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FCC votes to approve a plan to allow for paid prioritization.


jamisonshaw125

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Similar things have happened on my Xbox games. Battlefield, for example gives you an option of purchasing VIP Premium which gives you prioritized access to certain servers during match making. It makes me sick to see I'm already being asked to pay more right after opening the game. Doubt I'll buy the next Battlefield game.

 

Sent from my LG-LS980

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Similar things have happened on my Xbox games. Battlefield, for example gives you an option of purchasing VIP Premium which gives you prioritized access to certain servers during match making. It makes me sick to see I'm already being asked to pay more right after opening the game. Doubt I'll buy the next Battlefield game.

 

Sent from my LG-LS980

I am not sure if brighthouse is going to participate in this...but I am not sure why they wouldn't offer priority packages. If they start throttling my already random internet speed, I will drop it down to 10 mb and cease to pay the additional fee that they charge for the "lightning 30" My apartment complex gets some type of deal with them. I am sure we are still over paying though.

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I was very surprised and disappointed when I read that the 2 Democratic commissioners not named Wheeler flip-flopped and appeared to give in to the chairman, but then I read this from that article:

 

The next phase will be four months of public comments, after which the commissioners will vote again on redrafted rules that are meant to take into account public opinion. But the enactment of final rules faces significant challenges.

 

So perhaps Clyburn and Rosenworcel figured they'd do better by using this designated "public opinion" period, rather than trying to force one from the outset at the expense of causing additional friction within the agency.

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I was very surprised and disappointed when I read that the 2 Democratic commissioners not named Wheeler flip-flopped and appeared to give in to the chairman, but then I read this from that article:

 

 

So perhaps Clyburn and Rosenworcel figured they'd do better by using this designated "public opinion" period, rather than trying to force one from the outset at the expense of causing additional friction within the agency.

 

I certainly don't have much faith that's how it will play out. They're just taking the required steps. It seems to me their intentions are clear and set.

 

Wheeler had this all figured out back when the FCC lost against Verizon in court. He didn't want to fight the ruling and knew where he intended to go, and now here we are.

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It seems to me as if the Dems are paid by big cable and the GOP is paid by the duopoly. Maybe the actual dynamic is a little more complicated, and I'm sure there are people in both parties who want Net Neutrality. At the FCC level, that seems to be the dynamic.

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I don't think y'all are reading the decision correctly. It does not allow a provider to purposely degrade the speed of certain content. In fact they said that any such action would be met by FCC action. I think this is a great thing if the FCC enforces the before mentioned part. Services like Netflix( Which I have spent countless hours avoiding studying on) account for about 30% of peak internet traffic. Fiber is costly to lay out and most providers have all but slowed to a stop when it comes to laying new fiber because they have to meet with increase demand on their existing lines and they cannot recoup the cost on new lines. Hopefully if a few big time users like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube pay some for the amount of traffic they use the expansion of new fiber will pick up again, and the millions of americans without high-speed internet can get access. I know y'all most likely won't agree, but from and economic perspective this is a good step

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I don't think y'all are reading the decision correctly. It does not allow a provider to purposely degrade the speed of certain content. In fact they said that any such action would be met by FCC action. I think this is a great thing if the FCC enforces the before mentioned part. Services like Netflix( Which I have spent countless hours avoiding studying on) account for about 30% of peak internet traffic. Fiber is costly to lay out and most providers have all but slowed to a stop when it comes to laying new fiber because they have to meet with increase demand on their existing lines and they cannot recoup the cost on new lines. Hopefully if a few big time users like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube pay some for the amount of traffic they use the expansion of new fiber will pick up again, and the millions of americans without high-speed internet can get access. I know y'all most likely won't agree, but from and economic perspective this is a good step

