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Broadband Connection Getting Slower? Part IIa
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02-Jan-2009
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Continuing the section on the changing, and degrading, state of the Internet, I have dedicated Part II to an issue that has become synonymous with the term 'net neutrality'. This issue is so large, and at the same time so fundamental to the issue of the Internet itself, that I have decided to dedicate subsections to it. This will more accurately lay out the various discussions and points of view. To start, we will first hear from the 'defendants', namely Time Warner Cable, Comcast, COX and just about every other major broadband provider of the Internet.
Out With The Old
To understand why there is a clash over bandwidth and Internet usage now, you have to understand why there wasn't one before. In the First and Second Ages of the Internet, anybody could essentially use it for whatever they wanted. This was for a number of reasons; connections were really slow so everything would take awhile, the technology was relatively new so there really wasn't that much available to use it for, and there was also the air of innovation to it, whereby people wanted to see just what they could use it for. And this is all very practical and a good deal on both the service provider and end user sides of the equation.
With the advent of broadband, though, we are actually at a point where bandwidth is competing with processing power (Web Based Applications), which literally means you can use the Internet for anything. When your Internet connection provides you more resources than you can get locally, it is simple Darwinism to have people congregate on the Internet more and more for more and more different things, which is exactly what we are experiencing today with the rapid rise in online television, movies, other media, games, news, communication...basically everything.
In With The New
The problem therein becomes that, despite having endless possibilities, a network does have a defined capacity, defined today in Giga Bits/second (which is kind of misleading because on your computer they're defined as Bytes, and there are 8 Bits in a Byte, which means an Internet Giga is realistically 125 computer Mega's). To further confuse the matter, this number is not even a constant. It is instead a variable based on where the various connections originate and destinate, all simultaneously, which requires a lot of management to be effectively handled. And therein lies the key.
In the earlier two stages, as previously indicated, you couldn't really do much because, though having the same infinite possibilities, the practicality of so much just didn't exist. Network management was largely non-existent (and, yes, I did own and administrate an Internet Service Provider in the 2nd Stage). What companies are doing now, is essentially trying to capitalize on their network management as a service onto itself.
The Case
You want to hold a Voice Over Internet Protocol conversation from Los Angeles with somebody in Tokyo. Someone in Colorado wants to play a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game with someone in South Korea. The State Department in Washington, D. C. is embroiled in a territorial dispute between China and Taiwan. And about a hundred thousand people from the State of Washington are trying to book hotel reservations in Mexico, Australia, and anywhere it isn't cold. Guess what? You're all using the same connection, for at least some of the time.
In the way the Internet used to work, you would all simply just flood the lines, bog down the hubs (and, yes, a lot ISP's did not have switches exclusively, I know I didn't), and wait, and wait, and wait, and about four hours later something would happen and half of you would get errors. What the companies are essentially offering is a better way to communicate over the existing network, and wanting you to pay a little extra for it.
To be continued with Part IIb, the 'claimants'... |
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