There’s a very amusing picture painted of NCTA on Ars Technica, literally Shakespearean in nature.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” cried William Shakespeare’s Henry V in the play so titled. “Or close the wall up with our English dead!” Perhaps in said spirit did the National Cable and Television [sic] Association (NCTA) veep Michael Schooler and Insight CEO Michael Willner march up to the eighth floor of the Federal Communications Commission on the ninth of July to plead the cause of ISP “network management”…
Taken in conjunction with yesterday’s post on DSL Reports, it sounds like we painted a portrait of Biblical apocalypse. NCTA’s own Michael Schooler and Insight’s Michael Willner supposedly warned of “the impending destruction of the Internet by P2P users.” Or else we said “that the Internet would all but collapse.”
Wow! That sure sounds scary. But since neither Karl Bode nor Matthew Lasar was actually at that meeting, they instead apparently based their accounts on a letter we filed. If you read it for yourself, you find that four points were made.
- Network management is necessary to prevent serious congestion.
- Service for customers would be degraded without such management.
- Network upgrades alone won’t solve problem.
- The government should not pre-determine the tools and technology to be used for network management.
So I ask: Which of these four points are in contention? The DSL Reports post even says “Most techs don’t oppose reasonable network management (booting extreme gluttons, some QOS and prioritization)…” So, we can start by agreeing that reasonable network management is a good thing. Without some kind of management, problems will arise.
Let’s look at service degradation. Was complete congestion claimed? The phrase used is “can cause substantial (and sometimes complete) congestion of the system’s upload capacity.” Let’s emphasize three key words: can, sometimes and upload. This is critical, because peer-to-peer applications are the focus of attention.
This goes to the point about simply upgrading a network. A peer-to-peer application looks for users with the best upload connection. Building a bigger pipe does not eliminate the necessity of network management.
Finally, is the federal government really the best body to judge what network management tools are appropriate? I’m not convinced it is. Nor am I convinced that the answer is a big dumb pipe that treats all bits equally, whether it’s a phone call, streaming video, a P2P download, an e-mail, or a Web page request. And anybody who actually understands how networks work wouldn’t either.
Both of these posts claim that we are crying “Armageddon!” for nefarious reasons. But should nothing be done at all? We want to give our customers the best Internet experience possible, now and in the future, and we need network management to accomplish that goal.
