FCC Chief: AT&T Can Limit Net Bandwidth

[BigKahuna13]

Democrats doing something right!

Why do we need a law for this, if I'm paying let's say comcast for Internet service and I want to view content, say a video from Verizon, if they slow down my connection I'm going to switch providers and go to someone who dosen't screw with he service I'm paying for, consumer demand will drive business to the providers that don't slow the service they're paying for. Am I missing something?

I'm under the impression that it's not going to slow your connect.

For example, if you're going to download a video from googles site...verizon (the ISP) will get to charge google for bandwidth use.

This is the part I'm refering to;

"While the House bill endorses general net neutrality goals, the Senate bill would only instruct the FCC to study whether a net neutrality law is needed. Net neutrality advocates said the Senate bill fails to protect U.S. consumers against broadband providers that want to block or slow competing content or services."

Exactly. How I understand it....

Let's say 80% of Verizon ISP users download videos from videos.google.com, Verizon could inturn slow the end users connection to that content because it uses more of the ISP's bandwidth then say jabber.com *OR* the ISP can say to google.com that they use "x" amount of the ISP's bandwidth so they must pay the ISP "x" amount of dollars to retain the bandwidth they currently have.

The above legislature proposed by Democrats would put a stop to this. The first article outlines what the ISP's want to do to certain sites.

At least this is what I gather is happening.

Yes that's how it'll work. More importantly, the ISP can slow down connections to content that it finds objectionable. And I'm not talking about porn. An ISP that's owned by a rabid radical leftwinger could slow to a crawl traffic that comes from a site devoted to right-wing blogging, for example. That's the real worry.

btw, you may find Save the Internet interesting.

[XtremeJibber2001]

Why do we need a law for this, if I'm paying let's say comcast for Internet service and I want to view content, say a video from Verizon, if they slow down my connection I'm going to switch providers and go to someone who dosen't screw with he service I'm paying for, consumer demand will drive business to the providers that don't slow the service they're paying for. Am I missing something?

I'm under the impression that it's not going to slow your connect.

For example, if you're going to download a video from googles site...verizon (the ISP) will get to charge google for bandwidth use.

This is the part I'm refering to;

"While the House bill endorses general net neutrality goals, the Senate bill would only instruct the FCC to study whether a net neutrality law is needed. Net neutrality advocates said the Senate bill fails to protect U.S. consumers against broadband providers that want to block or slow competing content or services."

Exactly. How I understand it....

Let's say 80% of Verizon ISP users download videos from videos.google.com, Verizon could inturn slow the end users connection to that content because it uses more of the ISP's bandwidth then say jabber.com *OR* the ISP can say to google.com that they use "x" amount of the ISP's bandwidth so they must pay the ISP "x" amount of dollars to retain the bandwidth they currently have.

The above legislature proposed by Democrats would put a stop to this. The first article outlines what the ISP's want to do to certain sites.

At least this is what I gather is happening.

Yes that's how it'll work. More importantly, the ISP can slow down connections to content that it finds objectionable. And I'm not talking about porn. An ISP that's owned by a rabid radical leftwinger could slow to a crawl traffic that comes from a site devoted to right-wing blogging, for example. That's the real worry.

btw, you may find Save the Internet interesting.

Not to mention they'll probably kill u/l d/l speeds of torrent users, regardless if the user is d/l'ing legal content or not.

[XtremeJibber2001]

Will video break the Internet?

Wednesday, May 17, 2006; Posted: 4:58 a.m. EDT (08:58 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Every day, it seems, a new service pops up offering to send you video over the Internet. "Desperate Housewives," Stephen Colbert heckling the president, clips of bad dancers at wedding parties: It's all there.

You may be up for it, but is the Internet?

The answer from the major Internet service providers, the telephone and cable companies, is "no." Small clips are fine, but TV-quality and especially high-definition programming could make the Internet choke.

Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive.

To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.

Internet activists and consumer groups are vehemently against those plans, saying they amount to tilting the Internet's level playing field, one of the things that encourages innovation. They want legislation to guarantee a "neutral" Internet, but prospects appear slim.

At the heart of the debate is a key question: How much would it really cost the Internet carriers to provide a couple of hours of prime-time TV over their networks every day?

The carriers are playing their cards fairly close to their chest, but there are ways to get close to an answer.

One data point: As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc. An ISP's business is carrying data from that tap to the customer.

One megabit per second doesn't sound like that much, but ISPs spread that bandwidth out over their subscribers. Analysts estimate that ISPs sell around 30 times more bandwidth to their end users than they can connect simultaneously to the Internet (the figure probably varies widely from provider to provider).

