Last week’s column was about Bill Gates’ announced departure from day-to-day management at Microsoft and a broad view of the Net Neutrality issue. We’ll get back to Microsoft next week with a much closer look at the challenges the company faces as it ages and what I believe is a clever and counter-intuitive plan for Redmond’s future success. But this week is all about Net Neutrality, which turns out to be a far more complex issue than we (or Congress) are being told.
Net Neutrality is a concept being explored right now in the U.S. Congress, which is trying to decide whether to allow Internet Service Providers to offer tiers of service for extra money or to essentially be prohibited from doing so. The ISPs want the additional income and claim they are being under compensated for their network investments, while pretty much everyone else thinks all packets ought to be treated equally.
Last week’s column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn’t know it.
One example of unequal treatment is whether packets connect from backbone to backbone through one of the public Network Access Points (NAPs) or through a private peering arrangement between ISPs or backbone providers. The distinction between these two forms of interconnection is vital because the NAPs are overloaded all the time, leading to dropped packets, retransmissions, network congestion, and reduced effective bandwidth. Every ISP that has a private peering agreement still has the right to use the NAPs and one has to wonder how they decide which packets they put in the diamond lane and which ones they make take the bus?
Related Posts
- Senator offers Net neutrality compromise
- Democrats push ‘Net neutrality
- Microsoft balks on Net neutrality explainer
- Net Neutrality: This is serious
- Canadian MP Announces Net Neutrality Bill During 300 Person Strong Rally
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I know that there are at least 2 Cable Internet Providers here in Arizona One is the major company which is COX Comm. and the other I believe is Roadrunner. Roadrunner piggy backs / gets their service from COX and then sells the speeds at the same price that cox does but gives you less bandwidth and of course you can pay more to get more. Roadrunner also gives thier service through routers to your house. Meaning unlike COX where I can get a standard IP address: 68.21.xxx.xxx etc. they give you the standard 192.168.xxx.xxx
“Roadrunner also gives thier service through routers to your house. Meaning unlike COX where I can get a standard IP address: 68.21.xxx.xxx etc. they give you the standard 192.168.xxx.xxx”
Are you kidding me?
Actually I’m sorry… I don’t think that it’s Roadrunner after all. My mistake it’s actually Cable America!
Still how you could sell it via a router?