NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] [IP] Re: Third Major ISP AT&T Testing Bandwidth Caps in the Fall [with a comment by me djf]
- ------- Forwarded Message From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> To: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com> Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 08:40:59 -0700 Subject: [IP] Re: Third Major ISP AT&T Testing Bandwidth Caps in the Fall [with a comment by me djf] Aurthor requested to be anonymous due to employment djf "One theory for why bandwidth caps might alleviate some congestion, especially upstream congestion, is that it will inhibit users from engaging in activities where they do not know how much bandwidth they are actually using, for example, P2P seeding. A P2P user may be less inclined to leave their computer on 24 hours a day to seed content if they have no idea whether the end result could be that they exceed their monthly cap (and face large fees). However, if that is in fact one of the ISPs' goals, they should consider only imposing a bandwidth cap on upstream traffic. This would negate any claims that this is being done as a "CLEAR competitive advantage in favor" of their own video offerings. By the way, another reason ISPs may be resorting to this model is because every other engineering network management technique that has been tried and made public has been used by proponents for net neutrality to launch new calls for legislation or FCC regulation. Even the latest proposals to move away from protocol-agnostic management techniques to "fair share" management have been criticized as discriminatory against particular users; there is currently an active discussion about this between certain participants in the IETF's P2P Infrastructure Workshop. And according to some advocates who participated in the P2Pi Workshop, "discrimination based on user-history is no better than protocol-discriminatory behavior."" - - ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com - ------- End of Forwarded Message