| What is wrong with comcast's present approach? Throttle ALL of an individual's traffic during peak hours if that individual is causing congestion problems. This is a sensible approach.
If the problem is truly congestion concerns then where is the evidence that this doesn't work.
I am very suspicious of clever new ideas when there are working simple solutions in place.
quote:
CableLabs uses this example: Customers wanting to use P2P on the cheap could get a service tier that offers big bandwidth and a low price -- but low priority as well. The caveat is that the tier would come with a "high likelihood of preemption," according to CableLabs.
...extra kick of speed to select traffic (or content partners) even when there's network congestion, according to the CableLabs document (pdf) quietly posted to the CableLabs website. That could allow cable operators to bill customers based on what the connection's used for. Instead of (or in addition to) metered billing, a carrier could offer "base Internet browsing" connections to some users, and "game or video hungry" connections to others.
If you bill based on what the connection is used for then we are back to paying by application(application discrimination). How is this other than a different way of stating what has been pushed for all along, leveraging control of the delivery system to get a piece of the content money?
We should not be paying by application or content. It's the internet age, we pay for routing of bits. Whatever content is being transmitted is the business of the end points, not the bit delivery system. |
