December 03, 2009

further to recent - back to net neutrality...

...picking up where i left off and heading in a new but related direction:

..as all of that is happening (see last post), and it will, the bandwidth demands on the mobile networks are going to be overwhelming. among other things, those of us who drop 3 of 5 calls on at&t mobility in manhattan will soon be joined by our verizon subscriber brethren when the family of 'droids hit the networks...

and it'll be worse in the mobile world than the increasing latency we continue to experience in the fixed environment - notwithstanding accelerated deployment of higher bandwidth fiber, etc. - driven in large part by increasingly data-hungry social and content-based applications and services. kids that used to text are now video-skyping with equal fervor, and the question's begged: when might clogged fixed and mobile networks reach parity in terms of everyday customer frustration.

which, in turn, leads to my long-time favorite hobby-horse - network neutrality. i continue to believe that every consumer should be able to use the device of choice to access the services and content of choice across the network of choice. and i've never been terribly fair to the operators in my past rants on the topic. so, to balance the rhetoric, how are service providers to stay in business as consumer access increasingly commoditizes?

look for other value-added services is one answer, seemingly quite popular.

and that doesn't mean launching yet another music, video, social network, mapping or other such solution - good grief, the choice is already endless. but it does mean the big guys (operator-wise) chasing new enterprise-based telecommunications/IT services opportunities, guaranteeing paying companies competing in an increasingly globalized marketplace quality end-to-end, full service fixed, wireless, secure, hosted and managed IT services across the globe. great costs savings for those companies doing business multinationally in terms of scale and efficiencies, but also in terms of being able to redirect investments away from building out their own facilities and services. needless to say, all of this is already happening.

but back to network neutrality. if the big guys want to chase the enterprise dollars as the consumer side commoditizes, a huge value-add in those service offerings will be in guaranteeing more-than-adequate bandwidth for corporate customers. and, suddenly, tiering - in terms of pricing, access and bandwidth - seems an utter given, despite all of the rhetoric in washington. funny thing is, having raved to the contrary in the past, i get it, from a staying-in-business-perspective if you're a major telecoms/IT service provider. but, i worry yet more than before that the average consumer gets increasingly screwed, in terms of quality of service, breadth and depth of online experience, etc.

bottom line: there's got to be a balance. what we don't want to see, what we can't allow to happen, what would undermine the social, democratic, and innovation benefits of the internet, is the de facto creation of an internet ghetto...

more to come...

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