Re: [nznog] UFB 1 gig plans for retail and impact they have

On 2014-11-04 08:38, Dean Pemberton wrote:

On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 12:26 AM, McDonald Richards wrote:

...

I agree. The days of the "any to any, open Internet" are slowly coming to an end.

I'm interested in teasing out people's opinions on this. Do people on the list agree with this statement? Are we at a stage now where the only future people can see is one where 'any to any' connectivity is impossible. Are we at a stage now where the concept of an Open Internet is a thing of the past?

Comments?

I see several different things happening: - As access speeds rise, and data caps are removed, any difference between a residential and business connection is disappearing. Although business connections have typically been charged a lot more for their service, and offered a higher level of service, this doesn't in practice make any difference. Residential users have come to expect that their service works 24x7, that they'll get prompt fixes for faults, and that they'll pay little more than they have in previous years for a better, faster service. How many home users these days would accept a busy tone when trying to use the internet? - Businesses are increasingly seeing an internet connection as just another pipe into the building (like water or power), and are looking for the cheapest option available to them, because the cheapest option (which is generally the residential class service) now has sufficiently high service levels and performance that it's what they want. - Many discussions about filtering things focus on the mass-market customers, who are the ones paying the least for their service. Yet they're the ones that to filter, time and money must be spent. On the other hand, there are (typically) unfiltered business connections, because businesses are trusted, or because they demand a service where they can run a webserver/email server/VPN gateway. Where I'm going with all of this is that I think in future, we have to consider all connections equal, at least as a starting point. Connection speeds, data caps, service levels etc are heading towards being equal no matter which customer segment you belong to. Which, IMHO, means we should treat them all equally; if you filter one of them, you filter them all. If you give one the option to opt out of filtering, you give them all the option. There was an article recently on the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/10/31/does-the-...) which explores why end users are also content providers, and should be treated as such - I think we should be careful of anything which tries to limit what the end users can do, because when we try to change the behaviour of the users, they route around the damage. Which is the last thing I think worth mentioning; that the internet will route around damage, whether we like it or not. We can filter things, we can try to block stuff, but unless you cut off the connectivity completely, devices and programs will still find ways to talk directly to each other. --David