content providers retransmit all the time now.

The streaming voice and video is another story. There, the user will notice a dropped packet because there is a blip in the video or a click in the audio. There isn’t enough time to retransmit a lost packet and maintain a real-time data stream. And providing that sort of quality does run into a lot of infrastructure overhead, capital.

But if some telecom company comes along and says that it will provide streaming video from its servers and guarantees no blips to the end user and won’t make that same guarantee for video from GreenCine then you have monopolistic abuse.

It will be interesting to see how they justify it.