Their repeated whining about lack of resources to improve access, speeds and services for customers comes across as disingenuous when one considers that both Verizon and AT&T have invested less in their networks than they take out in depreciation.

Last year return of and on capital generated almost $15 billion in free cash flow that they took out of the industry.

Over the past three years, they have taken out approximately $47 billion.

Half of this resulting cash flow has been used to pay dividends. The rest has been used to pay down debt, increase cash on hand, and support the merger wave that is sweeping the industry.

Recall that AT&T has a $67 billion offer on the table to buy BellSouth. And Verizon offered $38 billion to buy Vodaphone out of their cellular joint venture. These huge transactions tie up resources and diminish the ability to reinvest in the industry.

To cover this financial shell game, they claim poverty, while throwing off cash and trying to get a free ride on the backs of the public.

What they fail to point out is that Net Neutrality has been the rule that has governed access to the Internet since its inception. It’s the reason that the Internet has become such a dynamic force for new ideas, economic innovation and free speech. What they really want is for Congress to radically re-write our telecommunications laws so that companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth can swoop in and become gatekeepers to Internet content — in a way that benefits no one except the largest ISPs.

I’d like pkp646 and “John Rice” to tell us how it is that they appear together (usually one after the other) spouting identical industry talking points across the blogosphere.

What gives fellas? Are you being paid?

And let’s not forget about the billions and billions of dollers that was given to the telcos to roll out a broadband network in the 90s. Something that was squandered and wasted.

The internet should be as free as the interstate highway system. I know I sound like a socialist, but I don’t care.

There is no such proposal, there is only a bill - COPE - which specifically prohibits the practice you mention.

It’s best to deal with facts, not paranoid fantasies.

The telco/cableco proposal was to levy fees on folks who make money on the internet; Google was specifically mentioned.

Note that no one is forcing the telcos/cablecos to provide a network that supports VOIP. They’re perfectly free to not do so. Their customers may then decide to get their bandwidth elsewhere. If they want to keep selling bandwidth to folks who want voip, they’re going to have to actually deliver, and their proposal won’t make that happen.

Note that the telcos don’t have the reach to make the service guarantees that Bennett would like. That’s why they won’t put anything other than “best effort” in writing for “internet access”. (Yes, I’m aware that they will write service guarantees for leased lines between a small number of endpoints, but that’s a different thing. Applications that I wrote transfer tens of terabytes/day cross continent. I also did traffic shaping for an application that uses 5-10 gigabits/sec 24/7/365.)

> I’m not a socialist, and this is the reason we differ.

I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that Bennett is making up stuff about me.

So the question is this: if a Telco invest massive dollars to enable VOIP to work as well as ordinary telephones do today, can a third party step in and use this investment for free? I say that’s a business decision that the Telco should be able to make on their own without government micro-management.

I’m not a socialist, and this is the reason we differ.

The cable ISPs are running a scam (advertising sync rates as bandwidth) and are incompetent. They don’t provision enough bandwidth to their head-ends and haven’t figured out that they can rate limit their customers with the routers that they have today. Of course, when they do so, they’ll get yelled at because they’re lying about their service (see “scam” and “don’t provision”), but ….

They don’t need any money from Google to do this.

Bennett confuses good things that one might do with more spending on the infrastructure with the actual proposal.

Those folks think that they’re entitled to a cut of every transaction that crosses their wires using IP; that’s what they’re asking for, so it is absurd to suggest that that it has a different purpose.

We don’t give them a cut of the biz that crosses in those wires in audio, so what makes IP different?

There’s nothing wrong with that.

That’s nice, but the proposals under discussion are about charging Google and the like, services that don’t need said change. The folks making these proposals say it’s because they’re owed a cut of the money, in the same way that they’re owed a cut of any deal made over the phone.

The two-tier internet proposals won’t fund the infrastructure changes, so it’s silly to argue for them on that basis, no matter how needed said infrastructure changes are.

That ought to tell you something.

For $500 per month, with no installation fees and no additional loop charges and a router included, I can get a T1 (1.5MBit symmetrical) to my house complete with up to a class C (256 IP addresses) upon providing justification for the IPs. Now, let’s say that I wanted to become an ISP for some reason, but just providing connectivity. I could run wires to my neighbors’ houses for a small cost; let’s just say my four nearest neighbors so I could provide the connectivity wirelessly for a one-time cost of next to nothing (less than $1000, certainly).

Now, I could promise each of these four neighbors to provide them with a 740kBit connection, and could set up a DHCP server with the 256 IPs I would have registered, and the odds are that I would be OK. Unless all four were simultaneously on, and a couple of them were using massive amounts of bandwidth, no one would notice that I was promising more capacity than I have. But let’s say that two of those neighbors are using Skype, and thus all of my bandwidth. Then you (a third neighbor) get on and find there’s not much left for you. At that point, am I at fault for over promising bandwidth/underestimating usage, or are the two “abuse[ive]” neighbors at fault for using what I sold them?

Is that actually a problem, or is it just a DSL advertising slogan?

One of the interesting things about the net is that bits from A to B usually traverse several companies’ wires. Unless all of those companies give said bits preferential treatment, preferential treatment by any of them basically doesn’t matter.

So, if AT&T is going to charge me to deliver better service from Google, the only way that they can actually follow through is to drop more of the packets that Yahoo is sending me.

Or, they can simply lie and cash the checks.

Ogrady at power page put up a detailed drawing of a possible future product.

The only thing different from company docs was that the do not publish trade secret type of watermark.

Free speech is no the same as publishing trade secrets.

That is all.

And has nothing to do w/ net neutrality.