From: JC Dill Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2010 10:20 PM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
On 15/12/10 10:05 PM, George Bonser wrote:
If the customer pays the cost of the transport, a provider with
better
transport efficiency / quality ratio wins.
This (and everything that followed) assumes the customer has a choice of providers. For most customers who already have Comcast, they don't have any choice for similar broadband services (speeds). So open market principles don't come into play, and Comcast knows it.
No, you misunderstood. It doesn't matter if you have only one internet service provider. If the end customer foots the bill, the incentive for innovation is for the *content* provider to strike a balance between quality and cost that the customers want. If the *content* provider foots the bill, innovation is driven in a way that the content providers want. Lets say I have foo.com and bar.com that offer video services and I am on Comcast. If Comcast meters my bandwidth usage and foo.com has good quality with a lower bandwidth use, I use foo. In the other model, if the content providers subsidize the bill, bar.com might be completely bloated but they have deep pockets and can pay the subsidy, they drive foo.com out of business and Comcast still has a congested network.