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:3, Interesting)
Density Myth. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Other things small countries can do that may be more difficult for the U.S. to do:
1 - Have a true national plan for rolling out internet, rather than Country, State, County, Municipality, Neighborhood, and Individual plans. (Individuals in this case being people who object, maybe with some merit, to unsightly telco boxes on or near their property and do something about it, messing up the plan, either requiring the telco box to be moved or for them to go through city planners and/or court to get permission to place the box on the person's property.)
2 - Dictate how the internet is going to be rolled out. Similar to 1, but not quite the same. Possibly have "country wide" municipal broadband, with individual providers riding off of state owned infrastructure.
3 - Not deal with U.S. Corporate lobbyists. It seems we have world class corporate lobbying. Our lobbyists are so strong that they can convince us the price we're paying for Internet, Health Care, Cell Service, pick your overpriced product is as good or better than the rest of the world, that the reduced service we often receive along with the high prices is really better than the rest of the world, and that all the multiple ways we pay our ISPs to improve their infrastructure, through taxes, directly through our internet bills, through "back door deals" like Netflix paying both their ISP and the end user's ISP to deliver content will actually improve much of anything. (The latter seems to have, but only because that one entertainment provider has paid to improve that one service on that one monolithic ISP.)
4 - Laying down new infrastructure rather than dealing with a hodgepodge of existing infrastructure. This one is actually pretty important. Especially since some of that old infrastructure - land lines - are something ISPs/telcos are still federally mandated to maintain. . . unless this has recently changed. Also, they may have more uniform wiring, and access to that wiring, in their larger buildings.
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a giant sticky mess. Many advocates for net neutrality have only a vague idea of how things work so their proposals are vague. Many with the experience to produce more detailed proposals have ulterior motives.
Anyway, if you assume honoring protocol priorities is OK, then you end up with abusive situations where an ISP that runs video protocol 1 can sink traffic from a competitor based on the fact that they use video protocol 2. Add to that that protocols can be patented, and you'd end up with an incentive to create and patent stupid protocols just to do exactly that.
Also there are services whose availability would benefit the customer/public/economy that involve prioritizing packets between privately administered device networks, and not by protocol, and defining the difference between those services and unfair competitive practices leads us down a road to byzantinism.
Really we need to get to a point where end-users can send ToS bits into the network and have them honored as long as they are below a fair usage level for ToS packets, and a certain percent of the network is kept free for best effort, allowing the consumer some level of live control. Before we even do that, though, we need to just move towards "ISPs and other providers must make X% of all built capacity available at a (possibly tariffed) basic rate for public best effort use" and apply that principle across all areas of bandwidth, pps processing power, and -- the toughest sell but very important -- CDN capacity. The cash flow through CDNs really needs to be further regulated to eliminate the perverse incentive of making money off congested pipes on the back end. The restriction on sales of prioritized services in the other 100-X% part of the pipe would provide appropriate incentive for expansion of the entire pipe, benefiting the basic rate users not just the premium arrangements. The X could be adjusted by policy changes until the sweet spot is found or as the ecosystem changes.
Now if the above was TLDR, a solid proposal would be 100x more complicated.
Re:Density Myth. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
It is possible because your density story is a lie. It is made up. There is no truth to it. If Ephrata, and even smaller towns in that county, can have gigabit at a reasonable price 14 years ago then we all can now. The tech is 100x cheaper now. There is no excuse for not fibering up the whole country.
Title is a bit sensationalist... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course a network vendor is going to point out that some packets needs preferential treatment over others. It's something they've worked to engineer into their product lines because their customers demand the capability to do so. For an ISP, 911 VoIP packets are a much higher priority than World of Warcraft packets.
Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
Saying Cisco opposes Net Neutrality just because they're pointing out some simple truths on how network operate today is like saying Glock supports terrorism just because they make guns.
Of course, if the title weren't sensational, no one would probably read it.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:2, Interesting)
And QoS isn't needed if you have enough bandwidth in place in the first place.