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won't go through because there aren't enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the oversubscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Oversubscription doesn't present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it's not going to work.

"The plain truth is that today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect," according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.'s top lobbyist.

The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter.

To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth Corp.'s chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month's worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That's a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs.

If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth's data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth's business model.

But if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

"We don't expect to get to the point where we're charging anyone those kinds of prices for Internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet," Kafka said.

To deal with that, Kafka said says BellSouth might put caps on the amount of data that a residential user gets for free, and charge extra if the user goes over, much like cell phone users pay overages. Other options include charging content providers extra for guaranteed delivery, the kind of model that has raised the hackles of Internet content providers and activists.

However, Kafka's estimates for these costs aren't really BellSouth's. Like other telephone companies, they don't disclose their actual costs. Instead, Kafka's base figure of $1 for 2 gigabytes of data per month is based on an estimate by Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, and Burstein thinks Kafka has it wrong.

"Traffic just isn't moving up that fast," Burstein said. "It will go up and it will go up faster, but not fast enough to be dollars and cents that really matter."

Internet video is still just a small fraction of the total amount of video people watch, and that's unlikely to change overnight, in Burstein's opinion.

In fact, he said, Internet traffic has increased much more slowly than the prices of Internet-carrying equipment like switches and routers have fallen, and that trend is likely to continue.

Burstein believes the danger of letting the carriers charge extra for guaranteed delivery is that they'll put the spending for upgrades into creating that extra "toll lane," and won't reduce oversubscription in the rest of the network even though it would be cheap to do so.

Both Verizon and AT&T Inc. have said they won't degrade or block anyone's Internet traffic. But it's impossible to tell what goes on inside their networks.

The message: Stay tuned, and watch your download speeds.

[XtremeJibber2001]

Coming soon: The Web toll
New laws may transform cyberspace and the way you surf it
By Tim Folger
Popular Science

Thursday, May 25, 2006; Posted: 11:00 a.m. EDT (15:00 GMT)

What if the Internet were like cable television, with Web sites grouped like channels into either basic or premium offerings? What if a few big companies decided which sites loaded quickly and which ones slowly, or not at all, on your computer?

Welcome to the brave new Web, brought to you by Verizon, Bell South, AT&T and the other telecommunications giants (including PopSci and CNN.com's parent company, Time Warner) that are now lobbying Congress to block laws that would prevent a two-tiered Internet, with a fast lane for Web sites able to afford it and a slow lane for everyone else.

Specifically, such companies want to charge Web sites for the speedy delivery of streaming video, television, movies and other high-bandwidth data to their customers. If they get their way (Congress may vote on the matter before the year is out), the days of wide-open cyberspace are numbered.

As things stand now, the telecoms provide the lines -- copper, cable or fiber-optic -- and the other hardware that connects Web sites to consumers.

But they don't influence, or profit from, the content that flows to you from, say, cinemanow.com; they simply supply the pipelines. In effect, they are impartial middlemen, leaving you free to browse the entire Internet without worrying about connection speeds to your favorite sites.

That looks set to change. In April a House subcommittee rejected a measure by Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts (D) that would have prevented telecoms from charging Web sites extra fees based on bandwidth usage.

The telecom industry sees such remuneration as fair compensation for the substantial cost of maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure that makes high-bandwidth services, such as streaming video, possible.

Christopher Yoo, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, argues that consumers should be willing to pay for faster delivery of content on the Internet, just as many FedEx customers willingly shell out extra for overnight delivery. "A regulatory approach that allows companies to pursue a strategy like FedEx's makes sense," he says.

On a technical level, creating this so-called Internet fast lane is easy. In the current system, network devices called differentiated service routers prioritize data, assigning more bandwidth to, for example, an Internet telephone call or streaming video than to an e-mail message.

With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees.

What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing.

"Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them," says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. "They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising."

Worse still, Scott argues, the plan stands to sour your Web experience. If, for instance, your favorite blogger refused to ante up, her pages would load more slowly on your computer than would content from Web sites that had paid the fees.

Which brings up another sticking point: A tiered system would give established companies with deep pockets a huge competitive edge over cash-strapped start-ups consigned to slow lanes.

"We have to remember that some of the companies that we now consider to be titans of the Internet started literally as guys in a garage," Scott says."That's the beauty and the brilliance of the Internet, yet we're cavalierly talking about tossing it out the window."

[ski_adk]

In other words, kiss all those really cool and useful little free community sites goodbye (i.e. Killingtonzone.com).

