U.S. regulators ditch net neutrality rules as legal battles loom

tedjames

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/federal-communications-commission-set-reverse-111440509.html

Hondabuff

I see both sides of it since I work for a company the leases the fiber for many ISP's. If Netflix is eating up 37% of the bandwidth running on the company fiber "say Verizon or AT&T" and is undercutting the TV service of the ISP then it was only a matter of time that this happened. It takes a lot of money for the infrastructure and upgrades for the ISP from the fiber to the switches. You just cant say "add more bandwidth" to solve the problem. Cable TV is too expensive and most people seeked out an alternative for the outrageous prices but created another problem by doing so. The ISP's own the "internet", we do not.

vanillagorilla3

Anyone else see that 2 million identities were stolen to falsely support the getting rid of Net Neutrality? Hopefully this will be tied up in court for a long time and overturned without us ever seeing any real changes.

@hondabuff, you can't be serious about "seeing" both sides. You can't let an ISP charge more because we don't want their cable package. We're using their service to watch something that takes away from another one of their services, and you're ok with that? On another note, cable is dying. It's not worth the money.

Hondabuff

vanillagorilla3 wrote: »

Anyone else see that 2 million identities were stolen to falsely support the getting rid of Net Neutrality? Hopefully this will be tied up in court for a long time and overturned without us ever seeing any real changes.

@hondabuff, you can't be serious about "seeing" both sides. You can't let an ISP charge more because we don't want their cable package. We're using their service to watch something that takes away from another one of their services, and you're ok with that? On another note, cable is dying. It's not worth the money.

You dont have a choice no matter how much we complain. They own the infrastructure your getting your service on. Your playing by their rules.

EANx

Posting politically charged stuff, even that related to IT, is a bad idea.

Hondabuff

Comcast is currently using cap limits in some markets limiting you to 250GB of data per month. That gets you about 40 Netflix movies. Exceed the limits and they have the right to drop you as a customer. To me that seems fair for a residential customer. With the testing of autonomous cars in my area we are seeing cars using 4TB of data in a day and that is alot of data that some of the networks cant handle. I think the key to make this work is limiting how far the data needs to travel by using micro data centers. If your trying to stream a movie in NY and It needs to query a server in LA it just doesn’t make sense. Moving all the computing to the edge is the future of IT and is going to spring a ton of growth in the next 5 years. I 100% agree the politicians need to stay out of it because both sides are trying to make each other look bad in the process of figuring this out. There are alot of brilliant Engineers in my company who understand that data demands are scaling exponentially faster then the current infrastructures across our nation. I honestly think it will all work out for the better in the end if people dont burn it to the ground first.

gespenstern

Good, good.

Russell77

It will be interesting to see who the winners and losers are as a result of this. I also see the demand crushing the existing infrastructure. One big question is how to you support applications that need priority unless you control the network from end to end? The only way for a cloud based system to guarantee delivery is to be on the ISP's network and deliver to the isp's customers.

Danielm7

EANx wrote: »

Posting politically charged stuff, even that related to IT, is a bad idea.

It's sad that a discussion like this even should be considered political. The idea that unthrottled internet should mean left or right is silly. The only people this benefits is the ISPs, this is a negative for all internet users.

Hondabuff

When 5G officially goes live you will she the paradox shift in technology. First time you see a Cable box deployed that runs off cellular is truly a game changer. 20/10Gbps speeds and micro data centers on the edge all connected via 3rd party 100Gb fiber rings in the top 5 cities and its installed and just waiting. Last report I saw was there are over 2500 ISP providers in the US and 1200 provide wired connections and over 90% running on legacy infrastructure. Big business wants the eCommerce portion of the internet to be the primary purpose of the bandwidth while Joe Schmo is hogging all the bandwidth binge watching Breaking Bad. Thus a change is needed.

McxRisley

Hondabuff wrote: »

Big business wants the eCommerce portion of the internet to be the primary purpose of the bandwidth while Joe Schmo is hogging all the bandwidth binge watching Breaking Bad. Thus a change is needed.

Hondabuff

McxRisley wrote: »

Prioritizing traffic is the driving force. People just automatically assume the ISP's are going to charge now for Hulu, YouTube and Netflix now. I will believe it when I see it.

McxRisley

Traffic is already prioritized though and web browsing/streaming is considered low-priority traffic.

JoJoCal19

Hondabuff wrote: »

You dont have a choice no matter how much we complain. They own the infrastructure your getting your service on. Your playing by their rules.

That is part of the larger monopoly problem. All of the politicians serve their corporate overlords. They've been passing laws to block state and city governments from installing their own infrastructure to combat these behemoths who own monopolies on the infrastructure. Even farther than that, I swear I had seen where one of the companies had sued to try and block Google from bringing Google fiber to one market.

networker050184

EANx wrote: »

Posting politically charged stuff, even that related to IT, is a bad idea.

Agreed. Let's keep this discussion technical!

cert_king

The people making these decisions were elected so only got yourself to blame.

