“Dice predicted that IPv4 IPs would be completely allocated in the next 18 months.  Obviously (if this is true), they are interested in having people know something about IPv6 so they can have such expertise in their job exchange.

Do we as users of ipHouse need to be concerned about hardware, software, other implications of this — DSL, DNS, etc., etc. …”

Our network engineer Doug McIntyre responded and sent this to our customer:

The popular press picking up news about the pending IPv4 exhaustion is pretty much high gloss over any of the real meat of the matter.   The effects that this will have on the average user in the United States will be nil for at least 5 years if not longer. ISPs and the regional registrars will be sitting on their IPv4 pools, and there may be a space crunch if some new ISP takes off that can connect millions of devices in short order.  That could be read as – wireless carrier or cable company, but these companies have a large amount of IP space already.  Where the current crunch has been for some time, is in Asia.  China alone is quoted at having something on the order of 400 million people now on the Net.

IPv6 has been in testing for ages. I had IPv6 tunnels going in the 1990′s for the ISP I was working for at the time.  Needless to say, the ipHouse network core is full IPv6 routing.  Our website is available via IPv6:

$ dig +noall +answer www.iphouse.com aaaa
 www.iphouse.com.      597      IN      AAAA      2001:4980:0:4000::1

In fact, many of our servers are using IPv6; DNS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, members, ipMom, and NOC servers have been using IPv6 since October 2010.

Implementing IPv6 for hosting customers is very straightforward.  We’ve been doing it on a case by case basis as colocation customers request it.

Right now, one big issue is the consumer grade CPE equipment Those hardware manufacturers can’t be bothered to do anything until they absolutely need to.  As a result, most DSL boxes can’t do IPv6 connectivity natively to this day.  All the major enterprise network hardware can though.  Obviously all of our stuff does it just fine (Cisco, Juniper, F5, Fortigate).

How this will all play out in the end years down the road is, probably in Asia first, the lack of IPv4 addresses will start forcing access customers there only be able to get IPv6 addresses for their connections.  Thus, any content provider (ie. Google, Facebook, JoeBob Store) will be either forced to have a native IPv6 presence or their content will only be accessible through third party proxy gateways that convert it to IPv4.  (The first two companies I named already have IPv6 presence, it’s the little guys that may have to worry)  When the big IPv6 to 4 proxy gateways get so overloaded to be unusable any longer, those with native IPv6 presence will get the business that all these consumers are driving.

For people already connected here is the US, there will be not much noticeable change at all. Eventually the CPE access devices driven by the requirements in Asia will trickle back to the US, and people here will be able to have access in either IPv4 or IPv6.  If you’ve got an IPv4 address today, as most US connections do, you’ll be fine.  There is very little reason for content providers to disable IPv4 when the vast majority of customers are accessing them via IPv4.

A few days later we got this question about IPv6:

“Wondering what your plans are to support this with your home customers.  I have a Cisco 678 modem that I’m guessing doesn’t support it, but thought that maybe tunnels could be setup or something.  DNS might be a question, too.  Just thought I’d ask, because I know it’s just on the horizon.”

Again, our man Doug answered the question:

Our website is fully up on IPv6, as well as DNS, and the rest of our network.   We do offer native IPv6 DSL connections, but as you state the 678 doesn’t support it.  In fact, there’s hardly *any* consumer grade hardware that supports native IPv6.  You can do it with Cisco IOS based hardware (ie. Cisco 887), or by hacking some of the other consumer stuff and putting the OpenWRT OS on them.   Doing a tunnel is easy enough, but its probably easier for you just to go to HE’s Tunnelbroker.net service and have it done automatically by them.  Most of the IPv6 peer interconnects happen where their tunnels terminate anyway, plus they offer a lot of tutorials and such there.  If you do want the tunnel to terminate here just let me know.

The customer followed up and confirmed to us what we suspected:

“Just ran into this that confirmed that Cisco isn’t doing ipv6 for consumers but Netgear appears to be:  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/020811-cisco-linksys-ipv6.html “

So how does IPv6 affect our customers?  It doesn’t affect them – yet.   Once IPv6 becomes the only address available to an end users, the content they want  access to  needs to be available via IPv6, and content providers will make sure they can be seen.

If you’ve got technical questions or comments, send them our way.  We love to talk tech.

-Peace

Bil

What’s interesting is that we had bought a Disney CD years earlier with this song on it but it didn’t become popular with my kids until they discovered the song on Youtube. I guess video didn’t quite kill the radio star.

