said by funchords :

said by SuperWISP :

Robb seems perfectly willing to make false and in fact slanderous statements about me and my business practices to further his crusade to regulate the Internet.

Nice charge, now cite the false and slanderous statements I've made about you.

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Several people who have spoken before this Commission and before Congress have claimed that Internet service is the province of a cable/telco "duopoly" which must be reined in by regulations to keep it from exploiting its market power. Fortunately, as of the moment, this is not true. Estimates vary, but most agree that there are between 4,000 and 8,000 small, independent, competitive ISPs such as ourselves. These small operators need to be nurtured, protected from anticompetitive behavior, and given an opportunity to grow.

The "hot button" issue in the recent hearings has been ISPs' throttling or blocking of so-called "P2P" activities, including those carried on via software such as GNUtella, BitTorrent, eDonkey, and KaZaA. Because my time here is brief, I've summarized the situation in two slides. Here, in the first slide, you see the way that content and services are normally delivered on the Internet. The provider of the content or service sets up a server -- usually in a building called a "server farm" -- where Internet bandwidth is cheap and plentiful. The information travels across the Internet backbone and reaches the ISP, which pays much higher prices for bandwidth -- often as much as $300 per megabit per second per month. (By the way, these prices have lately been increasing -- not decreasing -- due to mergers and consolidation in the backbone market.) The ISP also maintains the expensive infrastructure that connects users to the backbone. The user pays the ISP to do this. This situation fulfills the implicit contract of the Internet which has been in place ever since it stopped being the government funded ARPAnet: everyone buys his or her connection to the backbone.

In the second slide, you see what happens when you have P2P. In this case, the content or service provider doesn't pay its full freight for connectivity to the backbone. Instead, it turns the users' computers into servers, which in turn distribute its content or services. And users often don't even know that this is occurring. All they know is that they installed the "downloading software" or other software that let them access the product.

This situation is great for the content provider; its bandwidth costs are reduced to nearly zero. And the customer -- who in the United States virtually always has flat rate service -- doesn't pay any more, because the service is flat rate. So, where do the bandwidth costs go? The answer: they are dumped on the ISP. What's more, because the ISP -- especially a rural ISP, but it applies to all of them -- pays much more per megabit to buy bandwidth and deliver it to customers, the costs are not only shifted but multiplied several hundredfold in the process. It's obvious to anyone that this isn't fair and it isn't in any way "neutral." The content provider is, in essence, setting up a server on the ISP's network without permission and without compensation. This is why ISPs virtually always prohibit P2P and also the operation of servers on residential connections by contract. Our contract with our users says this, and we fully disclose it; we do not hide it. If someone does want to operate servers on our network, we can offer him or her "business grade" bandwidth, for which we charge a fair price that takes these extra costs into account. But P2P makes the bottom lines of such companies as Vuze look better, so of course they want to mandate that it be allowed on all connections -- no matter how non-neutral this is or what harm it does to ISPs.

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said by bicker :

Waaaa waaaa waaaa. You just want what you want and don't care to factor in what is right or true. Your perspectives are un-American, and deserve far more ridicule than I'm prepared to pile on them.

said by superdog :

said by kamm :

If you don't understand funchords' post then just come out and ask for help.

I am thinking that perhaps you don't understand my question?. Funchords has a right to his opinion (as do you), and he voiced his based upon what he read (obviously?). At least he backed up his response with some facts. How are you basing yours?.

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If all you are doing is making a deduction based upon reading someone else's paragraph?, perhaps you need the help in understanding a simple question?,

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ESPN's business model here assumes that the content ESPN is offering is so compelling that it will force users to change carriers.

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...and never order this service, period

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