The point is that AT&T does now have its fingers on most of the pipes in America, I could certainly see them tightening their grip on a few of them to choke some extra money out at key places.

AT&T doesn’t have a company ethic like ‘Don’t be evil’.

Dave
Karate Guy

well Joshua Zeidner, if that is your real name, it’s gonna work pretty much like it does today: some of the bandwidth will be reserved/used for cable TV and other value added services requiring lots of bandwidth and a high QoS and some of it used for IP access at a lower QoS.

where is your faith in your fellow neutralnetwork comrades?
you NN types seem to think that there is no market for net neutral access and that it will disappear from the face of the earth unless the democrats make it law. this is a pessimistic view of things. it seems to us mice unlikely that, so long as a SIGNIFICANT customer demand exists for this sort of access, that NN access will disappear. your dirt roads will always exist. mandating NN will GUARANTEE it but at the cost of denying everyone else the possibility to enjoy the greater potential of a paved information highway.

and dude what is with the name thing? what does it matter? why should it matter? are our views to be dismissed because we are “not to be trusted”, like the hapless mr. orlowski?

moreover, do you imagine that someone has to pay us to disagree with you?? LOL.

rest assured, Joshua Zeidner, the three blind mice shill for no one. the entertainment value of these exchanges is all the compensation we require.

I make my judgements based on reason, not on faith. Joshua, you have failed to propose a single rational argument for why additional legislation to ensure NN (whatever it is) is required.

“ Apparently we should trust at&t with the inputs“

We have an institution that deals with the abuses you describe, called the FCC. Your support of new legislation, to preserve something you can’t define, is based on the FCC being unable to do its job. If you have evidence to support this position, please can you share it – all I can see is paranoia, which The Register article describes very well as fear of Keyser Sose – a fictional character.

Orlowski, in my view correctly, quotes Madison River vs Vonage – where FCC action was swift and just.

So Joshua, you want a new law to deal with an imaginary threat, and damn the consequences of that law.

What makes you so special? Do we need a law against The Grinch, too?

BTW- I hope readers here have caught Lessig’s statement on Wired:

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/01/15/2155259.shtml

Lessig, I am a bit insulted that you chose to make this address on wired as opposed to your own blog where the subject of your stance on NN was already being discussed. Is there some kind of problem with addressing the laity directly? Don’t forget us little people over here.

*mice shake three heads in dispair

Joshua Zeidner, QoS means Quality Of Service.

it is a technical term used by engineers, particularly communications engineers, to describe a network operation.

cisco, the california company that makes devices called routers, have a nice tutorial on the subject from which we quote:

Fundamentally, QoS enables you to provide better service to certain flows. This is done by either raising the priority of a flow or limiting the priority of another flow. When using congestion-management tools, you try to raise the priority of a flow by queuing and servicing queues in different ways. The queue management tool used for congestion avoidance raises priority by dropping lower-priority flows before higher-priority flows. Policing and shaping provide priority to a flow by limiting the throughput of other flows. Link efficiency tools limit large flows to show a preference for small flows.

explain for us, Joshua Zeider, how you propose to solve the problem of network congestion without using QoS.

explain for us how cool new bandwidth hungry and time sensitive applications (like IPTV and VoIP) are going to thrive in a network environment that OUTLAWS QoS.

you may use any material you wish in the exam, but your answer must fit within this tiny window. there are two constraints: the speed of light is finite and you may not employ wishful thinking.

since QoS is an end-to-end deal, no partial credit will be given.

Internet protocols are still so inefficient at guaranteeing QoS, that one modest Bittorrent user can clog up a network. Worse, there’s no way to guarantee QoS across hops – although the ITU’s long-term NGN (Next Generation Network) initiatives seek to address these. Without QoS, IPTV providers have to build far more infrastructure than the need to, and this over-provisioning is expensive – and they still can’t guarantee a decent picture.

oh yes, the evil Bittorrent users. The quote sums it up, whose problem is it, the public users or the private company? Why should we make policy concessions for telcos so they are able to wipe out cable companies? Does At&T look like they need help? Poor, poor, telcos. They can’t guarantee a decent picture. This article is hilarious.

The essence of the argument is one of fabricated scarcity and clandestine monopoly. But frankly I’m sick and tired of arguing with people like you, we need an adequate forum to discuss this without interference and noise from telco people. For every useful piece of information there are 20 3bms adding in their garbage.

lol Dada. three blind mice IS our real name.

anyway, it is the message, and not the messenger which is important. and speaking of the message, does anyone disagree with the “not to be trusted” mr. orlowski when he writes:

Internet protocols are still so inefficient at guaranteeing QoS, that one modest Bittorrent user can clog up a network. Worse, there’s no way to guarantee QoS across hops – although the ITU’s long-term NGN (Next Generation Network) initiatives seek to address these. Without QoS, IPTV providers have to build far more infrastructure than the need to, and this over-provisioning is expensive – and they still can’t guarantee a decent picture.

simple physics friends. bandwidth is not infinite. and unless there is an incentive (a FINANCIAL incentive) to build more infrastructure, bandwidth isn’t even large.

The Dems’ law would have outlawed QoS, even when the participants entered such a contract by mutual agreement, and institutionalised one slow lane for everyone.

outlawing QoS in a communications nework – by law – is utterly ridiculous.

He’s either skewing the facts to support his world view, or doing it to draw page views by being “controversal.” Either is inexcusable. He can’t be trusted.

translation: if you don’t agree with me you either don’t understand the problem, or can’t be trusted.

lol guys. keep trying.