Today my son uses Youtube to play music while he’s online. He’s not watching the video, he’s just got the music in the background.  I find it fascinating how his use of Youtube has come full circle, just like how I left MTV on in the background.  It’s just a LITTLE outside the norm, or maybe it is the norm.  In either case, it’s also an interesting use of bandwidth, to say the least…  My sons love Youtube.  To them it’s free music, and art.  It inspires them to do crazy antics and videotape themselves doing the crazy antics.

The link between the consumption of entertainment and how business operates can be simple.  An artist creates a piece of art.  I see the art at a show and finding value in it, I pay the artist for the art.  But it can also be complex.  It can be multi-tiered, with numerous middle-men between the artist and the consumer.  Any time you watch an episode of TV, there are numerous artists combining their talents to provide you with a consumable product that you pay for, albeit incredibly indirectly. We rely on large corporations to pay these artists so we can get this content cheaply.  We LOVE our MTV.

The day the music died.

As I was writing this post, I was researching (watching) some video content on Youtube.  As I watched, I tried to predict what will happen to Youtube in the next few years.  I feel we’re at a crossroads.  I really can’t tell what will happen next…

For the followers of this blog, you know how I feel about Net Neutrality.  I’ve felt this way for the last decade.  I’ve been worried about a completely vertical Internet, where the content is owned by a distribution network (read Phone/Cable Company) and access to the content is restricted to members of the distribution network.

During my drive in today I heard this story on NPR about the FCC voting on FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed rules governing net neutrality.  Earlier this month Genachowski gave remarks on preserving Internet freedom and openness.  When I read the speech I felt that the compromise that the FCC is giving the wireline and wireless providers is too much.  The FCC is supposed to protect consumers.  The protections corporations are granted in these rules are broad.  It will be up to the consumer to protect themselves against possible wrongdoings from their provider.

Maybe Vader some day later…

It’s now late afternoon on the east coast and the FCC did vote to approve the proposed rules.  Here is a link to an excerpt of the order and ruling.  Most notably, I liked this segment:

“In light of each of these concerns, as a general matter, it is unlikely that pay for priority would satisfy the “no unreasonable discrimination” standard. The practice of a broadband Internet access service provider prioritizing its own content, applications, or services, or those of its affiliates, would raise the same significant concerns and would be subject to the same standards and considerations in evaluating reasonableness as third-party pay-for-priority arrangements.”

I congratulate the FCC for taking a step to protect consumers and the Internet as a whole.  Thank you!

My only question now is, will it be enough?

Peace.

-Bil

I know that already, tell me something good?

As many of our customers know, our roots are in the Internet access world.  Some of us around here have been doing the online thing since the mid 80′s. (seriously)  If we’ve learned one thing over the last 25 years is that people will consume data for a fixed amount of time.  It’s roughly 4 hours per day.  Anything more than that and we suggest an intervention.

All kidding aside, we have seen a steady growth in consumption of bandwidth from our customers. It’s because there is an explosion of ever increasing high quality data available to them.  I think it’s an odd twist on Moore’s law. But if consumers have come to expect a doubling of performance every 2 years, then we should be able to turn that into a mechanism to extract more revenue from them, right?

Well, maybe.  Here’s why I don’t see that happening.

It’s because the Internet access world comes from the telephone world.  A world where it was expected that a voice line subscriber wouldn’t use the phone for more than 4 hours per day.  And even if you did, you can only max out at 24 hours per day.  That’s the max a subscriber could use.  No matter how many words you spoke on the phone, the most you could use was 24 hours.  Simply put, it was billing for service based on time.

“I got something that will sure ’nuff set your stuff on fire”

Along comes the Internet and billing for time was annihilated in the rush to get subscribers online.  Large and small, Internet access companies, telephone companies, and cable companies rushed to get subscribers online.   These companies built out networks and hooked up subscribers and enjoyed huge profits.  They certainly missed billing for time, but seriously, the bandwidth the subscribers were using was minuscule.  The unanimous chorus was “We’re making money hand over fist, let’s enjoy this for a bit.”

And they did.

The Internet access providers adopted billing for services based on a flat rate. “Pay me $19.95 a month and you can have all the Internet you can eat.”  This worked great.  The outlying users who were pushing big piles of bits around gladly paid a little more for higher capacity, but in general, the trend has been for the Internet access providers to offer more and more bandwidth for less and less per month. Who was offering a 100Mbps Internet connection for $30.00 per month?