UGH!!! This shiat really pisses me off!!! :x

[XtremeJibber2001]

In other words, kiss all those really cool and useful little free community sites goodbye (i.e. Killingtonzone.com).

UGH!!! This shiat really pisses me off!!! :x

I honestly can't see this passing....would really cripple the market IMHO

[ski_adk]

It's all in the marketing. If they want to do this, they will. They'll sell it by saying that the economy is losing billions of dollars a year in uncollected usage fees, etc. That will be followed up by saying that in order to maintain the Internet and to keep it running at all, this must happen. And I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of safety/homeland security stuff mixed in there too.

[XtremeJibber2001]

The house rejected the Net Neutrality Bill (HR5252) ... not sure how I missed this

http://news.com.com/House+rejects+Net+n ... nefd.pulse

[XtremeJibber2001]

To the Senate...things are not moving in a "good" direction.

Senate panel rejects Net neutrality in tie vote
Stevens: Supporters should 'build their own network'

June 28, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- A Senate committee on Wednesday rejected a proposal that would have required broadband providers to give their competitors the same speeds and quality of service as they give to themselves or their partners. The vote was an 11-11 tie.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee's 11-11 vote means the net neutrality amendment will not be added to a wide-ranging broadband bill as it goes to the Senate floor. The amendment, offered by Senators Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, and Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, would have prevented broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from charging extra based on the type of content transmitted by Internet-based companies.

Late Wednesday, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said he'll place a hold on the broadband bill because it lacks strong net neutrality requirements. By placing a hold on the bill, Wyden is saying he may object to the Senate beginning debate on that legislation. A hold on a bill can lead to a filibuster, if Senate leaders aren't able to fix the senator's objections.

"If [broadband providers] get their way, not only will you have to pay more for faster speeds, you’ll have to pay more for something you get for free today: unfettered access to every site on the World Wide Web," Wyden said on the Senate floor. "To me, that’s discrimination, pure and simple."

The amendment would bring new regulation to the Internet, committee Republicans argued. Snowe was the lone Republican voting for the amendment.

E-commerce companies pushing for net neutrality rules are "enormous" companies that want to profit from delivering multimedia content over networks broadband providers have built, said Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican and chairman of the committee.

"These people who argue they ought to be able to drop all this stuff on the Internet maybe ought to build their own network," Stevens said.

The committee's rejection of the proposal means the fight for net neutrality rules could be stalled for the year. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives approved its own version of a broadband bill but voted 269-152 to reject a net neutrality amendment.

Net neutrality backers said they will continue to push for a law as the bill heads to the full Senate. Among net neutrality supporters are several consumer groups as well as Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Snowe predicted that without a net neutrality law, large broadband carriers will block or degrade Web content from competitors, creating a slow lane for everyone but themselves and their business partners. Officials with AT&T and BellSouth Corp. have advocated a business plan that would allow them to charge extra fees for preferential delivery of some companies' Web content. The broadband providers need new business plans to pay for the roll-out of next-generation broadband networks, they argue.

Snowe rejected that argument, saying the broadband giants will bury small innovative companies that can't afford to pay extra fees.

"Consumers are going to have all the choice of a Soviet Union supermarket," she said."They will have access to that supermarket, but the choices will be dismal."

Consumer groups criticized the committee's rejection of the Snowe amendment, but the tie vote shows the issue is gaining momentum, said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a group advocating for media diversity.

"The Senate Commerce Committee handed control of Internet content to the telephone and cable companies," Gigi Sohn, president of consumer rights group Public Knowledge, said in an e-mail message. "The committee gave the telephone and cable companies something they have not had in the history of the Internet -- a way to control what goes over the 'Net."

Verizon Communications Inc. praised the committee for approving the underlying bill, which streamlines the local franchising requirements telecom providers must get before offering television services over Internet Protocol in competition with cable TV.

The committee also approved an amendment, offered by Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican, that would permanently extend a tax moratorium on Internet-only taxes such as access taxes. The Internet tax moratorium, which Congress has extended multiple times since 1998, expires in late 2007. A permanent extension is likely to face opposition in the full Senate from a group of lawmakers who say it ties the hands of local governments.

[Geoff]

In other words, kiss all those really cool and useful little free community sites goodbye (i.e. Killingtonzone.com).

UGH!!! This shiat really pisses me off!!! :x

That's not what this is about at all. Google has been making noises about entering the VoIP telephone and IP Streaming Video business. If everybody started using this over the "free" internet, the cable and telephone companies would go broke adding capacity to their networks to keep up with it and not get one penny of extra revenue. The reality is that the internet isn't "free" and the content providers with bandwidth-hog applications (phone & streaming video) are either going to have to pay for it or their traffic will start being shaped.

