connected...

Who Cares About The iPhone?

I've had a Motorola Droid 2 for several weeks now and I am still gushing over it, marking probably the longest love affair I've ever had with a gadget.  For probably close to a decade I'd been telling my corporate and college students that I wanted a universal handheld device that was a phone, GPS and MP3 player.  After a few products that came close to my ideal (the Q, which drove me away from Motorola for years not just because Verizon disabled the GPS, and BlackBerry), my grand dream is finally realized.  And it ain't an iPhone, which even as a longtime Apple and iPod fan makes me glad.

Yes, iPhones broke new ground and are still wicked cool.  And you can jailbreak them so you aren't trapped in a room in hell with Inez, Sartre and Steve Jobs' controlling vision.  But competition is good, and I couldn't wait for Verizon to get them.

My old phone was toast, and the Android devices were mature enough so I took the plunge.  Never made a better tech decision in my life.

There's a wide array of apps, and most of the apps I want have been/will be ported from iPhone versions.  The biggest app gap forme so far: no CSPAN radio from Jacobs Media yet, and no NASA TV app.  Yeah, I'm a geek.  In that vein, my favorite apps are the Android version of APOD and Galaxy Wire, which provides cool vintage NASA pics daily and This Day in History stuff.

The phone is also incredibly stable.  Not that it doesn't freak out on occasion, but what computer doesn't, especially when you load boatloads of software and hammer it constantly with use?

Battery life is a POS, so I have found myself tethered a bit more than I'd like, but management apps and a little behavior mod makes it bearable.  The overall utility of this thing more than makes up for power weakness.

Ericka wants an iPhone.  Maybe.  We're due for a New Every Two upgrade and she'd been chomping at the bit for one.  Now that it's not just vaporware here in Verizon Wireless Land, she's less passionate about it since she's seen how great my Droid is.  We'll see what happens next month.

ntodd

PS--I was going to blog more about network issues and whatnot, but lost interest.  Gotta get back to Angry Birds...

Unfairpoint

Freep:

Regulators opened a probe Monday into whether to revoke FairPoint Communications’ right to do business in Vermont, grilling its president about customer service problems and ordering the troubled telecommunications provider to respond to a state “show cause” petition within 30 days.

The state Public Service Board gave the company until Sept. 10 to reply to a petition filed last month in which state officials asked for an investigation into whether FairPoint has the financial viability and operations know-how to recover from its inauspicious start handling telecommunications business in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Advertisement

FairPoint, based in Charlotte, N.C., bought Verizon’s land line business and Internet operations in the three states in a $2.3 billion deal last year.

It took over operations Feb. 1 and many of its customers have been plagued with problems since, from billing errors and service order delays to long waits on call-in complaint lines.

“As we said in our petition, if FairPoint cannot raise its service quality to an acceptable level, it’s our opinion that we’ve got to look at whether they should be operating the incumbent phone company here,” said James Porter III, special counsel to the Public Service Board.

At this point, I'm amazed I have dial tone.  Really, it's been such a clusterfuck, especially the billing situation. 

And after all the promises that we'd have improved services because this was a smaller company than Verizon with a focus on customer satisfaction and a real interest in doing business in Vermont, it's been disappointing.  I guess we won't be getting WiMax out in the boonies any time soon.

But if FairPoint isn't capable of being the ILEC, who really is?  We've got a good bunch of independents like Waitsfield Telecom, but who can step up and be a statewide carrier?

ntodd

iRansom

Defective by Design:

As you've no doubt heard, Apple, the last major retailer of DRM-encumbered music announced, live at MacWorld, that all iTunes music will be going DRM-free. Today, some 8 million songs and music videos are already available DRM-free, via iTunes Plus.

Of course, what this really makes clear is that this was never about the record companies withholding DRM-free music from Apple, but rather that Apple was unwilling to concede a tiered pricing structure to the recording companies. So to all those who kept sending us messages about how Apple were the wrong target, I hope know you will see that Apple really were forced into this concession. In the end, anti-DRM activists -- including well over 10,000 from Defective by Design -- were able to educate the public enough to pressure the major labels to go DRM free and force Apple to give in.

We received this note from one reader today "Help -- Apple is holding me ransom for $0.30 per song" -- yes, it's a sad situation that Apple's concession comes at a steep price for their most loyal customers. You would think that if Apple really hated DRM so much they would do this without charge wouldn't you? You do know the reason why they don't? They hope, just like all DRM vendors, to keep you locked to their platform. $0.30 per song is the ransom you must pay to break your bonds. -- our condolences to all those who cannot escape.
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Yet, this announcement is a major win for the campaign against DRM and our efforts to get Apple to drop DRM.

