Fast forward a few years to 2009 . . . Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.



Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.



Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.'' Extremely high demand on the Internet is overwhelming available bandwidth, and regulations passed back in 2006 make it illegal for network operators to differentiate and prioritize content.



Welcome to the world of network neutrality, where all content is treated exactly the same . . . where somebody decided that a stupid network is better than a smart network.

“. . . our engineers started with the assumption that we should find technical ways of prioritizing certain kinds of bits . . . we seriously explored various “quality of service” schemes . . . [but] all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth. With enough bandwidth in the network, there is no congestion and video bits do not need preferential treatment.”

Simple is cheaper. Complex is costly.





At least Tom Giovanetti, of the Institute for Policy Innovation , a Bell-Funded Tank, writing in Friday's Mercury News, didn't call it a "dumb" network when he wrote the following science fiction . . .Actually, Tom, I *noticed* that a stupid network was better than a smart network. I looked at "reality." I saw email, and the Web, and eCommerce, and Mapquest, and blogging, and Instant Messaging, and streaming audio on demand, and multiplayer online games, and many other miracles too numerous to list here, miracles that never arrived via "intelligent" networks.Too bad Tom G didn't hear about what Internet2, the premier U.S. post-Bell-Labs network research effort found [.pdf]. (Research is how we learn about "reality.") Let's hum a few bars of Internet2:In other words, when Tankers like Tom Giovanetti or Austrian-style economists like Alex Jacobson ask who decides how to allocate scarce bandwidth, they're asking the wrong question. Most of the cost of a network is obtaining right of way and constructing the poles, conduits, towers, antennas, cables, etc. Whether you provide a kilobit or a terabit is rounding error.needs to decide how to allocate scarce bandwidth. It is more expensive to allocate it than to simply provide more. Again, heed the research findings of Internet2 [.pdf]:In fact, Internet2 finds that GigE with reasonable service decisions is 10x more costly than simple GigE where the user decides what service to buy. GigE is enough bandwidth to run a telephone network for a city of 100,000 people, yet we have GigE interfaces on our computers. We could have GigE in our houses for little more than we now pay for 1000 times less capable services. Backbones are even cheaper than access networks.Thus, the only reason to ask, "How do we allocate scarce bandwidth?" is if we're behind on technology. Even then, it is far more reasonable to ask, "How do we get ahead on technology?"And if the telcos and cablecos won't get us ahead on technology, we should be asking, " How should we replace the telcos and cablecos?

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