On throttling…

A few stories have appeared recently regarding the practice of throttling traffic. While one of the most egregious offenders (Bell Canada) is right in my own backyard, I’d rather talk about Comcast and Verizon. Obviously, the FCC decision against Comcast on August 1 2008, and the order requiring Comcast disclose the nature of its traffic management are seen as significant victories for ‘Net Neutrality’.I completely applaud the FCC for taking this stance, and I agree that Comcast has acted inappropriately. But… I also largely agree with Verizon CTO Richard Lynch’s comments as cited in this ars technica article. Now, don’t misinterpret my agreement in this case; I believe that not all traffic can be treated equally. But I do not believe that any trafic should be slowed down. Rather, I believe that the access providers like Verizon, Comcast, Bell Canada, etc should be offering stated traffic classes, and adhering very strictly to categorisation of traffic. My opinion is that certain content providers or certain forms of content should be granted a higher traffic categorisation (e.g. expedited forwarding). Traffic such as my stock trading (if I actually had a sufficient amount of money to participate in stock purchases), my health-provider research, and similar content should be prioritised highly. Traffic such as YouTube, and BitTorrent should be prioritised lower, however the content provider and/or the subscriber should have the option to buy a higher traffic class. It’s doubtful one would be able to give their YouTube traffic equal prioritisation to critical Health Care data, but the user and/or provider should be able to buy a higher rating that best effort.In my opinion, this would be a win-win for the access provider, who can meet time-critical data delivery by engineering and segregating their network paths for sufficient  bandwidth for high priority traffic classes. And, they can take a piece of the content providers revenue by taking a piece of premium per-service bandwith subscription. However, to make this work, the access providers need to focus on providing the best possible and most flexible network access, and stop worring about competing with the content providers… Alas, that is unlikely to occur.

This entry was posted on 26. August 2008 at 06:13 and is filed under Telecoms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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