Don't buy DRM and speak out against it -- it really is that easy. Remember to use services that are DRM free.

Would there were this much activism against the war, but hey, a blow against corporatism is a blow against fascism...

ntodd

Vonage And Verizon, Sittin' In A Tree...

Well, they aren't K-I-SS-I-N-G, but they've at least settled their patent infringement dustup:

Vonage announced today that it has reached a settlement with Verizon to resolve a patent infringement suit  that was first filed in June 2006. According to Vonage, the settlement could be worth as much as $120 million if the company does not win an appeals court rehearing for two of Verizon’s patents. If Vonage does win a rehearing on the two patents, which both  enhanced name translation servers, then the company will pay $80 million to settle the case.
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Earlier this year, a federal jury found Vonage guilty of infringing upon three of Verizon’s patents and ordered the company to pay $58 million in damages, and to also pay a 5.5% royalty rate on any future sales using Verizon technology. Despite filing appeals to have the verdict overturned, an appeals court last month affirmed the federal jury’s original verdict. An earlier request for a retrial was also rejected.

The settlement comes just two weeks after Vonage agreed to pay $80 million to Sprint Nextel to settle a similar patent suit.

(via Living in a connected world)

I'd blogged about the patents in question before, and while I agree to a certain extent with some cynics who say this is just Verizon's attempt to destroy a competitor, they do have a right to protect their innovations.  And really, I still can't figure out how Vonage can possibly survive with its current business model even without all the lawsuits...

ntodd

HDBLURAYWHOCARES?

Next-gen DVDs were part of our discussion when I was teaching last week at the FDIC, so this caught my eye:

Paramount and Dreamworks said today that they're abandoning support for Blu-ray Disc and will begin putting out their movies exclusively on HD DVD, one more step in the aggressively consumer-unfriendly march of large entertainment and tech firms (Sony on the Blu-ray side, Microsoft on the HD DVD side) to leave many people sitting with obsolete equipment -- and to drive both of these allegedly next-generation discs into the ground.
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Gizmodo does a fine job measuring the battlefield as it stands. They come up with 10 studios for HD DVD and Blu-ray each -- some studios are supporting one format only, some are supporting both. So the battle is even.

But do you care? As many commentators have noted, by the time the fight shakes out and we see a winner declared, we'll already have moved long beyond delivering video content on permanent plastic media. Every year, hard drives and solid-state memory systems are getting physically smaller, more capacious, and cheaper; the Internet, meanwhile, is getting roomier (even if not as fast as we'd all like).

Sure, it'll be some time before you can download a high-definition movie from Netflix or buy a hard drive packed with every episode of "The Wire." But considering the attrition war between HD DVD and Blu-ray, it'll be some time, too, before it becomes clear which one to buy without getting burned.

I said a while back that I thought HD had all but won the war because porn was going with the format, and that's one big part of why Beta lost to VHS.  But I also observed in class that it almost doesn't matter now that we have the iPod/Tivo model: regular hard drive space is cheaper than bottled water so if I can download movies from the Internet, who the hell cares what disc format is more popular? 

Our distribution model is inherently moving away from shipping atoms (if I might borrow from Nicholas Negroponte) in the physical world to shipping bits in a network-centric universe.  Actually, I've been talking about this concept for ages, but I never wrote a book about it and instead just have this crappy blog...

ntodd

indiePhone

Yes!

eMusic, which sells DRM-free MP3s, has just inked a deal with AT&T to make music available for purchase directly from AT&T handsets. Users can also download another copy from a home computer an no extra charge.

eMusic is the second-largest music download store after iTunes. It currently boasts more than 300,000 subscribers and offers more than 2 million tracks from independent artists (a category that includes people like Paul McCartney and the Arcade Fire), and the company hopes to turn its lack of huge radio hits into a positive by reaching out to a different audience.
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The new service is available for both Samsung and Nokia handsets. Sorry, iPhone users.

(via Slashdot)

I love my iPod, iTunes, and iSteve iJobs.  And I'm so glad that AT&T and eMusic are doing this.

ntodd

Universal Access

Something I do agree with Google about:

Google wants to put its money where its mouth is...to the tune of at least $4.6 billion.

The search giant said Friday that it's willing to participate in the Federal Communications Commission's upcoming wireless spectrum 700MHz band auction and pay the minimum reserve of $4.6 billion.

But for Google to participate, there's a catch. It's requiring the FCC to adopt all four of its licensing recommendations, no matter who ultimately wins the bidding process.

