Two-tiered Internet? (only if it's fast, right?)

[Richard Cranium]

What do you think of a two-tiered internet? I'm not sure I really understand what they want to do but it looks as if they (the providers) want a way to charge more money for fast internet access and not just for the end users.

http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=1745

[Krom]

HEH retarded, exactly the kind of thing congress would let slip through.

[Tricord]

That'll never work. Nobody owns a big enough portion of the internet to make something like this work. If a single ISP does this, it will lose all it's customers to the competing ISP's.

Big transit carriers, such as Level3, really don't care about what the end-customers use their network for, as long as they get paid for the bandwidth consumption.

An ISP can only guarantee bandwidth on it's own network (and even then, they might not be able to). So guaranteeing bandwidth to content providers for streaming media is virtually impossible.

You can't influence internet traffic much (especially not the routes followed). I'm guessing their idea of a two-tier internet is a direct peering to content providers such as Yahoo and Google, effectively cutting cost for the ISP and providing an excuse to raise it's end-user product prices.

Bah.

[Ferno]

With the way the internet works now?

hah! good luck!

[MD-2389]

With the way the internet works now?

hah! good luck!

Hey, if it locks out AOLers, all the better.

[TigerRaptor]

Telecom companies such as Bellsouth and AT&T have seen their telephony profits cut to ribbons by cable providers offering all-in-one voice and data service

All these years of offering crappy products and service. Serves them right.

[Iceman]

The implications for the Internet at large are staggering. If such a system goes into effect, virtually every service that isn't provided by telecom companies, including Internet gaming, will be relegated to the "slow" Internet.

Thats all I need to know ...

[Capm]

define slow? The only way they'd get away with that is if the fast internet were a gigabit or more - And even then, at some point, gigabit will be the low end speed.

[Krom]

Ahaha, I like how people are talking about "gigabit" internet when my ISP still measures their "high speed" in multiples of 28.8k dialup speeds.

[roid]

read this on Boing Boing today, i think it sums it up well:

From Boston.com today:

"AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors."

Translation: "We like everything about the internet, except the way it keeps us from locking out the competition, so we want something just like the net, except less useful to the user, but with more pricing power for us."

[roid]

we actually already have something similar to this in some parts of Australia, it's called PIPE. But it's not done to make it worse for the user, but BETTER.

PIPE works like this: because of the major-city-centric nature of Australia, in many major citys the ISPs are in very close proximity to eachother - often in the very same buildings! So what those ISPs decided to do was connect to eachother with dedicated cables, and have an agreement that they would NOT CHARGE EACHOTHER FOR THE BANDWIDTH. I guess it's kindof a form of anti-competitive collusion (since it discourages users from signing up with the unlucky non-PIPE connected ISPs), but in the case of the PIPE network it really does benefit the consumer.

In australia they limit the amount of downloads you can do a month, per gigabyte (i'm on a 10gigabyte plan). But i can trade traffic with anyone else on the PIPE network at full speed, and the traffic isn't counted.

(thankfully, unlimited plans are gradually comming down in price. We'll eventually all switch over to unlimited plans.)

I think the PIPE network is a good way of doing a multiple-tiered internet - since it's main motivation is to INCREASE speed for it's users, not charge them for the privilege.

[fyrephlie]

so it's like back when i had a hard line in the house instead of just a cell phone and made a long distance phone call... local charged me for the unlimited local calling each month (read: USWest MN Monopoly at the time) and my long distance was charged through the long distance carrier (read: GE cause they charged 5 cents a minute no matter what and only a $1.95 monthly fee when i made a long distance call that month, which i did 3 times ever...)

so, i guess if this were to happen we would expect 'fast' gaming servers through the telecom companies.

BOOOOOOO, HISSSSSSSS... not gonna happen.

[Tricord]

we actually already have something similar to this in some parts of Australia, it's called PIPE. But it's not done to make it worse for the user, but BETTER.

PIPE works like this: because of the major-city-centric nature of Australia, in many major citys the ISPs are in very close proximity to eachother - often in the very same buildings! So what those ISPs decided to do was connect to eachother with dedicated cables, and have an agreement that they would NOT CHARGE EACHOTHER FOR THE BANDWIDTH. I guess it's kindof a form of anti-competitive collusion (since it discourages users from signing up with the unlucky non-PIPE connected ISPs), but in the case of the PIPE network it really does benefit the consumer.

In australia they limit the amount of downloads you can do a month, per gigabyte (i'm on a 10gigabyte plan). But i can trade traffic with anyone else on the PIPE network at full speed, and the traffic isn't counted.

(thankfully, unlimited plans are gradually comming down in price. We'll eventually all switch over to unlimited plans.)

I think the PIPE network is a good way of doing a multiple-tiered internet - since it's main motivation is to INCREASE speed for it's users, not charge them for the privilege.

That exists everywhere on a larger scale. Every country has an "IX", an Internet Exchange point. The idea is to have all local traffic of a certain country or region transit through the IX. Typically, all ISP's peer with each other at this point, allowing local traffic to route through the IX rather than through the (expensive) uplinks.

See a reference list of the more important IX in Europe. See http://www.bnix.net for the Belgian Exchange, quite a big one.

[roid]

yeah there we go, just like that.