I wrote about the fight for net neutrality earlier this week and got some comments that suggest I did not succeed with my hosting example.  I was thinking of clarifying that in a comment.  Then I read a column by Holman Jenkins in the WSJ (love reading the WSJ to challenge my own opinions) titled “Neutering the ‘Net."  That column shows some of the same misunderstanding, so I am thinking a full post might be in order.

Where we live, Verizion offers FIOS and in their ads and on their site they claim 15/5 Mbps (that would be 15 downstream, i.e. to the home, and 5 upstream).   The point of net neutrality is not that I should be able to exceed these speeds.  Nor is it that I should have a guarantee of getting these speeds at all times.  There is not even a principle anywhere that says that claimed speeds have to be achieved at all – although that might fall under truth in advertising – more on that in a second.  All the fifth net neutrality principle really says is that if Verizon starts throttling my traffic they can’t pick and choose what kind of traffic they want to throttle.

What does that mean for residential pricing?  I don’t think that usage based pricing where each click could cost you something will be accepted by consumers for long.  But tiered pricing is a different story.  That is some folks might well be willing to pay more for either more bandwidth or better guarantees around that bandwidth.  Let’s put some of these bandwidth numbers in perspective.  For starters, VOIP calls barely register as they are below 100 Kbps.  So even at 1 Mbps symmetrical (about 1/15th and 1/5th respectively of FIOS), you could have 10 simultaneous phone calls.  Now look at the high end instead.  A single high quality 1080i HD stream is around 5 Mbps, so that is still only 1/3rd of the claimed FIOS downstream rate.

So it would not be unreasonable to ask for a plan that guarantees the ability to have one high quality HD stream and a simultaneous phone call and Internet browsing all at the same time, at any time and for however long you want.  Someone might ask whether that doesn’t add up to a huge amount across households.  In our village there are about 5,000 households, so let’s call this 5 Mpbs * 5,000 = 25 Gbps.   Does equipment for this break the bank?  I just did a super quick search and found a D-Link switch that has more than 100 Gbps switching capacity at less than $3,000 (admittedly it’s a bit more complicated because this deals with fewer ports, but it is directionally correct).

I hope this demonstrates that the net neutrality fight is not about the technical capability or the cost of delivering net neutral access but entirely about providers continued desire to protect other services that they would also like consumers to buy from them instead of from third parties.  Jenkins is right about one thing in his column.  This is good for Google and it is no surprise they are supporting it.  But it is also good for anybody else wanting to offer IP-based services.