Google has also been pressing the FCC to reserve a portion of that spectrum to be used primarily, or exclusively, for broadband communications. The Internet giant wants "open access" rules, fearing that without them, only a few powerful companies, such as telecommunications and cable providers, will become the permanent guardians of the airwaves.

Google wants the FCC to agree to its four "open" platform recommendations, which include: open applications for users; open devices that will work with whichever network provider customers choose; open services that would allow for third-party resellers to acquire wireless services on a wholesale basis; and open networks, which would allow third parties, such as Internet service providers, to interconnect at any feasible point within the 700MHz licensee's wireless network.

The Issue Of Which We No Longer Speak really is a discussion of TRANSPORT across provider backbones (yes, getting to them is necessary, but it's about categorizing data for appropriate delivery in the carrier cloud).  I think people should be more concerned about ACCESS--that's where the overblown rhetoric about "Internet gatekeepers" is more apt.

I'd like to see us expand the Universal Service concept to become Universal Access, meaning I can get to the Internet and my applications no matter where I am, no matter what device I use, and no matter what provider's service I subscribe to.  This would probably require all players, including the Googles, Comcasts and Vonages of the world, to pay into the USF.  A good thing for all, methinks.

ntodd

[Adding: I like this play by Google from a strategic business POV, too.  While you can be an app provider without owning the network, if you've got the coin it certainly makes sense to invest in access.  They've also been fairly aggressive in WiFi investment, IIRC.

Also note that the reason I want the FCC to carve out some spectrum for open access is that the airwaves belong to all of us.  The reason we need to auction is to make sure we don't step on each others' toes (having no regs governing wireless would be as bad as having no traffic laws on the road), generating revenue for the government is a good thing for everybody, and it makes sense to have providers with their economies of scale essentially manage the spectrum on our behalf.  But they shouldn't be able to mint unlimited money just because we lease them some of our RF property.  Not unlike public access TV, I say if the providers want access to us, the customers, they gotta give us access to stuff that belongs to us.]

Speaking Of Evil Telecoms

I think this article needs a fisking:

When Henry Powderly II ordered Verizon Communications Inc.'s FiOS fiber-optic service, he knew he was about to be connected to the future of telecommunications. He also got unplugged from its past. Which meant that while Powderly was gaining features, he was losing some telecommunications options.

Verizon's installer — without warning, Powderly says — removed the copper wires that used to carry his phone calls. For most of the world, copper still links homes and businesses, as it has for a century.

I'll just start by saying, "YOU LUCKY BASTARD!"  I wish I could get FiOS and leave the Ancient World Of Slow-as-molasses Copper, but I live in East Nowhere and am roughly 18 lightyears away from a Verizon (soon to be Fairpoint) CO.

Verizon's new high-bandwidth fiber lines are fully capable of carrying not only calls but also Internet data and television with room to grow. But once the copper is pulled, it's difficult to switch back to the traditional phone system or less expensive Digital Subscriber Line service. And Verizon isn't required, in most instances, to lease fiber to rival phone companies, as it is with the copper infrastructure.

I don't believe Verizon isn't required in any instance to unbundle fiber according to the FCC's UNE-P rules at this point.  It's a different animal than copper because the presumption essentially is that the old Bell companies had an "unfair" advantage over competitive carriers with their extant facilities built over the course of the last century or so.  Presumably there is an even playing field when it comes to fiber since all carriers have the same opportunity to deploy new optical infrastructure (issues of capital notwithstanding), and there are alternatives to traditional POTS services providing competition (e.g., Vonage).

As it hooks up homes and businesses to its fiber network, Verizon has been routinely disconnecting the copper and, many subscribers say, not telling them upfront or giving them a choice. More than 1 million customers have signed up for a FiOS service, which is offered mainly in the suburban areas of 16 states.

On the one hand, I understand the consumer POV that this is limiting their choice should they decide they don't like the FiOS service (highly unlikely that would be the case) or want a cheaper option (more likely the cost would be an issue, but if you add up all traditional services, FiOS is darn affordable).  Also, the move to get rid of their copper is clearly a ploy to lock out competition who could still reach Verizon's customers under the rules governing copper plant.

However, I thinks it's unreasonable to expect Verizon to continue maintaining their copper, which is rather expensive due to its inherent characteristics (e.g., splicing, sensitivity to environmental conditions).  Fiber is much more resistant to things that cause problems in metallic facilities and thus easier and cheaper to maintain.  And again, the competitive providers can always lay down their own fiber.

Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said customers should have been notified at least three times — once by the sales representative when FiOS is ordered, by the technician before copper is cut and through paperwork given to the customer. Some customers say that hasn't happened.

Yeah, their communications with customers suck ass, as always.

"It's a huge expense to maintain those copper networks," said Scott Randolph, federal regulatory director at Verizon. "At some point in time, it would not make sense to operate two networks."

What did I just say?

Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, incumbent phone companies like Verizon must lease to rivals their copper network. That's generally not the case for next-generation fiber systems. And so far, Verizon has filed more than 100 notices with the Federal Communications Commission to retire portions of copper throughout its network.

TA96 certainly has its flaws, and the incumbents sure hated having to lease their local loop to competitors, but despite all that the law did open up a new networking landscape that has enabled lots of cool stuff.  You know, like cheap broadband access to the Internet.  At some point the regime has to give way to new realities--I'd argue much more has changed since 1996 than had between 1876 and 1996, from a networking, application and computing perspective, not to mention in terms of competition.

The FCC allows the retirement of copper as long as public notice is given so the phone companies can work together to ensure the smaller companies' access. But rivals say access at reasonable prices is not guaranteed and it's just a matter of time before they're cut off.

"It's a horrendous situation ... We don't let General Motors build a highway and decide what size cars to let on the road," said Joe Plotkin, marketing director for Bway.net, a New York Internet provider. "The small guys have tried to fight this re-monopolization of the network infrastructure."

Um...that's a pretty bad analogy (same caveats apply as in my NN post below).  The limit isn't the size of the cars (that's the demesne of IP, not Verizon), but the number of cars--if you only have one-lane roads like around my house, you ain't gonna have lots of cars driving by my mailbox.

He and other smaller rivals contend the communications market is fast becoming a two-player game between giant phone and cable companies — diminishing consumer choice.

Duopolies are indeed dangerous, and while I'm concerned about that, I'd be more concerned if the Verizons and Comcasts of the world could physically block other players from reaching customers.  But hey, power companies have a great deal of potential bandwidth going right into homes and the FCC has approved broadband over powerlines, and Google's got lots of capital they're using to build out access and maybe transport facilities as well.  Oh, then there's satellite and new WiMax services lots of local players are rolling out.

While AT&T Inc. and Qwest Communications International Inc. are also retiring their copper networks, they're not touching the so-called "last mile" of copper wiring that runs from each customer's dwelling to the central office where other lines aggregate. Laying fiber, a robust pipeline, through the last mile is much more expensive because each line goes to a particular home or business.

Verizon is taking the pricey route because it believes fiber offers a superior service that will lure customers away from cable operators, who now offer telephone service in addition to television and high-speed Internet.

Verizon doesn't just believe fiber offers superior service.  It does.  This is not open to opinion: it's resilient in terms of interference and environmental conditions, offers greater bandwidth and service flexibility, and is even becoming cheaper to manufacture than copper lines.

Besides limiting options down the road, the switch to FiOS can have other implications. Unlike copper-connected phone service, FiOS doesn't work during power outages once a backup battery goes out — not even for emergency calls. Home-alarms and certain other devices work best with copper.

True, but that's not a show stopper.  Battery backups can last 8 hours and from what I can cobble together via Google, average outages are about an hour.  I also wonder how many people have a corded phone in their homes anymore.  And heck, the battery in the remote terminal that serves my house goes out in about 30 femtoseconds, so I can't make an emergency call without my cellphone anyway!

Rabe, the Verizon spokesman, said the company will restore copper to homes if the customer insists, but Verizon would rather not reconnect the copper and will try to convince the customer to agree. At any rate, the phone giant provides ample warning, he said.

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Bill Kelm, a FiOS customer in suburban Dallas, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission last year because of Verizon's "inconspicuous" policy rules.

"It's buried within these long terms of service that people never take the time to read," he said. "It needs to be more conspicuous."

While Kelm has no quarrel with FiOS itself — he pays $145 a month for TV, Internet and phone — he would like to have been told before he signed up that Verizon would cut the copper. He was counting on Verizon's clearly advertised 30-day money back guarantee in case he didn't like the service and wanted to switch back.

"I blew a gasket," Kelm said. "The 30-day money back guarantee was worthless in my opinion."

Yet Verizon says they'll reconnect if you want, so the guarantee isn't worthless.  Unless, of course, a reporter needs you to support their pre-determined narrative.

He's also concerned that Verizon initially priced its current FiOS service lower only to jack rates up once the subscriber is reeled in.

"Then, you're stuck," Kelm said.

