NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Is network unneutrality necessarily bad?
On Nov 8, 2007 1:36 PM, The Anarcat <anarcat@anarcat.ath.cx> wrote: > Why? Because they are in a conflict of interest. Their interest is not > to provide good QoS to everyone, it's to maximize their return on > investment. So what ISPs usually do is under-provisionning: say they > sell 1000 3mbps ADSL connections, they're *not* going to buy an > associated 3gbps pipe on the other site. They'll buy less bandwidth and > hope that the users don't go all together download stuff at the same > time. ... > So to answer your questions more clearly: > > Yes, network unneutrality is necessarly bad, unless it's sold as such. So why is underprovisioning necessarily bad? If you want a fully provisioned link, you can get one today. But there is a reason why a dedicated T1 costs an order of magnitude more than your home DSL line. Do you pay $500/month for a T1? One can argue that the consumer needs visibility into the underprovisioning and a way to compare the effective bandwidth from their (two) competing providers, but explaining it in a useful way is hard (measuring is hard too). But why should one expect an ISP to not be underprovisioned? Any ISP that tried to provision for peak load of all users in the worst case would quickly find itself out of business, either from losing money on the upstream link or from losing customers to vastly cheaper alternatives. And today's "correctly provisioned" can also quickly translate to tomorrow's underprovisioned, as usages grow to consume the available bandwidth, getting us back to the traffic prioritization problem. _______________________________________________ NNSquad mailing list information: http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad