Oz regulator “welcomes” debate on limiting net neutrality The head of Australia's telecommunications regulator, the Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC), has signalled he's open to new debate about network access regimes that back away from complete net neutrality. Speaking at a Brisbane event hosted by Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, ACCC Chairman Rod Sims noted that “ …
I think the regulator should fully embrace Telstra's idea of "congestion-pricing" various services when "such practices are transparent". In fact, they should mandate that ACCC would be in charge of that transparency and would be doing 2 things for transparency's sake:
1. Designing the pricing and service description for each telecom provider that follows congestion-charging that telecoms are required to use on their websites and in any advertising campaign where they mention the price.
AND
2. Launching a website where customers can compare all the providers' pricing and associated caps.
What's that Telstra? You no longer want congestion-charging?
Yep, me too.
I read the article as far as that line and then, assuming the rest of the article would be like-minded anti-freetard rant a la AO, I just clicked into the comments section to see if there was a shitstorm over it. Well, not so much a shitstorm, but you beat me to it, so here's my support to your statement.
I'm not so sure the statement about peer-to-peer automatically translates to "p2p is the criminals' friend" (though that may have been what he was thinking)
Some (not all) internet traffic may be compared to postal services. You might want emails, and definitely voice traffic, to get the equivalent of "Next day by 9am" while a software distribution could come 2nd Class. But post is paid for at the point of sending and internet by the (supposed) size/capacity of the pipe it comes down.
Perhaps a more granular form of service provision where you could pay per month for a certain speed for your ordinary traffic, and a different price for voice traffic and a separate price again for p2p traffic in a manner similar to paying for bundles of cable channels. But aside from the difficulty of getting a mechanism - and provider enthusiasm - for that, takeup would be dependent on customers. Not all would want to buy the Premium Sports voice speed but would accepting a lower speed for p2p see a saving too.
I'll assume that was a serious question. So I'd have to say that in the northern hemispere, when BT were forced to allow the other telcos to carry long-distance and international traffic, then the BT costs came down to stop the customer hemerage. Then when other networks coud also use their networks for internet, the costs came down a lot. Although to be fair to your question, this kind of regulation sounds more like the opposite.
Idea for NBN - one port on your NTD you have with low quota, but high speed and low latency. another port you have with a different package, whether from the same provider or another, with a lower speed, but higher quota. plug your games machine into port 1, your torrent machine into port 2 (or all machines into something that splits the traffic to the appropriate port). voila. no fancy footwork required from ISPs.
"...increase the cost of downloads at certain times of day...it would be a significant challenge to the concept of net neutrality, which suggests carriers should carry all traffic without prejudice"
How does that have anything to do with net neutraility? AFAIAC net neutrality means that packets are considered equal indepedenly of their type/origin/destination. If your network has peak times and you want to allow people to pay less for avoiding those times, no problem for me. If you can't give 100Mbit/s to all your customers at once, but share out the bandwidth available between the active users, OK too. Maybe you even allow some users to pay for higher quality of service/bandwidth, and they get more of the pie, that's OK in my book too.
However, if you decide that VOIP packets get dropped or SIP connections blocked, then that is BAD (Vodafone). Giving priority to time critical packets is okish up to a point. When you start dropping (rather than queuing/delaying) all my browsing packets because someone else has a web-chat open, that is not OK. Especially given the positive feedback; if you don't drop the web chat packets as well, it will ramp-up it's data-rate, assuming that there is loads of bandwidth available.
"How does that have anything to do with net neutraility? AFAIAC net neutrality means that packets are considered equal indepedenly of their type/origin/destination."
Did you not read this bit?
"Telstra, for example, offers a movie download service and would obviously prefer it offers a better user experience than iTunes"
Presumably "better user experience" in this case means dumping iTunes movie packets in favour of Telstra movie packets...
"A better user experience" is indeed not something which another person, or in this case company, is able to define. Of course there is always the fundamental idea that my opinion is better than yours, and it would appear that Telstra is of that persuasion. Also, them saying that VoIP should take precedence is just pants. If I am looking up some web site so I can get the number of the doctor's office, or similar, then is that less important than your evening chat with your girlfriend? Argue that one however you wish, the only good solution is going to be to treat all packets equally.
If only we could develop some sort of "voice traffic" only network, then we could use that for voice traffic, and we could keep the net neutrality in place. Hell, I bet we could create a way to control it with tones or sounds so that we didn't even need a 4Ghz computer and an E1 connection to use it. Maybe in the future.
Oh dear, the ACCC can't see the competitive issues with QoS enabling tighter vertical integration? You'd expect the economic rationalists at the ACCC to be in favour of the free market, not promoting the use of technical measures in such a way that they'd increase customers barriers to exit.
It's not the ACCC's job to solve the capacity planning issues of large carriers. The ACCC's job is to prevent the carriers from gouging consumers. Looks like there's been some regulatory capture over at the ACCC.
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