Golly, I've NEVER heard of providers EVER offering deals to get people interested in services...

ntodd

My Epic Post On Biofuels

Okay, this isn't really about biofuels.  It's about a major burr in my saddle: Net Neutrality.

Before I get into the technical, regulatory and economic meat, I must needs begin with a variety of analogies I've pulled out a number of times when people start acting all crazy about NN:

• When you order a supreme pizza, you get charged more than if you ask for a plain cheese.  Pizza parlors often have other options such as ala carte toppings, individual slices and even salad!  All available if you choose to avail yourself, all available for a price.

• Some people buy new Cadillacs with all the spiffy options (including crappy gas mileage), yet I see other cars on the road like 1985 Datsuns, 2007 Priuses, motorcyles, buses, and other vehicles.  In many urban areas there are toll roads available if you want to go faster or more directly to certain surrounding areas that are not limited to Caddies, but for any car no matter how expensive or cheap or gas guzzling or biofueling it is.

• Say you go the Post Office to send a letter.  You have a number of choices for delivery: if the letter is not time-sensitive and/or you're a cheapskate, you could just mail it First Class for 41 cents; should the letter be rather urgent, you might buy an Express Mail flat rate envelope for $16.25; add a larger item to the letter and it will cost you more because of the additional weight.  First Class has always been "best effort" but generally arrives at some point, whereas the other higher-level options have guarantees associated with them.

As I tell my students all the time, every analogy breaks down at some point.  People can't start comparing the specific realities of pizza making, for example, with telecom because of course they ain't exactly the same.  Yet if you accept the basic premise that one may charge more for increased levels of service, then you're halfway there on Net Neutrality.  If you don't accept that, well, that's beyond the scope of this discussion anyway--I'm not going to argue about basic assumptions of capitalism.

Now, I'm going to try to do this without the benefit of a week-long class that I teach on basic telecommunications, so some of the things will be grossly oversimplified (my colleagues and other bit-weenies better cut me some slack!).  I hope the general concepts will be clear despite that.

So what the heck is NN, anyway?  I find most people I argue with have a vague notion about it, not unlike the old line about porn, I know it when I see it.  Fortunately Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the three basic flavors:

Absolute Non-Discrimination: Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu: "Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."^[2]

Cardozo Law School professor Susan Crawford: insists that a neutral Internet must forward packets on a first-come, first served basis, without regard for Quality of Service considerations.

Limited Discrimination without QoS Tiering: American lawmakers have introduced bills that would allow Quality of Service discrimination as long as no special fee is charged for higher-quality service.^[10]

Limited Discrimination and Tiering: this approach allows higher fees for QoS as long as there is no exclusivity in service contracts: If I pay to connect to the net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service.^[1]. [We] each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.^[11]"See Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

I'll address these in a bit.  First, I need to talk about what QoS is since it's featured so prominently in each definition.  An explanation from my old company's wiki:

Quality of service (QoS) is a network's ability to support varying levels of network performance that can then be mapped to the needs of the applications supported by that network. The performance parameters we seek to control include such things as delay across the network, variations in delay, and total bandwidth available for a connection or information flow, to name a few.

Basically what we're trying to do is use a single networking infrastructure to deliver different applications that have rather different requirements in terms of service from that network.  For example, voice hates delay.  Imagine such a conversation:

Person 1: I love you.

PAUSE

Person 2: I love you, too.

That delay imparts meaning in a usual voice interaction--were you not listening to me, did you have to think before saying you love me, etc?  Thus we want a network to deliver our voices without adding any delay (nor delay variation) because that could in effect change what we are trying to communicate.

On the flip side, consider an e-mail that says, "Come get bagels on the 3rd floor."  Whether that takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes to deliver, the message will always retain its intended meaning.  That's not to say if there's a lot of delay the bagels will still be there after your officemates devour them, but that ain't the issue.  We're simply talking about the needs of e-mail and voice in terms of retaining their meaning.

So each of those applications have certain expectations and requirements of the service provided by a network.  Voice wants low delay, e-mail doesn't care about delay.  They also have different needs regarding other aspects of the network, such as errors--voice is rather tolerant of errors (the human ear can figure out meaning even if parts of the "message" are lost), whereas data needs to be 100% correct (it would be bad if you sent a note promising to transfer 100 bucks and it became 1000).

In the past, we've had separate networks for different applications.  There was a voice network, for example, and a variety of different data networks basically tuned to the requirements of each specific type of application, and ne'er did they meet.  Yet now we're using the public Internet and Internet-like private networks to run multiple applications together.