Blucodex

networker050184 wrote: »

Agreed. Let's keep this discussion technical!

I believe this is technical and an appropriate sub-forum /shrug.

beads

Haven't really seen enough from industry or ISPs to sway my opinion one way or another. Like to see real business expenses in relation to the average client versus the average non-movie downloader, etc as a comparison.

As it stands all I hear is the other side has it completely wrong type arguments.

- b/eads

ITHokie

Setting aside the negative economic impact of the Title II backed OIO and the horrible policy ramifications, I would love for anyone here to explain how they believe internet access can be functional without any network management whatsoever. "Treat every packet equally" is the underlying philosophy for OIO.

Now I know it wasn't enforced the last 2 years, but the FCC certainly had power (via OIO) and expressed the motivation to do so. No prioritization of services, no QOS, no network management of any kind would be permitted. Don't forget about mobile data networks, too.

ITHokie

Danielm7 wrote: »

It's sad that a discussion like this even should be considered political. The idea that unthrottled internet should mean left or right is silly. The only people this benefits is the ISPs, this is a negative for all internet users.

That you can make this statement is a testament to how political it is.

tpatt100

ITHokie wrote: »

Setting aside the negative economic impact of the Title II backed OIO and the horrible policy ramifications, I would love for anyone here to explain how they believe internet access can be functional without any network management whatsoever. "Treat every packet equally" is the underlying philosophy for OIO.

This is what it was supposed to be but once it got the attention of the general public it became something else entirely.

ITHokie

tpatt100 wrote: »

This is what it was supposed to be but once it got the attention of the general public it became something else entirely.

It's written explicitly this way in the OIO, and "treat every packet equally" is what most people mean when they say they are for "net neutrality." They believe ISPs should not be able to manipulate traffic whatsoever. There are other versions, of course, but they are minority views.

gespenstern

ITHokie wrote: »

Now I know it wasn't enforced the last 2 years, but the FCC certainly had power (via OIO) and expressed the motivation to do so. No prioritization of services, no QOS, no network management of any kind would be permitted. Don't forget about mobile data networks, too.

That's impossible. I flamed a lot on this on my free time and majority of warriors don't even understand how datagrams get routed on the internet and struggle to explain what an ISP is supposed to do in situations where prioritizing/deprioritizing certain types of traffic would be beneficial for majority if not all.

The reality is ISPs oversell the bandwidth. Before someone attacks this situation by saying "how dare they" -- if they didn't do that our prices would be ten-fold higher. I believe in some cases you can still buy a dedicated pipe -- just check how much does it cost to make sure if you want to go this way. All this means that during peak times they have to throttle something. Like torrents in favor of VoIP/streaming as for torrents their users probably don't care much, while not getting on time voice/video ruins the experience completely.

Another problem with this is at some point in time ~10 years ago it looked like a good idea to introduce unlimited plans. And it was okay for the type of traffic we had back then. Now, with all these torrent heavy users and netflix binge watchers I'm not sure if ppl who check their email and buy shirts on amazon should subsidize those who saturate their bandwidth 100%. In this case ISPs became victims of their own decision as it's hard to roll back unlimited back to limited, so they have to jump around this with all the marketing tricks.

It's a mess.

What real world scenarios show though is countries where the Internet is regulated to less extent end up having broader pipes and lower prices, like it happened with post-Soviet countries who arrived to the scene later than everyone else and where communications weren't regulated and were "free for all" for a while which led to a booming smaller entrepreneur ISP market. Now we are in a ridiculous situation where Romania has better connectivity than the US, even adjusted for suburban sprawl/detached homes situations.

ITHokie

gespenstern wrote: »

That's impossible. I flamed a lot on this on my free time and majority of warriors don't even understand how datagrams get routed on the internet and struggle to explain what an ISP is supposed to do in situations where prioritizing/deprioritizing certain types of traffic would be beneficial for majority if not all.

Exactly. It's incredible to me that folks with solid networking knowledge are for this version of net neutrality. My impression from asking some friends and colleagues is that some genuinely don't understand the constraints ISP face in delivering time-sensitive services during peak hours while some understand but take the "we gotta something about the ISPs" mindset, so they'll go along with just about anything that muzzles them.

I agree with the rest of the post as well.

joshuamurphy75

I was for it when I first heard all the hype going around, but after looking into the issue, I'd rather let the markets decide.

I think I've lost a few friends because of this view.

tpatt100

I'm all for letting the markets decide if the market wasn't so constrained... I hope new technologies in the future break the near monopoly on internet access in the US.

Kasor

Maybe we shall disconnect internet and go back to the old style. Nap... not going to happen, but let see what the new administration will do after the next three years.

Russell77

http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/130436-u-s-regulators-ditch-net-neutrality-rules-legal-battles-loom-2.html

This is a good read from Tech Crunch. It leans toward favoring net neutrality but lays the background for the whole debate. The devil is in the details but all packets are equal except for network management seemed to leave an open door to getting control over ones own network if net neutrality was still in pace.