Imagine this for a moment: You just purchased a new microwave and would like to plug it in on your countertop and cook a delicious burrito, but you can't. Why can't you? Because the power company only allows you enough power to run a small coffee maker, or maybe a rice cooker, or maybe a toaster, but none of these things at the same time.
This is the internet, and it is horrible.
For this analogy to make sense, we would all have to pay a fixed amount for electricity and then be entitled to consume as we want. Last time I checked, Comcast (and all other ISPs) offer a range of plans for increasing amounts of money with increasing limits and caps. The ISPs pay gigabyte per gigabyte in their peering arrangements (and yes, some gigabytes cost them more than other gigabytes), why can't they pass that cost onto you?
And, even looking past that, I for one trust monopolistic telecoms such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to innovate faster and get better internet into the hands of consumers than the US Government.
Because all of those companies are already paying their ISPs as well (or are big enough to be their own ISP, ala Google).
Bandwidth is already paid for in both directions - nobody gets a 'free' pipe as it is today. This is letting one side charge double for no good reason.
I wasn't originally talking about net-neutrality. In my opinion, the bandwidth available to people in the US (as well as the cost) is terrible. My point with the electricity analogy is that I think I should be able to watch streaming HD video in every room in my house and still have enough bandwidth left over for whatever else I can think of.
Simply: data needs to be treated like electricity. It would be absurd if the power company told me I could run a toaster, but not a toaster and a microwave.
ISPs could deliver this sort of thing[1], they just choose not to (because it might not make financial sense).
[1]Could meaning that this is technologically possible.
Packets != Electricity -- in boston, I'm not getting electricity generated in california.
When we send a package the price consists of 3 things - size, distance, and speed. I think that's a much better way of thinking about bandwidth than electricity is.
Peering agreements can be seen as one UPS taking my package to memphis and then fedex taking it to an area that only they serve. If fedex and UPS have similiar amount of packages going between them then they may decide to not bother charging each other. However, if fedex decides to reduce their territory to only major factories (CDNs) then all of a sudden the amount of packages they're sending over UPS gets out of equilibrium and UPS may decide to charge them for their delivery service.
>Packets != Electricity -- in boston, I'm not getting electricity generated in california.
You're right. You're getting electricity that was produced several million years ago under ground in [probably] West Virginia, then transferred to a station near your house where it was released and made available to you.
But where it is produced is a completely moot point. We're talking about the internet. The difference between sending a .jpg to my neighbor and sending a .jpg to you in Boston is trivial.
You are describing peering arrangements between ISPs quite well. The ISP that is sending the traffic will "hot potato" the packets to the closest peering port, so the ISP receiving the traffic is responsible for backhauling it. This is why there is a convention of charging for traffic sent between tier 1's. If it's a wash, then it's a wash. Otherwise, whoever sends more pays more.
However, this is not how peering arrangements look between a CDN and an ISP. In that case, the CDN is responsible for the backbone traversal, because the CDN is proxying requests or delivering them from cache, at the local peering point relative to the consumer.
In your example, if you are in boston accessing content with an origin in california, your ISP will receive the data in boston, and will not have to backhaul the traffic from california. The CDN will take care of that.
Your analogy is flawed. There is a limit on how much electricity you can use at once. It's the maximum that the copper to your house can safely carry. The same is true for the internet, the only difference being that the maximum bandwidth that can be gotten out of the internet infrastructure is relatively lower than the maximum amount of electricity that can be gotten out of the grid.
>And, even looking past that, I for one trust monopolistic telecoms such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to innovate faster and get better internet into the hands of consumers than the US Government.
This is why we can't have nice things, right here. This is why the internet as we know it is doomed. There has been over the past 50 years a real push where we assume that private industry can solve anything. And now here is an example of someone who would actually go so far as to "trust" an industrial monopoly to continue to act in a competitive fashion. Why would it do that? That's not what monopolies do. They are uncompetitive.
No system is perfect, capitalism included. I know the libertarian brigade around here can have trouble sometimes wrapping their brains around this, but capitalism actually has structural flaws that need to be mitigated. The best way to do that we know of so far is by regulation enforced by a democratically elected government. This is a really simple concept and one that anyone 75 years ago would have intuitively understood. I blame public schooling.
Christ, you would think at least a cursory glance at the history of cable television in the US would convince anyone not to "trust" a monopoly in the communications space, but you can't even count on that. Goodbye, internet.
For this analogy to make sense, we would all have to pay a fixed amount for electricity and then be entitled to consume as we want. Last time I checked, Comcast (and all other ISPs) offer a range of plans for increasing amounts of money with increasing limits and caps. The ISPs pay gigabyte per gigabyte in their peering arrangements (and yes, some gigabytes cost them more than other gigabytes), why can't they pass that cost onto you?
And, even looking past that, I for one trust monopolistic telecoms such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to innovate faster and get better internet into the hands of consumers than the US Government.