CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[WanMan]

I am going to use the following article as a premise to rekindle a discussion I tried to start several months back.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071029006017&newsLang=en

The company's website is here: http://www.akamai.com/

A few months back I tried to initiate a discussion revolving around Network Neutrality in the consumer broadband market. Cable operators and telephone companies were attempting to control their markets in some ways that brought attention of the masses, and the concept of neutrality in the consumer broadband networks into question.

Simply put, consumers do not want to see their broadband traffic discriminated by the network operators (cable the telco). Cable and telco want to discriminate against foreign traffic (traffic generated from outside their network) in order to reduce the competitive tendency that they, as a network provider, will see no revenue from.

For instance, AT&T does not want to deliver a 20 mbps connection to everyone's home and allow people like NBC, ABC, ESPN, or the even Hulu and Akamai to sell content to their end users. The telephone industry started to get into the video market by deploying IPTV, but this meant using a broadband transport system that can also be used my content suppliers on the public Internet.

The method in which the cable operators have handled this is to place bandwidth caps on their end users. If the end user transports too much in a given amount of time--legal content or otherwise--they will shut off your connection. Similarly, the telephone industry wants to place higher priority of native traffic (their IPTV) over traffic that is foreign (Akamai, Hulu, etc.).

And while all of this was predicted by thinking men and women, the cable and telephone industry ain't really humans, but our overlords that are enslaving us.

Of course, I cannot blame them and I do see both sides of the debate. Imagine Comcast and DirecTV--along side of Akamai and Hulu--selling content to AT&T U-verse customers. Boy, the dangers in mind are really there. I am a consumer as I write this so you can imagine my stance on the Network Neutrality debate, but I feel the willingness of cable and telco broadband operators willing to settle for the dumb-pipe business isn't going to happen.

BTW, can someone with a lot of bandwidth let everyone else know what the Akamai beta site is like?