SEF (if these Cisco koolaid boxes actually work) is primarily used to ensure the aggregate enjoyment of the Internet by all subscribers in an ADSL2+ world.

Say your fed off a remote DSLAM (fed by 8 T1s) bolted to a telephone pole somewhere… Are you sure you want your enjoyable Youtube/Pr0n or whatever getting jittery because your neighbors are downloading warez with bittorent?

Or more easily throttling a customer who may be blasting spam to your email account…

Or any other actual and far more common problems that exist RIGHT NOW in the real world of network operations.

“access from http://www.bennett.com/blog/ has been denied”

Seems hypocritical to me.

Before I go any further, I will disclose that I am an independent contractor working as a software engineer, and one of my clients is 2Wire, which builds the customer premises boxes that many claim will be used to ‘unfairly’ prioritize services offered by AT&T.

First, in the best case we are talking about VDSL2 here, which has a 30 MHz total spectrum and can theoretically provide 250 Mbits of digital bandwidth. ‘Theoretically’ means across a lab bench, not up to a quarter mile from the nearest AT&T green cabinet in your neighborhood. In practice, it will be much less than that, depending on distance and wireline quality. In the real world VDSL2 will not be available in most areas, so many subscribers will be stuck with a 3 to 6 Mbit ADSL connection.

There is no way that AT&T can deliver the ‘tri-media’ or ‘triple-play’ of IP telephony, IPTV, and video-heavy internet access on an ADSL connection without ‘unfairly’ prioritizing the higher bandwidth services that its customers are paying good money to receive.

Personally, I use my local monopolistic cable company for my ‘triple-play’ service, so I can get true low-latency high-bandwidth HDTV and IP telephony that doesn’t break up. I don’t try to connect third-party IP telephony devices to my internet connection because I’m happy to pay for high-quality IP telephony that my cable company will provide through the magic of that nasty unfairly discriminatory non-neutral internet of theirs. I get much higher bandwidth on my internet connection than I could ever hope to get from AT&T now or in the forseeable future.

However, if my cable company tried to slow down my Google access to make it unusable, you can bet that I will dump their service in a New York minute and running screaming and crying back into the tender embrace of Good Old Ma Bell. The service would suck, but at least I could save some money.

Regarding your specific assertions:

Cisco’s Service Exchange Framework (SEF) seems to me to be expressly designed to allow carriers to block, impede or otherwise filter “third-party” services. And SEF also appears to be the kind of stuff the carriers were planning on purchasing in order to eradicate net neutrality.

Whether you like it or not, the Service Exchange Framework (or something like it) will be used by carriers. This is not because of any diabolic intent. Rather, it will be used because it will allow carriers more efficiently provide customers the service that they demand.

An even more diabolical scheme appeared to be the carriers creating their own services – search-engines, YouTube-style video-delivery, etc. and then impeding all competitors to ensure that their service “won”.

YouTube-style video delivery systems will be incapable of delivery HD content for a long, long time. Why? Because even a highly compressed HDTV stream can take 20+ Mbps (assuming 1080 resolution). A small city with 50,000 HDTVs would need a 1+ terabit connection to the Internet to supply streaming content. Current technology does not support pipes that big.

Suffice it to say that with one or two FTTH providers per locale, the result was going to be to turn the Internet into Cable Television. Not exactly what we would have wanted, right?

Did you even notice the consent agreement exempted IPTV?

The most ominous aspects of their plans were not to charge, say, Yahoo a premium to get better performance than Google. An even more diabolical scheme appeared to be the carriers creating their own services – search-engines, YouTube-style video-delivery, etc. and then impeding all competitors to ensure that their service “won”. Shockingly, there were some allusions to this sort of anti-competitive tactic by various execs…

Suffice it to say that with one or two FTTH providers per locale, the result was going to be to turn the Internet into Cable Television. Not exactly what we would have wanted, right?

Doug

Doug, how exactly does this benefit “Democratic” communication?