Cognative Surplus
April 27th, 2008
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Good article here. Go read it.
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Archive for April, 2008
Net Neutrality and the Internet as a Platform
April 27th, 2008
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The Net Neutrality debate has been stumbling along for several years now, and still there is no real consensus as to what, if anything, is needed as a course of action.
The inherent obstacle, from both a technical and business level, to an open access approach to broadband engineering is that the fundamental economics of broadband are based on over subscription. It is very common (and usually feasible) to have hundreds or thousands of broadband customers (each with, say, 3-5Mb/s of service) going through a backhaul of 50-150Mb/s. This model assumes that each customer will only use their connection some of the time and, assuming that not all of the ISPs customers use the service at the same time, is generally a good model. This is roughly analogous to many business model that operates on a subscription basis. Every year, my local theme park (Six Flags over Georgia) sells season passes to hundreds of thousands of people with the understanding that only a small percentage show up on a given day. Gym club memberships, NetFlix, and telephony/cell phone providers all leverage this principle to maximize profit.