What providers are doing in the enterprise space is deploying IP networks with some extra capabilities that are not inherent to IP.  The Internet Protocol is "best effort" and provides absolutely no guarantees of delivery across the network--obviously stuff gets to the other side most of the time, otherwise the Internet wouldn't work at all, but other mechanisms (the TCP in TCP/IP being a major one) on the ends deal with that.  That's fine when pretty much all applications are cool with being jumbled together and have essentially the same needs for delivery, which is what the Internet environment was all about decades ago when IP was first implemented.

Nobody thought about running voice or video over the Internet back in the Dark Ages (you know, the 80s).  Text reigned supreme and nobody was really running very complicated stuff.  Today we are continuously coming up with new applications (i.e., uses) and they diverge quite a lot from the old, quiet, tradition-bound world of the pre-web world.

So we need new approaches within the network itself and that's just what the providers are implementing.  In the enterprise environment they sell the same old vanilla flavor "best effort" service (marketed with better-sound names life "basic service" or "standard service") and for a little more coin, corporate customers can buy a "premium service" that offers differentiation between data from their various applications so they can improve overall performance and ultimately, the end user's experience.

An example of what happens if you treat everything the same in your network: Champlain College implemented a Cisco Voice-over-IP solution a couple years back for the usual reasons, including cost savings.  A major, unanticipated issue was a severe drop in voice quality at certain times of day--what some people called "the monster on the other end of the phone" problem.  They'd try to make a call, but for some reason the person on the other end would sound horrible, almost scary.

Turns out that students were getting done with their classes and firing up programs like BitTorrent and their interactive gaming stuff and effectively bogging down the network so much that the little teensy packets filled with voice samples were getting overwhelmed.  Lose too many of those things (most such networks just throw out packets if there are too many), or have them caught behind a lot of big data packets (think of waiting at a RR crossing for a long train) and you can't reconstruct the actual voice on the other phone.

Solution?  Start giving voice packets some logical differentiation on the same physical network.  They examined the traffic patterns, tweaked things in their network devices and POOF!  The Monster was exorcised and the students never noticed any change in their gaming or perfectly-legal (ahem) downloads.

So now I can address one misconception about how the Internet currently works and will work in this Fantabulous New Age of Quality.  One thing I hear from folks is they're afraid AT&T will create two Internets: a highspeed King's Highway one for rich people, and a lowspeed, crappy, pothole-pitted Low Road for us peasants.  In many minds The Evil Empire is literally building separate physical networks and will "discriminate" between who can pay for access to the Internet and those who will be shuffled off onto the back roads where you can't get to your favorite political blog and so forth.

It's actually a single infrastructure that AT&T has deployed to carry everybody's stuff, and it's just a matter of what CONTENT PROVIDERS, not end customers like you and me, pay for in terms of levels of service from that one network.  So YouTube can stay with the traditional "best effort", which means no additional cost to them and we can continue to enjoy embedding fun videos in our blog posts.  Yet if they wanted to start selling a premium high-definition movie service over the same Internet, they could put some extra skin into the game and have their video perhaps delivered in such a way that it looks lovely when you watch it on your computer.

I think this is where people get off the bus because they don't see how this can happen without "degradation" of our regular service.  Perhaps a simple drawing will help:

Let's say I've got a router in my IP network that is receiving three types of traffic, each at different rates and with different needs.  One of the things that happens inside the router is it looks at the "class" each packet belongs to and then puts them in appropriate queues.  Depending on the rules the router's configured with, it will then pump these packets out in a "fair" fashion based on how much stuff is in each queue, what the QoS parameters are that each application has contracted for, and choose the appropriate paths for those packets. 

So maybe the HD video gets put onto a path that offers high bandwidth and the voice and e-mail are interleaved on a lower speed path that still meets their basic requirements.  Possibly some of those green packets will be shunted off on the lower path, too.  Yet each colored packet will get access to the rest of the network, albeit in an arbitrated fashion to make sure the green video stuff doesn't take up all the room in the "tubes" (thanks, Senator Stevens!). 

Voice and video, being more sensitive to delay, might get a bit more space than the e-mail, but the e-mail will still be delivered fairly.  Yes, perhaps it will get slightly more delayed than if this were solely a "first come, first serve" algorithm, but we're talking milliseconds here, which are far below the threshold of any human to notice.  All the while this is improving the experience for people watching video or using Skype or Vonage to talk to friends in Oz.

