Cisco Opposes Net Neutrality 337
angry tapir writes: All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite net neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems has said. Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations. "Different bits do matter differently. We need to ensure that we have a system that allows this to occur."
Re: I prefer (Score:4, Informative)
This! Cisco doesn't actually oppose net neutrality, just the abolishment of QoS prioritization... but who the hell wanted to get rid of that anyway?
Re:What About Electricity? (Score:4, Informative)
Does the electric company get to decide which devices will be shut down first? Can they shut down your devices before they shut down your neighbor's, because ?
Actually yes. For industrial uses there are there are different categories of avaliability: high availability, standard and interruptible. An interruprible contract means that the electic company could disconnect the transformer serving your factory if the power demand is too high. Conversely high availability contracts will be disconnected last: normally they have also ne transformaer in stand by in the case the main one fails. By the way if yuo have a 100 kW contract you'll get more power than a 10 kW contract...
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Informative)
The crux of net neutrality is bits from different providers being given the same priority. Nobody is arguing that we can afford to drop some Bittorrent packets in exchange for VOIP / video streaming. What the cable companies want to do, however, is prioritise their video streaming, for example, over someone elses. That is the net neutrality issue.
Re:Density Myth. . . (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also add my example. I live in a decent sized city. We're no New York City, by far, but we're not suburbs either. When Verizon was laying their FIOS cables, they went to the suburbs and bypassed the city. The population density of the city was higher, but they avoided us entirely. Of course, the reason wasn't population density, but income. Suburbs are more likely to have middle class/high middle class/affluent individuals who can pay Verizon more money. Cities might have poorer individuals and they might not be able to afford FIOS. So they made a business decision and avoided the poorer locations.
The problem with this is that, in the 21st century, knowledge of how to use the Internet is crucial to many jobs. Use of the Internet can help lift a person up from poverty. Sticking the poor regions with slower speeds is exasperating the income separation.
Of course, Verizon is free to build where they like and avoid poorer areas. It's not like they took billions of taxpayer money to wire states, reneged on their promises, and kept the money, right? (Oh, wait. They did.)
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Informative)
Shoddy journalism to blame for this, I'm afraid.