Am I missing something? In all this furor over the dire possibility of a tiered Internet aren’t people ignoring the fact that it already is tiered?
The fact that you connect over a T3 while I’m lagging behind on 1.5Mbps DSL and my mother-in-law brings up the reaer on a 56kbps dial-up is a form of tiered service. You want more bandwidth? You pay for it. Now before you say its not about bandwidth, that it is about Quality of Service, let me point out that QoS is part of what you get once you rise up to the big boy offerings of T1 and above. But those QoS commitments only apply for routes that are intra-network or negotiated (for a fee) inter-network. The issue is not about whether tiering should exist because it already does but about how tiering will be mainstreamed. If there was ever an argument for a national broadband policy this is it …
