Communications Daily did a good write-up of the ITIF’s Network Management Forum yesterday, where Brett Glass and I held forth with our views and recommendations about the Internet’s traffic glut. CD is a subscription-only publication, so I can’t link to the article, but here’s a little snippet where I pitched tiered service and Weighted Fair Queuing:
ISPs might reduce worries about competition and free speech raised by neutrality regulation supporters by putting management in consumers’ hands, Bennett said. A common argument for neutrality regulation says network management lets ISPs favor their services over competitors’. Bennett proposed letting consumers designate the services they want given the most bandwidth. Consumers would use their home gateway to assign VoIP, Bit-Torrent and other services to tiered subscription “buckets,†he said. Each bucket would offer an amount of time for each level of bandwidth, he said. A consumer wanting fast BitTorrent service could put it in the high-priority bucket and demote Web browser service to a low-priority bucket. If the bucket used up its high-priority minutes, the BitTorrent service would be “demoted†to a lower tier bucket, he said…
Adding bandwidth on networks won’t fix congestion woes, Bennett and Glass said, citing Japan. At 100 Mbps, Japan has some of the world’s largest pipes, but still faces significant congestion due to P2P networks, they said.
This is an example of solving a problem through technology rather than by regulation and law, and that’s what we do in networking.