So…Tell me something good.

Then along comes the digitization of everything and I mean EVERYTHING and the world changed.  Now those Internet access providers are wondering how to keep giving subscribers more bandwidth without getting more revenue.  It’s illogical to say the least.  In the old days, if you used more minutes or hours, you paid more money.  But now, you don’t pay more money to the access provider, you just download more.  If you pay anyone, it’s the content source, not your access provider.

Take these five destinations, iTunes, Pandora, Youtube, Hulu, Netflix.  They didn’t exist 10 years ago and now my family cannot live without them.  Each of these behemoths directs a perfect storm of traffic onto my home network.  I dare say, they deliver heavy traffic to anyone who visits them.  Now multiply this by 100,000 or 500,000 or 10,000,000.  Do you see what will happen to the Internet access provider?  Wait, didn’t we just talk about this last week?

“What I got to give will sure ’nuff do you good.”

The FCC report plainly states that about 68% of reportable Internet access service connections were too slow in both the downstream and upstream directions, or too slow in a single direction, to meet the broadband availability benchmark adopted in the Sixth Broadband Deployment Report.

Well duh.  As I already said, this report doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

What we know is this; Our subscribers are making do with what was sold as broadband a few years ago for one of three reasons: It is all they can afford, it’s all they can receive, or it’s all they need.

In many cases we have subscribers leave us because they want faster speeds.  Our subscribers end up going to cable or Qwest directly because, thanks to the FCC, we’re not allowed to sell the higher capacity services Qwest offers.  That reminds me, we know one more thing.  Internet access providers do not have any incentive to increase broadband capacity because there isn’t any competition for the wireline providers.

Yet.

We might actually see competition once the wireless players are pushing the bits the wireline providers are pushing (if the technology improves enough).  Until that time, we’ve got to live within the online world that’s available to us, at the speed that’s available where we live.

You see, I’ve got DSL at home and that’s what I tell my kids.  Sadly, we’re all usually online at the same time so you can imagine the traffic load we create.  In our defense, we’re way under 4 hours per day, so stop thinking about that intervention.  Ok, I’m going to go listen to Rufus & Chaka Khan again and wish for something good.

Peace.

-Bil

In 1997 I spent some time lobbying at the Minnesota Legislature and the Minnesota Public Utilities commission about the differences between a data connection and data communications.  The differences may seem plainly obvious to those of us in the Internet / Cable / Telephone industries, but for those milling around on the hill, they can’t quite grasp the difference between a carrier pigeon and the message tied to it’s leg.  This analogy was too esoteric for those who were approaching dementia so I changed the analogy to a letter carried by a postal service.  They seemed to understand that governments should regulate the postal service, but not the contents of the letter.  You tell me, which part of that analogy resembles a connection and which resembles information?  Pretty obvious, huh?

While it has been obvious for a long time that a telecommunication service is HOW you connect, I think the codgers on the hill got fouled up in the language. The word telecommunication contains that magic word, communication.  When you hear communication, you immediately think of what you DO with a voice service, a cable television service or the Internet.  But we in the industry all know that the Internet, voice, cable television, or anything you DO with a telecommunications service is an information service.

We all use telecommunications services AND information services everyday.  Honestly, it’s difficult to think of a reason to have a telecommunications service without an information service laid on top of it.  I admit that they are so closely tied together that most often you need one to utilize the other.  But there are so many methods of delivering information services that there really is a need for separation.

And that’s how we buy most of our services.  We buy an Internet LINK/PORT and we buy Internet BANDWIDTH.  These are two line items on one invoice.  Sounds like the telecommunications companies already realize these are separately regulated items.

Way back in 2002 the FCC ruled that cable modem service was an information service.  This was dismaying to many ISPs.  Cable companies could legally block ISPs from delivering Internet on cable networks and this new ruling spelled out a path for the ILECs to shut the ISPs out of the DSL / high-speed Internet access market too!  And that’s exactly what happened.

Today Qwests third generation DSL offering is FTTN DSL, with dramatically higher connection speeds than the prior Qwest DSL offerings.  That’s a mixed blessing for consumers.  If consumers really want faster speed for their Internet access and want to stay on DSL, they have but 1 choice, buy from Qwest.  Consumers must buy a bundled telecommunications service and information service from Qwest if they want the higher DSL speeds.  Sadly, that means customers who want to remain loyal to ipHouse cannot.

