Two positions at FCC Comcast Hearing

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed () reed com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 2:48 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Statement at the FCC en banc on Reasonable Network Management

Dave - I can confirm that the FCC hearing yesterday was fascinating as a
participant.  Many of your readers were there, and the discussions were
far more insightful than one might have expected.

For IP if you will: a number of people have suggested that I share the
final version of my opening statement on the technical panel at the FCC
en banc hearing, so besides filing it in the two FCC dockets, I put it
on my web server at

<http://www.reed.com/dpr/docs/Papers/Reed%20FCC%20statement.pdf>

Note that I did not read the footnotes or a couple of the less important
paragraphs, due to time constraints, and of course the physical
manipulation of the envelopes I used as props doesn't translate into PDF
format.  :-)


________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 4:27 PM
To: David Farber; Ip ip
Subject: George Ou on FCC Comcast Hearing

Dave:

George Ou's, technical director of ZDNet, has written an excellent article on the FCC's Comcast hearing with some 
rather dramatic and revealing graphics. As a network engineer, he knows whereof he speaks, and the article is good 
reading. He also mentions at least two members of the IP list in the article. Excerpt and link below.

--Brett Glass

FCC hearings: Comcast versus Vuze<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1031>
Posted by George Ou

The FCC held its hearing on Comcast’s Network Management practices<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1001> at Harvard 
University yesterday.  Vuze executive Gilles BianRosa whose company filed one of the two FCC complaints against Comcast 
reportedly told the FCC<http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878330-7.html> yesterday that BitTorrent does not hog 
bandwidth.  Since most Internet experts would dispute that claim, I generated the following hard data on the bandwidth 
consumption of various applications that run on the Internet.


Note: Richard Bennett<http://www.bennett.com/blog> who was an expert panelist at yesterday’s hearings informed me that 
BianRosa claimed that BitTorrent didn’t exceed the contracted limit.  That however ignores the explicit “no server” 
clause in the terms of service and no broadband service was built to be fully saturated 24×7.  This is why commercial 
grade T1 lines that offer less than half the speed of broadband connections costing 8 times less are $400 per month.

Bear in mind that the data below is in reference to upstream (upload) bandwidth consumption in kilobits per second 
since that is the focus of these FCC hearings.  Also note that applications like web surfing hardly use the upstream at 
all since it’s primarily your clicks and URLs that are being transmitted to tell the web server where you want to go.

[graph and chart omitted]

It is interesting to note that before the advent of P2P applications, Broadband users were primarily downloaders and 
rarely did they ever upload.  It is for this reason that Broadband networks were built asymmetrically and heavily 
favored the downstream.  Servers in data centers with commercial-grade Internet connections served and transmitted 
content and consumers consumed that content by downloading them.

If you’re downloading video from a service like Apple iTunes, Microsoft Xbox Live Marketplace, Netflix, or YouTube, 
you’re only downloading and not uploading anything.  Those services pay a lot of money for their own datacenters filled 
with servers, their own bandwidth, and/or they pay services like Akamai to cache and distribute their content over the 
entire Internet.

Vuze on the other hand uses a different business model where they don’t pay for their own bandwidth and they expect 
their users to contribute their upload bandwidth to make the service work using the BitTorrent protocol.  Vuze 
basically gets free distribution because they enlist their own customers to be their servers and bandwidth providers 
using their own computers and broadband connections.  So instead of paying for commercial distribution, Vuze offloads 
their bandwidth on to the broadband providers....

Complete article at

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1031&page=1


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