Good thought in theory, but theyd keep the extra change. Stuff like that should work out for us, but we always get screwed.
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I don't think y'all are reading the decision correctly. It does not allow a provider to purposely degrade the speed of certain content. In fact they said that any such action would be met by FCC action. I think this is a great thing if the FCC enforces the before mentioned part. Services like Netflix( Which I have spent countless hours avoiding studying on) account for about 30% of peak internet traffic. Fiber is costly to lay out and most providers have all but slowed to a stop when it comes to laying new fiber because they have to meet with increase demand on their existing lines and they cannot recoup the cost on new lines. Hopefully if a few big time users like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube pay some for the amount of traffic they use the expansion of new fiber will pick up again, and the millions of americans without high-speed internet can get access. I know y'all most likely won't agree, but from and economic perspective this is a good step

 

Nope.  You are dead wrong.  And College Station, eh?  I have to ask, are you a student at Texas A&M?  If so, I am not surprised.

 

Regardless, I already comedically summed up the situation seven years ago:

 

Mob connected Teamster: "That's a nice business you got goin' on there. We wanna cut of the profits 'cuz we're deliverin' your good product."

 
Successful business owner: "But my customers already pay you fairly for your delivery fees."
 
Mob connected Teamster: "We need a little somethin' from you, too. Our trucks is the only way you got to get your merchandise to your customers."
 
Successful business owner: "If not for my success, my customers would have no need for your delivery trucks. You would be out of business."
 
Mob connected Teamster: "Well, if you want your products to continue to arrive safe, if you know what I'm sayin', then you better pony up."
 
BTW, did I say "Mob connected Teamster"? Oops, I meant AT&T. As for "Successful business owner," just feel free to insert Google.

 

 

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1210974-Commentary-Duo-of-Google-and-Sprint-could-put-AT-amp-T-in-a-headlock?p=9623746#post9623746

 

My little skit was inspired by former AT&T nee SBC CEO Ed Whitacre's own comments two years earlier.  He basically dug his own ignorant, greedy grave:

 

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

 
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

 

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/10/5498-2/

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/01/6089-2/

 

Yeah, in both my sendup and Whitacre's actual comments, there is a name for that -- it is called extortion.  The Internet does not work that way.  Users pay for their packets sent and received.  They do not pay for their packets to be delivered.

 

Your examples of Netflix, Facebook, etc., are specious.  They already pay for their bandwidth, as do the users who request those packets.  The problem is that the Twin Bells/Big Cable envy the short term money that the content providers are making.  It is greed and envy -- pure and simple.  You see, the Twin Bells/Big Cable are not content to be just "pipes" that require investment but make copious long term profits.  Well, if not, they can get the hell out of the industry.  And they can get the hell off of public right of way.

 

AJ

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That sucks what about all the money Facebook, Google, and Netflix put into their systems to ensure that the big bells and cable cos customers can have a pleasurable experience connecting to their servers. It goes both ways.

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Excuse me if I don't find jokes about my education funny. But I believe that you are too blinded by hatred by the Twin Bells/Big Cable. At the end of the day they are all businesses even Sprint. And business don't provide goods & services out of the goodness of their hearts they do it for the profit. While I can see that Twin Bells/ Big Cable would want to act like your mobster example the FCC specifically said that actions like that would be unacceptable.  

 

 

"Despite criticism from fellow commissioners, Wheeler defended the proposal, saying the FCC would find many of the possible broadband provider practices feared by net neutrality advocates unreasonable. If a broadband provider charges a service like Netflix a fee to access the Internet connection for which a customer has already paid, that would be an unreasonable practice prohibited by the FCC, he said.

 

Wheeler’s proposal, he said, would consider the slowing of broadband connections by providers to be unreasonable and prohibited. “When a consumer buys specified capacity from a network provider, he or she is buying open capacity, not capacity where the network provider can prioritize for their own profit purposes,” he said. “Simply put, when a consumer buys a specified bandwidth, it is commercially unreasonable, and thus a violation of this proposal, to deny them the full connectivity and the full benefits that connection enables.”

