Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

[Barry Shein <bzs () world std com>]

On February 28, 2015 at 23:20 nick () foobar org (Nick Hilliard) wrote:
> On 28/02/2015 22:38, Barry Shein wrote:
> > Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from
> > deploying "commercial" services.
>
> there were several reasons for asymmetric services, one of which was
> commercial.  Another was that most users' bandwidth profiles were massively
> asymmetric to start with so it made sense for consumers to have more
> bandwidth in one direction than another.

How could they have known this before it was introduced?

I say that was prescriptive and a best guess that it'd be acceptable
and a way to differentiate commercial from residential
service. Previously all residential service (e.g., dial-up, ISDN) was
symmetrical. Maybe they had some data on that usage but it'd be muddy
just due to the low bandwidth they provided.

  Another still was that cross-talk
> causes enough interference to prevent reverse adsl (i.e. greater bandwidth
> from customer to exchange) from working well.

So SDSL didn't exist? Anyhow, *DSL is falling so far behind it's
difficult to analyze what could have been.

> > As were bandwidth caps.
>
> Bandwidth caps were introduced in many cases to stop gratuitous abuse of
> service by the 1% of users who persistently ran their links at a rate that
> the pricing model they selected was not designed to handle.  You've been
> around the block a bit so I'm sure you remember the days when transit was
> expensive and a major cost factor in running an isp.

It was the combination of asymmetric, no or few IPs (and NAT), and
bandwidth caps.

But of course they weren't happy with those few who found ways to use
a lot of bandwidth but I thought we weren't talking about the few.

> Some operators used and continue to use asymmetric bandwidth profiles and
> bandwidth caps as methods for driving up revenue rather than anything else
> in particular.  International cellular roaming plans come to mind as one of
> the more egregious example of this, but there are many others.

Sure. once it became institutionalized and the market got used to it
why not sell tiered bandwidth services at different price points, but
that could have been true of symmetrical service also.

But in the beginning these were ways to forcibly distinguish
residential from more expensive commercial service. "Forcibly" as in
not polling actual usage such as for lots of port 80/443 connections
inbound or checking postal addresses for residential vs business as
telcos used to do for voice service, etc. Maybe "passively" is a
better term.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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