The following articles woke me up to the way certain vendors treat
users who fully take advantage of the very services they promote:
PC Magazine - Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs
Comcast Broadband Dispute Blog
I
could chalk that up to poor customers service, but then another article
caught my attention and my mind somehow linked the two situations:
The Internet is Falling!
Now,
to speak of the first issue, I am a Comcast customer, and I use it for
remotely accessing my workplace at times. I am an IT Manager for
my company (among other roles). So I download new OSes now and
then, and I join webinars and I also play around with
video-conferencing and VoIP. So I guess I would consider myself a
fairly heavy-side-of-average user when it comes to my bandwidth
usage. I don’t, however, put an undue strain on the neighborhood
by constantly downloading ISO images (CD or DVD digital copies) or by
videoconferencing for most of the day, so I doubt that they would
consider me a high-risk user.
In my thinking, justified by some
research of the issue, this kind of situation cannot be nearly so
isolated that Comcast would be the only ones dealing with the issue,
however. In fact, Verizon and Earthlink have both mentioned that
their policies generally don’t cut off users, but throttle them
back. Imagine that, using technology that is fairly easy to
implement to continue offering your service to people that use it to
it’s full extent without allowing them to saturate your network with
their traffic. I’m willing to bet that the bad press and the
0.05% of users you ticked off would not be nearly so bad if you simply
said: “we’re going to throttle you guys back during peak usage times
because you are using an abnormal amount of bandwidth in comparison to
the average user.” It would be especially beneficial if they
provided the profile by which they made those decisions such that users
understood what it was about their usage that was causing problems.
Speaking
on the second reference to Internet Overload… My thinking is
inline with the core company representatives that commented. In
other words: “do people really think that the core Internet companies
are that stupid that they don’t see the trends in bandwidth usage and
account for the potentials of bandwidth consumption rates rising by
abnormally large factors?” “Do people really think that a bunch
of idiots are running the core Internet backbone?” Come on…
Then
I saw a comment that inferred that some of the telecommunications
vendors are talking about the inability to adequately pay for the
infrastructure upgrades that will be required to support these boosts
in bandwidth consumption. Come on, how much do we pay every month
for these services and how often do we hear about new technology that
makes the wires we currently use able to carry many times more
bandwidth than they currently do? Do people honestly think that
we’re going to “run out” of technological advances anytime soon?
Granted, the technology does cost money, but it shouldn’t be bled out
of the customers, but instead taken from the ranks of the customer
service and other administrative departments at these companies that
are so poorly rated already. My bet is that half as many people,
properly trained, could take much better care of more people than do
the current staff. You could even pay them more, I’d
imagine. I’ve been on both sides of that equation too.
More
thoughts on the subject postured that if ISPs properly qualified
services (not in a pay-for-level of qualification style, but a standard
protocol-style class and quality-of-service style), they would be able
to head off the majority of the problems that will effectively saturate
their networks. They would then be able to focus on upgrading
only the parts necessary to continue providing appropriate service
levels for the major popular protocols of the day.
I must admit,
however, that the “devil’s advocate” side of my brain postures that
we’ve been classifying levels of service based on bandwidth allocation
for years. I mean, that’s what fractional T1’s are all
about. Or what is a T1 vs. a T3 or OC3? Now that Intel has
reached a critical mass of CPU speed, they’re focusing on bettering
other aspects of the CPU architecture such as number of cores, speed of
the bus, latency, etc. Bandwidth has almost gotten to the point
where it is not so much a matter of pure bandwidth as it is of latency
and jitter (two terms heard pounded to death in the VoIP world).
The truth of the matter is that people will start to pay a different
amount (and probably do already) for the difference between a simple
bandwidth link and a link that has low latency to major parts of the
Internet. Have I missed something, or is this not what Net
Neutrality is effectively against?
Anyway, I’m probably missing
something in the Net Neutrality scene. I’ll have to do more
research before I can resolve the debate going on in my little head of
what I think is right. My gut says that neither side is
completely right, but neither is completely wrong either. Such is
the life of politics, business and technology. You can’t just
separate them and work on one level in such a broad ranging topic of
discussion.