Prior to 2002 consumers had dozens of ISPs to choose from.  Those same ISPs have been squeezed out of the market by a simple “reclassification” of broadband by the FCC.  Today, if you listen closely you can hear ISPs across the country rejoice at the thought of being able to buy connections again if the FCC is successful at retracing it’s steps.  It might take another 8 years or even longer, but I think that progress is worth waiting for.

Peace.

Bil

Because it isn’t cheap to bring broadband service to rural areas, knowing which areas are most in need is necessary to determine where to best spend limited resources. The Minnesota Commerce Department is working with Connect Minnesota to map Internet connection speeds throughout the state and is promoting the Connect Minnesota Speed Test as a way for consumers to check on the truthfulness of their ISPs. While this is a great goal, there are significant technical problems with the Connect Minnesota Speed Test.

The first problem is the coding and assumptions present in all Ookla speed tests. Because the speed tests assume you are on a DSL or cable connection, they automatically assume a huge asymmetry in upload and download speeds. Therefore, they give false results for any type of connection other than DSL and cable connections. Don’t use this to test the connectivity for your servers colocated at an ISP or your office T1 or Metro Ethernet connection. Our engineers have pulled down 230Mbps to their workstations here at the office and Ookla speed tests are unable to calculate that type of speed.

The second problem is that the Connect Minnesota Speed Test site itself is clearly limited by a 10Mbps connection. No Internet connection ever performs at 100% and there is always going to be some routing and other overhead wrapped around the actual data itself. This type of speed test will always underestimate the actual speed of any given connection. This is an old speed test issue. Internet routing hasn’t changed and all the caveats Peter John Harrison wrote about in his 1999 SpeedTest still apply.

Finally, and here is my major problem with the Connect Minnesota Speed Test, it is coming from a provider and machines in Texas! This means that it isn’t really testing the speed of your Minnesota Internet connectivity (even with all the above provisos) it is testing the speed of your connectivity to some provider in Texas. There is a lot of network between here and Texas. The packets for the speed test are traversing different networks and providers on their way to and from the server in Texas. They may be affected by various routing issues on networks that have nothing to do with your ISP and that your ISP has no control over.

If the Minnesota Commerce Department wants a more accurate picture of broadband connectivity within Minnesota, they need to locate the speed test on a well-connected server within Minnesota.

Of course, anyone who really wants an idea of the speed of their connection should not just be using an Ookla speed test. Basic FTP gives you a much better test to determine how fast you can pull down a file from a remote site. In fact, ipHouse has files on our servers specifically for customer speed tests. More accurate tools exist for calculating bandwidth but they aren’t easy for the average consumer to use. They almost always require command line access on two machines on each side of the connection you are testing. If you are an ipHouse customer and want to know the speed of your connection, just contact our support team and we will let you know the test options available for your connection and how to see bandwidth usage throughout our network.

Any discussion on network management these days must include a discussion on net neutrality. Why? Because limiting access to certain types or sources of content is one way to ease resource demands across a network.

What is net neutrality? Net neutrality is the idea that access to content on the Internet should be equal and fair, regardless of the access method or the provider of access. This sounds simple, but it’s not.

A neutral network is free of restrictions to all Internet content and is also free of restrictions on the equipment used to access the content.  A partially non-neutral network would be a cellular phone company.  They restrict what equipment you use to get access to the content. You typically must buy a phone they provide. A neutral network will let you use any equipment you choose when connecting to the network.

What’s the big deal? When Internet access companies are also content providers, net neutrality issues come to the forefront. A great example of this is Time Warner. Time Warner owns and produces content as diverse as Bugs Bunny videos and CNN. They also own Time Warner Cable. If you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber, chances are that you will have unrestricted access to Bugs Bunny videos, but if you subscribe to DSL from a phone company, Bugs Bunny videos may not even be available to you. Now take the Time Warner Cable subscriber who wants to watch a video on the Fox News website.  Fox News is a direct competitor of CNN. Is it in the best interest of Time Warner Cable to restrict or filter the access to the Fox News website in order to get their subscribers onto their own website (CNN)?

But the market will win, right? Maybe. It is obvious that not all content will be owned by one access provider. That’s not the issue with net neutrality. Net neutrality is about allowing unfettered access to all types of content, regardless of ownership, viewpoints, opinions, or criticisms. It’s my opinion that net neutrality can be legislated, but access providers will find ways to show preferential access to certain types of content no matter what the regulations say, thus bypassing regulations. The reason Access providers will bypass regulations is simple, the demand for bandwidth is skyrocketing.

