* Suggestions include workable solutions for prioritizing data
Following up on our recent newsletter about rethinking net neutrality in a mobile broadband context, we heard from newsletter subscribers Paul and Phillip with their views on the issues. Paul wrote us saying, “If we want to protect the democratization of online content, we have to propose and support solutions for managing Internet congestion that doesn’t discriminate by content.”
Paul continued by saying, “I wish the net neutrality movement would propose or support workable solutions for prioritizing data so those who oppose neutrality can no longer use the industry’s all-too-real prioritization dilemma as a tool to debunk the workability of a content neutral network.”
Paul has written a blog advocating that broadband providers be allowed “to leverage tiered pricing base on consumer usage. This would force capacity hogs, like peer-to-peer network users, to pay for the added demands they place on the system, or experience the slow lane.”
Paul believes “we should all get the Internet we choose, based on the speed and capacity we pay for. Allowing ISPs to leverage the market forces generated by our individual usage is a compromise that can meet everyone’s agenda, and ensure we succeed in defending neutrality.”
Phillip added, “My concern with net neutrality is that certain carriers might (and indeed, have been known to) prefer their own ‘in-house’ services (typically VoIP and IPTV) while reshaping everyone else’s competing services to the point of not working acceptably.
Phillip runs VoIP between two houses and the office, and says he has had to use different port numbers to stop the carrier from degrading his traffic. Paul believes that his service providers would prefer that he buy services from them instead of some other provider, but that the “reality was that I was self-hosted: clearly I’m not going to replace an in-house, amortized CAPEX system with an outsources, ongoing OPEX service. Nonetheless, their indiscriminate degradation of all ‘outside’ VoIP traffic affected me as if I were somehow a ‘competitor’.
Phillip concludes, “I think having a level playing field is a good think if it outlaws these sorts of abuses.
We’ll save our analysis and observations on these replies for a future newsletter, but next time we’ll look into AT&T’s position on net neutrality — following up both on AT&T corporate statements and in a recent CTIA address made by AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets President and CEO Ralph de la Vega.
