What the Internet provider should be selling you is a committed bandwidth rate - which is a guaranteed bandwidth, you will alway s have at least that much throughput - and a burstable rate, which is the maximum throughput you can have in ideal conditions. The 5Mbps that is hyped today is the burstable rate.

Different services require different bandwidth profiles (and suffer to a greater or lesser degree when these requirements aren't met.

VoIP require very low bandwidth, but it is continuous and must be with a very small guaranteed maximum latency (even with good echo cancellation, which becomes more difficult for longer latencies, you may have experienced the headache of talking on top of the other person when you have a sat line with long delays...).

Streaming video requires a higher continuous bandwidth, but is a bit more tolerant to delays as long as they're not all over the place.

Web browsing is very bursty, and it would be nice to have high bandwidth, but not necessary. Delays (shorter than a couple of seconds) are pretty much inconsequential.

Protocols that require acknowledgement (such as TCP/IP) may have an effective bandwidth less than carrier bandwidth due to the acknowledgement window size (and in such instances, the bandwidth and latencies in both directions will come into play). Streaming video and VoIP are UDP/RTP (non-acknowleding protocols) for the data, but the control (SIP, etc.) is TCP.

It's quite important to know the nature of the traffic (and even your benchmarks (such as DSLReports.com) use a range of traffic types in their computations (and the end number is an "average" of these).

Simply guaranteeing bandwidth is not enough (and is wasteful too; even in the circuit-switched world, if the phone company had to guarantee you a channel, they'd have to overbuild tremendously [and mobile phone companys would be out of business; you've probably all heard "fast busy" or "all circuits are busy" announcements at one time or another).

Telling you what the burstable rate is is useful (and is what they tell you most of the time, because it's the biggets number they can use), but only one of a number of things that will affect your customer satisfaction.

</LECTURE>

:-)

Cheers,

[re: the Comcast lawyers]: Basically, he's trying to check the boxes.

Defamatory accusations? Check (saying someone broke the law).

Conviction or verdict in favor of accusations? No check, therefore no accusation publicized.

If the ad had said that the companies had been convicted of crimes, your second point might be valid. It didn't.

As pointed out, many people have accused the telcos of breaking the law. Where are all the defamation suits?

As pointed out, the telcos aren't going to want discovery here either.

Comcast, as a large ISP, may well have been involved in one of the more questionable aspects of Dubya's extra-FISA snooping, as one of the points of contention was as to e-mails held in transit on U.S. servers. I don't know. I'd welcome the opportunity to find out.

Cheers,

Since Glenn was so kind as to provide a means for contacting the playa (remember, don't hate the playa, hate the game!), I decided to email her. I hope many of you do the same. Won't change the outcome, but will annoy the bejesus out of her if her inbox gets flooded....hehe

*************************

Ms. Koles,

I'm writing to you from a small, midwestern city in Missouri to let you know how saddened I am by your behaviors as they relate to your and your company's refusal to run the Blue America television ads which discuss Chris Carney's actions (or inactions) regarding telecom amnesty.

It's difficult to conceive of anything less American and more fascist than for a large cable television conglomerate to refuse to run ads on its stations which are critical of a legislator because your company doesn't like the content discussed or because your company financially supports that legislator and his corrupt actions. I know you and your superiors have rationalized your decisions through your attorneys in what can only be viewed as obviously and transparently absurd reasoning, and those actions only prove how insidious and corrupt your company really is.

But what I wonder is: how, as an American, and as someone who believes in the American Dream and the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution, can you live with yourself and sleep at night when you, personally, are a central part in suppressing legitimate political debate and standing with those who censor that which they don't like? What kind of civics lessons are you teaching your children by your actions?

I'd wager you don't give it much thought, because that would cause some rather painful introspection into what you do and why you do it. And we all know how introspection and having a conscious has no place at the table of big media when there are profits to be made and candidates to be funded.

That was a great lecture! but perhaps I know something about these things (full disclosure - I'm a telco employee) and don't want to put in a lot of technical detail here that obscures rather clarifies the issue of network neutrality.

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.