Unprecedented demand for bandwidth. Access providers are seeing explosive growth in bandwidth utilization. Access providers are supplying larger connections and oddly enough, consumers are using them. The old adage is, “On the Internet, content is king and the king is damned fat”. 

Recently the iTunes store started offering both high definition and standard definition formats for episodes of this season’s television shows.  You might say hurray, but the Access providers are saying OUCH! A standard definition episode might be 300 Megabytes, but a high definition episode will be anywhere from 1 gigabyte to nearly 3 gigabytes.  iTunes is only 1 reason Access providers have seen a huge jump in bandwidth utilization over the last 18 months.  

We at ipHouse have seen a 35% increase in the bandwidth utilization from our individual accounts over the last year. During that time we have transferred over 4 petabytes (4,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of email, pictures, videos, songs and who knows what else. When I divide this into my subscriber base, the numbers are staggering. It means that every single one of my subscribers is downloading 1 Megabyte of data every day, even when they’re not online!  But this is not a true representation of what is really happening on the network. Statistics show that most subscribers are downloading less than 200 kilobytes a day. 

The majority of bandwidth is being consumed by a few individuals who are transferring an unprecedented amount of data. These individuals pay their bills on time, do not utilize tech support and are advocates in the market place by praising us to their friends. Still, they’re consuming a large amount of technical resources… We categorize the top 5% of our individual subscribers as “excessive” utilization users, regardless of other business metrics.

“Excessive” utilization? Access providers are focusing on these heavy users, creating their own definitions of excessive utilization. This month excessive utilization might be 250 gigabytes. Next month it might be more, less, or the same. The Access provider holds all the cards when it comes to defining Excessive utilization. The Access provider can restrict when a subscriber can get full or limited bandwidth, what services are available (for example, bit torrent or file sharing), and how many bytes can be transferred in a given period. Access providers are already providing Quality of Service on their networks, so restricting “excessive” utilization is just another metric that becomes automatic. 

Coincidently, Quality of Service also creates what appears to be a neutral network while still meeting the business objectives of having preferential content delivered to subscribers. By defining the Quality of Service for a given set of content, or services, it becomes easy to show Net neutrality, while delivering something completely different.  Net neutrality only works when bandwidth is not limited or when bandwidth paid for on a consumption basis which leads me to…

Time based vs. consumption based markets. Consumers of services are used to two basic billing models. The first is flat rate but time based.  We are all familiar with this model. You can rent a movie for 24 hours for 99 cents. The second model is a variable rate, but purely consumption based. The water company or the electric company charge based on a small but measurable variable rate and the consumer pays for the amount of service consumed. There is also a hybrid model of time and consumption. An example of the hybrid model is a car rental that is a $39 dollars per day PLUS mileage.

Access providers had originally chosen the hybrid time/consumption model, as an example – $19.99 for 100 hours per month. The heavy costs to provide the service were tied to acquiring and supporting customers, not in the technical resources the customers used. Access providers quickly abandoned the hybrid model for fixed rate service offerings with “unlimited” access. Access providers quickly learned that the demands of some subscribers would heavily tax the infrastructure they share with other subscribers. Limiting the heavy users proved problematic as those subscribers cried foul and demanded that the Access provider provide what they were sold.  Access providers have no choice but to either jettison “Excessive” users or bill those users based on what they consume. It’s probably too late to change the model one more time and I doubt subscribers would be accepting of a model based purely on consumption.  Instead Access providers are looking for ways to offer “full spectrum” services while limiting what is being consumed in some fashion. The cable operators that provider Internet access were the first to move in this fashion.  AT&T recently joined the pack in limiting the data transfers available with each access account.

The underlying question is, can the demands of more and more bandwidth by subscribers be in concert with network neutrality?