Now it would certainly be reasonable to expect if YouTube wanted to offer a new, high-quality video service that they would charge more for the increased value.  That better, premium service is going to require extra quality and priority delivery across the network, which has cost the network providers money to implement with new, fairly pricey equipment.  So why shouldn't some of what they charge us go to the providers upon whom they rely?  Honestly, I still find it a puzzlement that people raise such objections, but perhaps that's because there are some other misconceptions about the Internet of which I need to disabuse them.

First, the biggest worry people seem have is that somehow AT&T is going to block political blogs, or create such conditions that it will "take 10 minutes to load Eschaton," thereby limited political speech.  I hope at least from the QoS discussion you can see that there's no technical reason why that would be the case.  As for the potential to begin filtering content the way countries like China and Vietnam do, well...the additional features providers want to charge for aren't necessary if they wanted to play along with a fascist regime, nor would the Net Neutrality language I've seen address the issue. 

It's trivial to block sites, specific content, etc.  Yet we haven't seen any of that without Net Neutrality because, as it turns out, Net Neutrality in its purest form already exists: no provider wants to be in the business of filtering content and, in fact, aren't, because that would destroy the very thing they want to make money from, namely the Internet.  Anytime a provider has done bad things, such as blocking VoIP phone calls from a competitor, the FCC slapped them down with current regulations.  That won't change.

Second, some people have expressed concern that AT&T will eventually stop supporting the old free services in favor of only the premium pay services.  I suppose at some point one can expect all older services to fade away as more people move to the newer, splashier offerings.  But the level of penetration in the market is low in the beginning of any product lifecycle (Fischer-Pry, anyone?), and as more people adopt the new technology, it will become cheaper (as we've seen with residential broadband deployment).

Beyond that, however, there's still a technical reason "best effort" won't go away: there's no benefit to the provider to get rid of it.  IP inherently supports it, so there's really no way to turn it off.  Remember, we're not talking about separate infrastructure (in contrast to AT&T's old TDMA network versus the newer, better CDMA network that Cingular had).

Third, somehow people think that AT&T is trying to make money off something that should be free because "the government built the Internet with our tax dollars."  Nope, the government hasn't been in the networking business in years, and even when they were (e.g., with the NSFNet quasi "backbone"), providers were still building their own infrastructure with their own capital without government assistance.

Yes, the DoD did originally fund ARPAnet for research purposes many aeons ago, and out of that research came the TCP/IP suite of protocols that we use today.  But TCP/IP is still free and is running over networks that the DoD had nothing to do with.  The Internet is really not one monolithic network, but really a "network of networks" where AT&T's network connects to Verizon's and Deutsche Telecom's and even Ma And Pa Kettle's Basement Internet Service.  They all use the same protocols so you can send me e-mail to bitch about this post even though my ISP is different from yours (not to mention I'm on dialup while you've got DSL, you lucky bastards).

One of the best examples of knee-jerk reactions against the providers is when people were freaking out in the wake of the patent infringement decision in a suit Verizon brought against Vonage.  Folks who don't understand patents were scared that somehow Verizon was claiming a patent "on the Internet".  Nothing is further from the truth, but because people naturally (and with great cause) distrust corporations and don't understand some fundamentals, they assume somebody's trying to pull a fast one.  They ain't.  At least, you know, where the Internet's concerned.

Anyway, many bloggers have been decrying the recent FTC decision regarding NN:

In the absence of significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.

That's essentially in the same camp as the FCC:

Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman, said during his portion of the keynote address that he believes the FCC's existing principles are sufficient to address problems that may arise should network operators block traffic.

"I think the FCC has authority to act," he said. "And it has done so in the past."

That's where I sit because having Congress try to legislate anything regarding fast-changing technology is a recipe for disaster.  Really, do you want Ted Stevens authoring laws about "the tubes"?  Nope, neither do I.  And as the FCC and FTC already can deal with any truly unfair practices by providers, I'd rather follow the "first, do no harm" guidance when it comes to new regulation.

So back to those NN definitions.  First:

Absolute Non-Discrimination

This is completely unreasonable and impractical in a modern Internet that is supposed to deliver new, different innovative applications.  Hopefully the stuff you know about QoS will make that conclusion fairly obvious.

Limited Discrimination without QoS Tiering

Why do Democrats hate capitalism?