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2155720/fcc-moves-forward-with-controversial-net-neutrality-proposal.html

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Nothing creates hysteria on tech blogs more than "net neutrality". To me it just seems like a solution in perpetual search of a problem. Someone posted a couple of links from Ars where they were, just like today, predicting the "end of the internet". But they were from 9 years ago! I've been hearing these dire predictions for so long but it never happens. I guess my question is what are you guys expecting the FCC to do for you? They are more or less an organization that caters to industry. You are asking them to go against their instincts. Look at the era they were founded in. That's all they know. Getting them(or Congress) involved will only screw things up more. Expecting them to deliver anything else is just "faculty lounge" dreaming.

 

And when I hear people saying ISPs should be turned into public utilities I just think of the ones I already have which means more or less annual rate increases that were blessed by regulators. My water bill hasn't gone down over the years. Neither has my electric bill. But when adjusted for inflation I am paying the same for internet today as I was in 2004. And my speeds have quintupled. Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

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And when I hear people saying ISPs should be turned into public utilities I just think of the ones I already have which means more or less annual rate increases that were blessed by regulators. My water bill hasn't gone down over the years. Neither has my electric bill. But when adjusted for inflation I am paying the same for internet today as I was in 2004. And my speeds have quintupled. Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

 

With your water, do you pay more for the water you wash your dishes with than what you pay for the water your clothes with?

 

That is the reason people want it as a public utility. Not just about cost.

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With your water, do you pay more for the water you wash your dishes with than what you pay for the water your clothes with?

 

That is the reason people want it as a public utility. Not just about cost.

What if I don't want to pay any more for water to wash my clothes or clean my dishes, but my neighbor is willing to pay a bit extra to have filtered and purified water run to a separate tap in his kitchen? If I still get my water at the rates I'm paying today and now my neighbor gets the extra that he's willing to pay for, and the water company makes more from it, the government takes in more tax revenue, and everybody is happy, what's the wrong with that?

 

I'm not sold on either side of this debate, but I am really intrigued to hear everybody's argument.

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Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are already paid the costs of transporting data by their subscribers and by peering agreements they have with other ISPs.  I pay AT&T as my ISP to connect to my house and provide a given connection speed, AT&T has a peering agreement with Amazon's ISP.  Amazon pays their ISP to connect to their data center at a given connection speed.  If Amazon's ISP transfers more traffic to AT&Ts network, they pay AT&T a fee.  If AT&T transfers more traffic to Amazon's ISP, AT&T pays Amazon's ISP a fee.  There is no reason why AT&T should require a separate charge to Amazon to keep the peering agreement between AT&T's network and Amazon's ISP running at a proper speed as they are already being paid for this by the peering agreement and Amazon and I are already paying our fees to be able to access this traffic at our ISP's speeds combined with the peering agreement's speed agreed between our two ISPs.

 

The FCC will not allow ISPs to slow down the data connections for companies who do not pay.  Then the easy way for them to force companies to pay the extra money is to never upgrade and cap their peering bandwidth agreements for the ISPs that carry the non-paying company's data.  Comcast did this recently with Netflix until Netflix paid them money to stop it.  This is just like putting in a high speed toll road around your city and telling people that they can continue to use the slow side streets if the location they are driving to doesn't want to pay for them to use the toll road.  The people have no choice in whether they get to use the toll road or not in this case.  The speed that the people can travel on the side streets is not being degraded unless more traffic joins them on the side streets in the future.  Without using the toll road, they can still get where they are going.  This behavior is widely viewed by all consumers to be unfair as choice is being taken away from the consumer.

 

Imagine if this had been done 20 years ago.  You would have a handful of very profitable companies from 20 years ago paying every ISP in the world to have high bandwidth delivered over their connections in addition to paying the normal fees to their own ISP.  You would then have the little startup companies like the beginnings of ebay and amazon 20 years ago not able to pay the extra money so their connections would stay at modem speed since that was the standard speed at the time.  20 years later, there is no useful ebay and no useful amazon because modem speed from 20 years ago is not sufficient to use their services properly.  They never would have had the money in the beginning to pay this extra fee so their services would have steadily been degraded compared to company's connections who could pay over the years to the point where they would be useless now. 

