Jul 21st, 2006, 10:26 AM
Ted Stevens' analogy so simplistic, that it just ends up being entirely flawed. It's sad that governments put old pieces of shit in charge of deciding what to do for new technology that they've never used.
Up to now, the Internet has been an equal service. Everyone connected to it shares the physical resources equally. You can pay to have more access (faster connection, better hardware), but you cannot pay to have priority access over someone else, which is what companies want to start offering.
The big ISPs want to start offering quality of service (QoS). For example, under the current circumstance, suppose two people are sharing one line. Only one person's signal can be transmitted across the one physical cable. The Internet works by dividing all the data you want to send and receive into small chunks called packets. Two people transmitting on the same line would alternate between sending their packets and waiting for others to finish transmitting to free up the line; statistically, this averages out to about 50/50 access for both people in this situation. Essentially, half the time you are transmitting or receiving data, and the other half the time you are waiting for other people to finish using the line.
It has been mathematically proven that your connection will not get better than this as long as other people are using the same physical connection as you.
The way you speed up your Internet connection in this situation is to increase the speed that you are transmitting. The 50/50 split of transmitting/waiting still applies, but if the time it takes to send one packet is reduced, then more packets can be sent in the same amount of time. Overall, everyone's speed goes up.
With QoS, the ISP can start messing with the 50/50 split. From my previous example, say that the first Person A pays for better QoS, while the second Person B does not. Suddenly, rather than a 50/50 split, the scale has been adjusted to 75/25 in Person A's favour. In other words, for every packet that Person B gets to transmit, Person A can transmit three.
Person A's connection suffers, while Person B has gotten faster, all without improving any hardware. The ISP has specifically given priority to Person A for any packets they want to send or receive.
The first problem with this is that the Internet connection is no longer equal. In competition terms, this is the same as one company simply paying to put another company out of business.
Here's the catch, though, and the main reasons why QoS is bullshit:
1) What happens when Person B starts paying for improved service? It is physically impossible to have a single physical line shared 75/75... as I stated before, it's been mathematically proven that the best you can get is 50/50... which is right back where we started from with our equal Internet. The only way to improve service now is to either give both Persons A and B their own separate physical lines (which can cost millions of dollars) or to improve everyone's speed. You could also raise your rates and charge customers more, but now you have a lot of customers who are paying for a service that they aren't getting. They're either going to sue you or find another ISP. If you're the only ISP around and you start raising rates like this, you're engaging in monopolistic practices, which is a fast-track to being dismantled.
2) QoS can only exist within your own network. The entire Internet is not one network owned by one single entity. It is made up of thousands of separate networks, each with their own physical layout and their own rules (QoS may be one of them). To access a website, you may have to go through dozens of separate networks (go to your command prompt and type "tracert www.i-mockery.net" and watch how many hops it takes to actually reach this site from your computer).
At some point, you have to leave your ISP's network and enter the wild Internet along with everyone else. At some point, you have to share some portion of your physical connection with any number of other Internet users. QoS is being misrepresented by the big ISPs because they want to make extra money, but in the end, there won't be any major improvements in service for anyone.
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