FCC launches war of net ideologues The US Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously to begin the formal process of listening to a pair of modern-day religious factions howl at each other over proposed rules for an open internet. FCC chair Julius Genachowski last month proposed formal net neutrality rules that would prohibit internet service …
Forget this idea of filtering "unlawful" content as CONTENT. Let them block SITES/IPs that are identified by 3rd party or government organizations as distributors of illegal content, after an investigation is done to confirm the content is in fact being distributed knowingly and ilelgally.
By targeting "content" like copyrite works, how is an ISP to have ANY CLUE if that work is being transmitted legally or illegally if they can't formally identify the party on both ends of the transmission? If they throttle my LEGAL downloads and uploads to myself, family members, and friends, for which I am excersizing my freedoms to share legally copy protected works, then I'll have claims with the FCC against my ISP real fast... and so will hundreds of thousands of my collegues in the cloud who might do similar things.
let me make this clear. There is 1 and only 1 type of content filtering/throttling I approve of: VoIP signals should be QOSed into a seperate channel when active, and be guaranteed at all times 128k connectivity and high packet priority. CAP this QOS channel at 128k and it can't be abused by hackers and mass downloaders as a 128k channel is fairly useless for bit torrent traffic, and further allow ISPs to validate that the QOS traffic is in fact voice traffic (not hard since is uses a different protocol that's easy to identify), and allow ISPs to penalize monitarily clients who use the QOS channel for any non-voice traffic.
OTHER THAT THIS ONE EXCEPTION, traffic management must by both IP and content agnostic, and shoulfdonly occur on a switch level, never a connenction level. aka, if I'm being throttled, EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION at that same switch should be equally throttled. This is the most fair, and lest costly traffic management system available, and should be MANDATED!
Next, disclosure and SLAs: Traffic shaping needs to be able to 1) be real time monitored by every connected client. A free agent of some kind should be availabel, as well as a web service, that can identify my route through the network, and show each switch capacity and thorttled percentage in granularity of at least 10 minute or shorter intervals. 2) throttling must never be to below 50% of advertised rates for more than any 90 minute intervals in a rolling 24 hour period or else be in violation of SLA, never be throttled to less than 70% for more than 4 hours in 24 hours, and never under any cirumstances throttle to below 1dn 256up. 3) SLA must be auto comitting, providing 1 free business day of use anytime throttling results in breech of SLA. Further, outright downtime exceeding 12 hours in any day should result in 1 day's credit accepting that modem outages (inside home hardware failure) does not count if the modem is replaced free by the ISP before the end of the next business day. 4) any throttling that occured must be viewable both on a web site in granular form, and in the bill in summary form, indicating any SLA breech. 5) Advertised bandwidth must be attainable as measured by a simple bandwidth tool from a bootable ISO (aka, clean OS image) or from a tool inside the router's firmware or router or other solid state or clean OS device connected directly to a modem for not less than 2 hours a day measured in 10 minute increments on more than half the days in a calendar month.
Bandwidth caps: Not to be less than the following formula: (downspeed + upspeed) * # of days in billing period * 24 hours, *10 represented in GB. For example, if my advertised speed is 8dn 0.5up, then my October bill should be 8.5 * 31 *240 = 61.75GB. a base system (2dn 256 up) would include about 15GB. Additional GB must be billed at a rate not to exceed the following formula: (monthly rate - $10 base connection cost) / #GB in plan month. Further, additional fees must never exceed the cost of raising to a higher tier plan with a higher data cap, the top tier offered by any ISP must be an unlimited tier, and total monthly bill may never be over $99 for ISP services.
IPTV: Bandwidth required to deliver IPTV via a bundled sevice with internet, (and as well VoIP while I'm at it), must NOT be included in the advertised bandwidth rate, not count against monthly utilization. IPTV bundedled service should be QOSed and segregated. So, for example, you get uVerse with 18dn 2up internet. They say you can use 5 concurent streams with any 3 in HD at a time. subtract that out and lets say the TV isgnal would be 10dn 1up. That means the user is left with 8dn 1 up internet, and the caps/limits/throttling should apply only to that porttion. IPTV bandwidth should NEVER be throttled at all (otherwiser they're essentially providing fewer concurrent streams, with is a service availabiltiy issue, not a bandwidth issue, and shouold be penalized).
It's good the FCC have at least got the go ahead to bring forward proposals.
Meanwhile behind the closed doors of the EU Telecom Package conciliation process, our largely unelected masters think neutrality can emerge from magic of competition.
If BT colours its VOIP traffic, that's fine because you can swop to another provider who also priorities their VOIP traffic! Your are much too stupid to want a say in this matter yourself.
Europe Fails
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
