In a message written on Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 09:44:40AM -0500, Brian Johnson wrote:
OK... so doesn't this speak to the commoditization of service providers? I'm against more regulation and for competition.
Competition would be wonderful, but is simply not practical in many cases. Most people and companies don't want to hear this, but from a consumer perspective the Internet is a utility, and very closely resembles water/sewer/electric/gas service. That is, having 20 people run fiber past your home when you're only going to buy from one of them makes no economic sense. Indeed, we probably wouldn't have both cable and DSL service if those were both to the home for other reasons already.
Explain how the provider of access is supposed to be able to control all of the systems outside it's control to get a specific speed from a content provider. If you are espousing contracts with each content provider, then you will quickly be destroying the Internet.
That's not exactly what I am proposing; rather I'm proposing we (the industry) develop a set of technical specifications and testing where we can generally demonstrate this to be the case. Of course, things may happen at any time, this isn't about individual machines, or flash mobs. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/