Steve H
Serious Thumper
   
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SuzukiSavage.com Rocks!
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Spartanburg, SC
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You got it JOG.
Neutrality makes all data the same on the net. A packet of data is just a packet of data. It doesn't make any difference if it's a packet of a video, a packet of data to render a web page, voice communication, email, it's all treated the same in a neutral situation.
The tech exists to throttle (in both directions) almost any data on the internet. Say you're Time-Warner cable, you want your customers to have a great experience watching your streaming content. You can easily turn up the packet priority for video packets originating in your network to make this happen. You aren't slowing the data incoming from the rest of the net. But, effectively you are because your internal video will have priority to travel before someone else's does.
If you're selling a telephone service that works over your network, you'll want to make sure it has priority so you don't get break-ups like on a cell in fringe areas. You turn up the priority for your voice service to achieve this. Now, you don't turn up the priority for any other voice service on your network.suddenly all other internet phone services that people may have are at a disadvantage due to the priority of your service. In many cases in order to 'encourage' sales of your telephone service, you might actually turn down the priority for other voice services.
With the tech capabilities available, just about anything can be prioritized or deprioritized at the whim of the network provider.
He can make a deal with a streaming service, in exchange for some funding sent his way, to provide priority treatment for that streaming service. This could make it hard for smaller startups to get going. It could put some out of business.
Wioth the tech capabilities, it might be nice to prioritize certain types of traffic but probably the only way would be to have the prioritizations a matter of regulation so everybody boosts or cuts priority of the same traffic types equally. Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of cross payments all over the place to increase this, decrease that...you want to watch HBO's internet service, no problem....now would you like that standard (no additional charges), with a little speedup (small charge to your provider to increase priority a little(, or would you like the super speedup (bigger payment to your provider for much better priority) This is the kind of thing everybody's worried about. $2 per month to give better response for youtube, $5 a month to prioritize xyz internet phone so you'll get clear calls, want to watch netflix without stops in the video, that'll be $8 additional per month.
You get the idea why some want it so much and others don't want it just as badly.
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