Re: Third Major ISP AT&T Testing Bandwidth Caps in the Fall [with a comment by me djf]

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Aurthor requested to be anonymous  due to employment  djf

"One theory for why bandwidth caps might alleviate some congestion, especially upstream congestion, is that it will 
inhibit users from engaging in activities where they do not know how much bandwidth they are actually using, for 
example, P2P seeding.  A P2P user may be less inclined to leave their computer on 24 hours a day to seed content if 
they have no idea whether the end result could be that they exceed their monthly cap (and face large fees).  However, 
if that is in fact one of the ISPs' goals, they should consider only imposing a bandwidth cap on upstream traffic.  
This would negate any claims that this is being done as a "CLEAR competitive advantage in favor" of their own video 
offerings.

By the way, another reason ISPs may be resorting to this model is because every other engineering network management 
technique that has been tried and made public has been used by proponents for net neutrality to launch new calls for 
legislation or FCC regulation.  Even the latest proposals to move away from protocol-agnostic management techniques to 
"fair share" management have been criticized as discriminatory against particular users; there is currently an active 
discussion about this between certain participants in the IETF's P2P Infrastructure Workshop.  And according to some 
advocates who participated in the P2Pi Workshop, "discrimination based on user-history is no better than 
protocol-discriminatory behavior.""


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