Seriously, here's one example of some the zombie legislation wandering the halls of Congress:

With respect to any broadband service offered to the public, each broadband service provider shall—

(1) not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet;
(2) not prevent or obstruct a user from attaching or using any device to the network of such broadband service provider, only if such device does not physically damage or substantially degrade the use of such network by other subscribers;
(3) provide and make available to each user information about such user’s access to the Internet, and the speed, nature, and limitations of such user’s broadband service;
(4) enable any content, application, or service made available via the Internet to be offered, provided, or posted on a basis that—

(A) is reasonable and nondiscriminatory, including with respect to quality of service, access, speed, and bandwidth;
(B) is at least equivalent to the access, speed, quality of service, and bandwidth that such broadband service provider offers to affiliated content, applications, or services made available via the public Internet into the network of such broadband service provider; and
(C) does not impose a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available via the Internet into the network of such broadband service provider;

(5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization...

Part 1 I'm cool with, though the "lawful" content can open up a can of worms.  Part 2 is also fine, though it's probably unnecessary in light of Carterfone.  Part 3 makes me scratch my head, though it's certainly not fundamentally offensive. 

But all those sections seem to be much ado about nothing and are not what NN advocates are up in arms about anyway.  Parts 4 (specifically section C) and 5 are what I take issue with because of the charging issue.  Which brings me to the last option that Sir Tim advocates:

Limited Discrimination and Tiering

This is coming from somebody who understands the Internet from a technical perspective, as well as the implications of new applications on the network.  It's a balanced approach and I think when people get some of the fundamentals, it's the one that everybody can find common ground with.

The funny thing is that ultimately being able to charge for differentiated services ain't gonna do providers much good anyway.  The real money is in developing applications, not delivery per se.  But they do need to recoup investment in the network now to bridge them to the application-centric era in which they will be competing.

Long post boiled down: decisions by governing agencies to reject adding Net Neutrality regulations do not mean "we're fucked," as I've seen some in the blogosphere breathlessly claim.  It's reasonable to avoid imposing anything new and unnecessary as we continue to develop a modern networking infrastructure (not unlike the moratorium against Internet taxation that was in force for so long).

ntodd

PS--As with all my long posts, I will be fixing the inevitable stupid things and also be updating in response to queries and new thoughts.

[Update: NYMary was asking me a few clarifying questions, so let me add one more boiled-down note. 

The networks are NOT looking at the content in the IP packets.  They don't care what the content providers are sending.  The content providers, however, are marking their packets with the priority levels they want and then the network delivers that data according to contracted rules.  So the decision about prioritization comes from THE CUSTOMER, not the network providers.]

Down With DRM!

Heard about this on my drive back to the hotel Wednesday:

Amazon.com has announced they will be launching their online music store without copyright restrictions, reports Yahoo News.

The decision will allow consumers to play music they purchase on the site on any device they choose, unlike copy-protected music bought from Napster or Rhapsody, which can't be played on an iPod, for example.

Amazon's vice president of digital media Bill Carr said the move "is helping to pave the way for a much better, much more customer-centric experience in digital music."

The service is expected to go into effect later this year, but no specific date has been set.

John Healey at the LATimes notes:

Though late to the party, Amazon isn't simply following in the footsteps of Apple, Napster, Sony and RealNetworks: it plans to sell songs only in the MP3 format, free from digital rights management restraints. That's moving an important step further than Apple, which plans to offer DRM-free music at a premium price only from EMI and selected independent labels. Going MP3-only is probably the only approach Amazon could take, given that a big part of its business is selling digital music players that don't share a common approach to DRM. If Amazon wants to duplicate the hardware-content synergies that made the iTunes Store the market's Godzilla, it can't afford to have customers confused or frustrated by DRM incompatibilities.

The major record companies would love to weaken Apple's dominance, and Amazon is likely to be willing to do things that Apple has refused to do (for example, sell new releases for higher prices than older titles). But the DRM-free approach has only one adherent so far among the Big Four: EMI, which declared its support for Amazon's new store today. Forbes offers an interesting take on where the other three stand; in short, only Universal seems interested in venturing into the unlocked world. Not having downloadable tracks from at least half of the major record companies would be a big problem for Amazon, but it wouldn't necessarily consign the store to the indie fringes. It all depends on how hard Amazon promotes the downloads it does have to the masses who frequent its site.

I agree that this is the only way Amazon could possibly go, and while I'm not sanguine about the issues with having only one of the Big Four going the non-DRM route, I have to think that this will ultimately be as successful as Steve Jobs' initial foray into leading the horses to water.  They will drink when they get thirsty enough and see that lovely, cool water.

Personally, I'm just totally psyched for this.  EMI's got lots of nice classical content and I would love to digitally expand my collection.  And anything that can help break the DRM hegemony just a little, freeing the music and the people who love it, is inherently a good thing.  If anybody can fight the power, it's Amazon.

ntodd