 

The biggest problem I have with this scheme is that I have no control over which companies will never see another speed increase again and which ones will.  Therefore my choice of which companies I would to do business with over the communication medium that I pay for is being taken away.

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What if I don't want to pay any more for water to wash my clothes or clean my dishes, but my neighbor is willing to pay a bit extra to have filtered and purified water run to a separate tap in his kitchen? If I still get my water at the rates I'm paying today and now my neighbor gets the extra that he's willing to pay for, and the water company makes more from it, the government takes in more tax revenue, and everybody is happy, what's the wrong with that?

 

That already happens -- it is analogous to broadband speed tiers.  I pay for a middle tier; maybe my neighbor pays more for the highest tier.  But that is not what this Net Neutrality debate is about.  So, the parallel is not relevant.

 

Instead, try this one.  What if the local utility decided to charge both you and your washing machine manufacturer for the water your washing machine uses, would that be fair?  You know, because washing machines use so much water that the utility might have to upgrade its pipes.  Or what if the local utility decided not to charge you for the water that your washing machine uses so long as your washing machine manufacturer would be willing to pay for it, would that be fair?  And not only would it be fair to you but also would it be fair to the market?  Or would basically all manufacturers have to pony up, otherwise get run out of the market?

 

Mine is not a perfect parallel, but it is relevant.  For further reading, Radem does a fine job in the previous post of describing peering, which is central to the Internet but which AT&T and its cronies want to disrupt in a shakedown for more cash.

 

AJ

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For another parallel, AT&T and its ilk are akin to Stephen Abootman wanting more "Internet money:"

 

 

AJ

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It's an extremely sad proposal.

 

I hope everyone is writing the FCC and donating money to entities like the EFF.

 

 

While netflix pretends to be a victim (lets face it, they buy capacity from cogent and cogent oversells capacity but keeps selling it anyway and netflix keeps buying because they are cheap) - the proposal is very scary.

 

I imagine a world followed by cablecards - where yes, cablecos are required to offer cablecards but make every effort to not to.

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On new installs, fiber distribution is on parity in cost to copper. The myth about copper being cheaper is false. It's just that copper is already in place in most of the country.

 

But ILECs cannot continue serving their millions of customers with copper service. 1.5Mbps DSL/T1 service is all that millions of Americans have access to. And many cannot even get that. And ILEC's don't want to upgrade the existing copper to fiber. They just want to ride out their copper investments for the next 40 years and bankroll billions.

 

You have to be crazy if you think that if ILEC's get their way they will start removing existing copper and replacing with fiber. It won't change their infrastructure plans at all. They'll just make even more money.

 

Meanwhile, ILEC's have started switching to fiber in new construction. Here in South Dakota, even ass backwards CenturyLink is doing fiber to the home in new neighborhoods and apartment complexes. Because all those new homes also have 100Mbps connections from Midcontinent cable. And on new construction, it makes sense to use fiber, even to an ILEC, since fiber costs roughly the same. And in the next few years it will cheaper as more contractors use and become familiar with fiber and copper prices continue to rise.

 

But CenturyLink still leaves existing customers on copper. Because those systems are paid for. And those customers don't have a choice. Because if they did, they would have left behind that slow and expensive DSL already.

 

Robert via Samsung Note 8.0 using Tapatalk Pro

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ILEC's don't want to upgrade copper to fiber, but they also don't want to repair existing copper.

 

They replace copper with fiber (or LTE) as the copper becomes unusable.

 

ILECS do want to get rid of copper, because they want to get rid of POTS and turn everything over to the (currently) less regulated digital network. Which is another reason why it is important to reclassify broadband providers as a common carriers.

 

Switching to fiber also cuts out the CLECS which are mostly still tied to copper facilities, which is win/win for ILECS.

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