( – promoted by odum)
There is a huge battle going on about (Inter)Net Neutrality. For those of you who don’t follow this, the fixed line telco phone companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc) are arguing that they should be able to give priority routing for Internet traffic over their networks to content owners that pay a premium for the better service. It has been characterized as providing an “express lane” for information.
Most of the opposition has been driven by content providers like Google, who argue that the historic neutrality of the information transportation network to what is sent over it should be maintained and the FCC should maintain “net neutrality.”
But there is another element to this argument that is at least as serious if not more; this has to do with Plain Old Telephone Services. This was the old telco monopoly, but now it is threatened by a technology known as VOIP (never mind) that uses the Internet. This bypasses the interconnection charges that the telcos impose on their competitors when a call terminates onto the telco network. The telcos are desperate to retain this revenue, but as more and more phone calls get carried by folks like Skype and Vonage, the telcos feel increasingly threatened. Hence, the proposal for a “two-tiered” pricing system.
The impact of the telco tactic becomes clear in this report from the OECD:
“Typically all Internet traffic receives equal priority on a first-come-first-served basis with no guarantee of delivery. As a result, aplications need to use error checking and request any packets that may not have arrived. The architecture was designed, and works best
for less time-sensitive applications such as e-mail and file transfer protocol. This is because packets are not sent over a dedicated channel and may arrive out of sequence or with a slight delay. A delay of a few seconds makes little difference to e-mail users but can completely disrupt a phone conversation using VoIP
or a data stream of a live event.”
So the telco two-track approach would let them either degrade the service quality of their competitors to where it is not usable, or load charges onto the telephone calls of their competitors, which would raise their costs, make them less competitive, probably require higher prices, maintain telco profits, and hurt the consumer; all to protect a 19th century technology from 21st century competition.
At least the oil companies rip you off to your face!