Some pissant low bandwidth web site like KZone ain't gonna be impacted by this.... unless somebody puts up a streaming video feed and a few thousand of us are all watching it at the same time.

[XtremeJibber2001]

In other words, kiss all those really cool and useful little free community sites goodbye (i.e. Killingtonzone.com).

UGH!!! This shiat really pisses me off!!! :x

That's not what this is about at all. Google has been making noises about entering the VoIP telephone and IP Streaming Video business. If everybody started using this over the "free" internet, the cable and telephone companies would go broke adding capacity to their networks to keep up with it and not get one penny of extra revenue. The reality is that the internet isn't "free" and the content providers with bandwidth-hog applications (phone & streaming video) are either going to have to pay for it or their traffic will start being shaped.

Some pissant low bandwidth web site like KZone ain't gonna be impacted by this.... unless somebody puts up a streaming video feed and a few thousand of us are all watching it at the same time.

It's much bigger than just VoIP and streaming media ... just so happens that's the content that uses the most bandwidth.

Imagine this ... YouTube.com was created in February of 2005 and lets users stream videos over the internet, for free. In just over a year, the site has catapulted to a huge arena. Today it serves 70M+ unique views a DAY.

Now just imagine how much bandwidth they use. If net neutrality is not passed, sites like YouTube will be charged out the wazoo. That means users get charged money, which means I have to spend more money, and it leaves less incentive for the young entreprenials hoping to enter the internet.

This example can be used all over the net. Just imagine if Google or another largely used website is being charged for its bandwidth use. The affect would effect us as consumers, potentially creating an enivornment where we have to pay fees, tolls, or access charges. It will become regulated and turn into the NJ Turnpike or Cable.

Look at cable today. I pay $80!!! For combined digital TV cable and cable internet, that's outrageous ... and now congress is heading towards a regulated internet where Comcast and AT&T will charge content providers money because they use bandwifth!? BS!

One thing is for sure, if Congress allows AT&T and Comcast to do this, the internet will never be the same and open source websites and free content websites like flickr, YouTube, Google Video, and others will be charging fees or disappear all together. Meanwhile, Comcast share holders will make huge profits.

Also, I frankly don't care if Comcast goes under. It's a free market, the internet age is driving innovation and will hopefully give consumers more options and cheaper alternatives. The days of Comcast over charging consumers is quickly coming to an end. Besides, Comcast isn't going to go broke over VoIP because VoIP isn't a solid alternative, yet. Look for HDMI conent delivered over fiber right to your PC to rule the future.

If you can honestly look at this situation and say "it's not that big of deal", you must be looking at it much differently than I.

[XtremeJibber2001]

Google says bill could spark antitrust battle

Says it will fight if broadband companies abuse power they could gain from U.S. legislators

July 05, 2006 (Reuters) -- Google Inc. warned yesterday that it will not hesitate to file antitrust complaints in the U.S. if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators.

The Senate Commerce Committee last week approved sweeping communications reform legislation that would make it easier for telephone companies like AT&T Inc. to offer subscription television to consumers.

But it narrowly rejected attempts by some lawmakers to strengthen safeguards on Internet service, which had pitted providers of high-speed Internet service such as AT&T against Internet content companies like Google.

The battle centered on whether broadband providers can charge more to carry unaffiliated content or to guarantee service quality, an issue called net neutrality.

"If the legislators... insist on neutrality, we will be happy. If they do not put it in, we will be less happy, but then we will have to wait and see whether or not there actually is any abuse," Vint Cerf, a Google vice president and one of the pioneers of the Internet, said at a press conference in Sofia, Bulgaria.

"If we are not successful in our arguments... then we will simply have to wait until something bad happens, and then we will make known our case to the Department of Justice's antitrust division," he said.

Cerf is visiting Bulgaria at the invitation of President Georgi Parvanov to discuss ways to boost IT business and Internet access in the country.

The U.S. bill includes provisions aimed at preserving consumers' ability to surf anywhere on the public Internet and use any Internet-related application, software or service.

"My company, along with many others, believes that the Internet should stay open and accessible to everyone equally," Cerf said.

"We are worried that some of the broadband service providers will interfere with that principle and will attempt to use their control over broadband transport facilities to interfere with services of competitors."

Despite extensive lobbying by telecommunications companies, prospects for a final law this year remain uncertain. Congress faces a dwindling number of work days because of the November elections.

If the measure passes the full Senate, it would have to be reconciled with a narrower bill approved by the House of Representatives.