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• Tuesday, June 10, 2008 02:26 PM

  @ macgupta

  To reiterate, network neutrality should mean that providers can offer various types of connections with various speeds, different mixes of various classes of services, etc., at various price points; what I do with the connection I purchase is my business.

  Since the provider has sold me a connection with a specific profile, the provider has no issue in figuring out how to engineer its network. My choices on how I use my connection do not degrade anyone else's service. The various Robot-3 objections are irrelevant.

  How to put together and market these various connections, hiding the technical details which most people won't follow, is an issue for the provider to solve. Hopefully, an Apple-like company will figure this out rather than a IBM-like company.

  To reiterate, the version of network neutrality that says every IP packet is treated the same is a red herring, flies in the face of reality, and is pushed only by people who either do not understand the issue, or else want to sabotage network neutrality by posing an impossible version of network neutrality.

  Oh, I agree with you, and think I said that. What I was saying is that there is more to the (useful) equation than "guaranteed bandwidth" and "peak bandwidth". They may be convenient marketing concepts, but from a technical perspective miss the boat in some instances.

  I think that marketing based on QoS classifications and specs for these might be the solution.

  I stated specifically in a prior post that I think that the carriers should be allowed to charge on QoS class (and that the common carriers should implement such classes), but not on whose traffic it is (customer or provider).

  Implementing QoS on a cross-network basis would make the statement that "all packets are the same" untrue (but sadly, for the present mish-mash we have, and in the absence of end-to-end QoS implementations, differential treatment of packets is inconsistent at best).

  FWIW, you'll probably note that I'm in the telecom field too. I've done work with major and minor carriers both here and abroad (and in fact, I'm up in the "51st state" this week). I won't ask who you work for. ;-)

  Cheers,

  —Arne Langsetmo Read Arne Langsetmo's other letters
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