The marriage of network policy and business objectives The answer to the above question is YES – IF subscribers are willing to pay for it.  I believe that the typical Access provider wants to offer neutral access to content.  Most Access providers do not own content and are interested in allowing their users unfettered access to content. The problem is who is going to pay for the bandwidth? Some access providers are forming alliances with content providers to support their bandwidth needs. These alliances can create sticky situations for the Access providers though. I think the better answer is simple Quality of Service offerings that manage the bandwidth demands on the network.  By keeping this issue as a technical problem, a technical answer can be found. If bandwidth demand becomes a financial issue, then the logical course of action is to implement a hybrid time/consumption billing model. While a small number of subscribers may be dismayed by the new billing model, only the excessive users will actually be impacted. But what about access to content regardless of where it originates and how much bandwidth it uses? This raises the question of regulation of Access providers… 

Regulation preventing access to networks, prevents network neutrality. Most small Access providers are not worried about getting access to the content kings of the Internet such as Google/YouTube, but Access providers are worried about the old media empires restricting access to content.  Regulation now prevents small Access providers (like ipHouse) from accessing the cable and phone company physical networks for providing network access to our subscribers.  Since we’re locked out of the telecom side, the next logical step is for the content companies, (who own the cable companies) to restrict content access to their own Internet access subscribers.

Time will tell, but net neutrality is a war that is likely to be lost by consumers and small Access providers. Even though most of the individuals battles are winnable, the small Access provider just doesn’t have the resources to win this war, even if we have legislation on our side.

I was also asked to talk about managing data content as an Access provider. within the following topics:

File sharing / Individual Privacy: Should access providers become data managers? I think this question is best asked, why should Access providers become data managers for content owners? I cannot find an analogy in any of the historical media distribution systems that is similar to the models that have been proposed for Access providers. One model makes the Access provider responsible for their subscribers’ file downloads, with the Access Provider paying the Content Owner for all downloaded media. That’s similar to the old C.O.D. model used for shipping chattels.   Why on earth would Access providers want to collect revenues for a third party?

Another model is a $5.00 per month ISP tax for music. The Access provider collects a tax and sends the revenue to someone to be distributed to someone else, thus adding a middle man. Huh? Do they think Access providers are a replacement for the jukebox companies of yesteryear?

The answer is no. Access providers are not data managers for Content Owners, nor should they become data managers by legislation. Still, stranger things have happened.  It’s been more than a decade since the Internet Revolution and people are STILL trying to figure out how to munge their old business model, be it music distribution or classified ads, into the Internet connected world.

Who would pay for such management? Ok, lets say either model gets some foothold. Access providers are acutely aware of bandwidth and resources required to shape bandwidth as it is delivered to subscribers. The infrastructure required to measure file downloads is technically available, but the cost to implement such a system is not worth the costs when divided into the number of subscribers. Assuming the Access provider is collecting transfers or a flat tax, who will pay the Access provider for the infrastructure to measure and tabulate the data? Adding systems adds costs and managing data is not a cheap cost.  So the question should really be, why are old world Content Owners forcing their old business model into the new world? Update the business model and the question of who will pay becomes moot.

What about the privacy of subscribers?  Who will protect them? Part of the problem with monitoring subscribers use of Internet access is just the “Big Brother” aspect of snooping into innocent and private communications. What do Access providers do when they stumble upon a discussion about a possible transportation strike or a shortage of a flu vaccine? Are Access providers responsible for monitoring the activities of their subscribers? Are telephone companies responsible for the drug deals that are setup via the telephone network?  

Today, Access providers are bound by existing law to protect consumer information and are treated as publishers and as carriers without liability to the content that traverses their networks. Assuming Content Owners get their way, this will all change and your tastes and interests will become just another metric Access providers will have in their database. Access providers need to manage their subscribers to the benefit of their own business, not the business of Content Owners.

Where does that leave net neutrality?  As much as you might think that Content Owners want net neutrality, think again.  Dedicated partnerships between Content Owners and Access providers might force subscribers to pay for content, fully to the benefit of Content Owners and logically, Access providers can restrict the choice of the content available.  Legislating net neutrality might be a good thing or it might not. Consumers need to speak out and make sure their voices are heard before they don’t have a way to speak out.  

Peace.

-Bil

Radio and television broadcasters as well as Broadway theater producers are very disappointed by the ruling. In their tests, the use of the new frequency interfered with wireless microphones and television signals.

The F.C.C. is confident that the interference problem can be solved by strict regulation of any new devices that use the white space.  To be certified by the commission, any new devices will need to include technology that will detect existing broadcast channels and change their own broadcast to avoid any possibility of interference.

It will be interesting to watch how these new spectrums are used. Their potential has been described as Wi-Fi on steroids. Perhaps the most immediate devices will be used for applications within the home such as connecting your computer to your TV. It remains to be seen if the new spectrums can solve the broader home or business to ISP issues we have seen with existing Wi-Fi technology.

For more information on this, check out ipHouse customer, Ann Treacy’s Blandin on Broadband blog, the New York Times article, and the official F.C.C. web site.