Re: Exec Summary Broadband plan -- a personal perspective

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <bob2-39 () bobf frankston com>
Date: March 15, 2010 5:50:28 PM EDT
To: <dave () farber net>, "'ip'" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: RE: [IP] Exec Summary Broadband plan -- a personal perspective

This may be the best the FCC could do with the hand dealt it by Congress. And Congress is giving “us” more of what we 
are asking for rather than what we need.
 
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this document is that it is a scan of a paper document and not posted in digital 
form.
 
I already posted anticipatory response in http://rmf.vc/?n=BBSnakeOil. I should emphasize that I’m sympathetic to the 
FCC staff on this given the constraints of the original NOI.
 
There is no sense of availability as a goal – you get access only where you have a subscription and you are forced to 
use a provider. The problem with the provider requirement became very clear in a side discussion where I was told that 
some customers need very high reliability and very high speed connections. That’s fine but why am I forced to pay for 
an overbuilt infrastructure. It’s like the days when I had to pay for a highly reliable very expensive telephone that 
I’d have to pay for forever.
 
Best efforts provides an alternative approach which allows me to discover what I can do with what is available. Those 
who want to spend very large amounts on very reliable networks can but more likely they will find that they don’t 
really need that kind of reliability. VoIP is a good example – we’ve gone from the PSTN to best efforts.
 
The whole idea of measuring broadband is problematic. It can measure the results of provisioning – but not the capacity 
in the physical infrastructure which can be unlocked by policies that encourage discovery. It’s as if we assumed the 
only way to get faster computers was to buy more of them because there is no understanding Moore’s law. We can get the 
very same hypergrowth dynamic in other markets. Instead we just pay for more of the same.
 
This is also personal – in 1995, at Microsoft, I made the decision to make home networks DIY (Do It Yourself) and not a 
profit center. I used NATs (Network Address Translators) so you could share a single IP address. I didn’t invent 
“broadband” nor NATs but the decoupling of the home network from carriers set in motion a dynamic. In fact I used to 
think NATs were a bad idea – it’s only now that I appreciate how well that decision has played out. The problem is not 
in the NATs but in protocols that comingle naming and addressing.
 
In the original triple play the carriers were going to charge each service be it TV or reading meters. ATT justified 
its purchase of MediaOne because it expect to get some money from each transaction. Readers of this list may remember 
the carriers’ attempts to charge users for PC’s and to ban webcams. They failed because they couldn’t control the 
networks within our homes nor interfere in transactions.
 
The goal was to create opportunity rather than promising a particular result. And the result of the DIY decision played 
out very well. Unfortunately the Congress missed the point and credited the shiny glass rather than the dynamic.
 
If you read the broadband NOI it makes many promises but leaves the carriers firmly in control with the need to sell 
services in order to be profitable. Bits themselves have no intrinsic value—the value comes from what we do with them. 
Nor do the bits have an intrinsic cost – if we just pay for the physical infrastructure we are then free to use it with 
little incremental cost. I need to be clear – this is local infrastructure like our home networks – it is not a 
national system engineered by a network operator.
 
Instead of learning the lessons from the networks in our home and building on those lessons we’ve retreated back to 
1995 or even 1860 (when telegraphy triumphed over the Phony Express). The carriers set a price on bits thus denying us 
abundance. It’s as if we had to pay for each word we heard or spoke – just like telegraphy.
 
I’m resigned to the broadband policy for now – it may waste a few billion but it won’t change the larger dynamic. 
Comcast bought NBC to escape be commoditized, Time-Warner is already a content company and Verizon is apparently 
halting FiOS expansion. The old model is unraveling even as we spend mightily to keep it alive.
 
We may waste a few billion but that’s small compared with the hundreds of billion dollars we’ll get back each year once 
we’ve shifted to funding infrastructure rather than selling services.
 
 
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] 
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 14:27
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Exec Summary Broadband plan
 
 
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296858A1.pdf
 
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