The Future of the Internet
AT&T Will Disconnect Wireless P2P Users
July 28, 2008 AT&T will jettison wireless users that engage in P2P file-sharing over its network, the company said Friday in a letter PDF
filed at the FCC (and flagged today by Ted Hearn at Multichannel News).
Senior lobbyist Robert Quinn answered a question posed at hearing last
week by Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell about the company's
policies of managing P2P network traffic on its broadband wireless
platform.
Quinn said that AT&T's terms of service (as well as the TOS for
most other carriers) bars the use of P2P applications on the wireless
platform. "Use of a P2P file sharing application would constitute a
material breach of contract for which the user’s service could be
terminated," he said.
Because P2P file sharing applications typically
engage in continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data
rates, a small number of users of P2P file sharing applications served
by a particular cell site could severely degrade the service quality
enjoyed by all customers served by that site.
AT&T hasn't yet booted anybody off the network for using P2P, Quinn said. <snip>
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Jul 29 2008:
The deal between record companies and ISPs will drive music-swapping underground and erode their profits still further
Back Room Deal
The memorandum has been struck with the UK's six biggest ISPs - BT,
Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB - and includes a
deal for all parties to work together to develop ways to deal with
repeat offenders.
It is thought that BSkyB's announcement of a digital music joint venture with Universal Music
earlier this week - the venture has no name, no pricing and no launch
date - could have been a move to prove that ISPs are supporting new,
innovative, legal digital models ahead of the announcements today.
In February, the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to crack down on illegal filesharing
as part of a wide-ranging strategy paper designed to look at ways of
supporting the UK creative industries and digital intellectual
property.
Bob Frankston frankston.com
I agree that we have abundant capacity available but we need to be careful on terminology. A barrel of oil is something we consume and it is distributed form sources. Challenge the concept of "bandwidth". Why are we paying so much for something that isn’t consumed?
The basic problem is the billing model once we treat the infrastructure as a profit center and charge for services we create costs. While the efforts in Amsterdam and Utah are laudable they need to go another step to escape the idea of charging for services and usage.
The particular price of bandwidth isn’t as important as the very idea of pricing by bandwidth rather than paying once for the physical infrastructure. It’s even starker when we observe that technology increases the capacity of what we already -- a learning experience for those who bet on scarcity of “bandwidth” for first fiber bubble.
Bandwidth is simply a measure and it isn't meaningful in isolation. You can't really talk about the bandwidth of an inch of wire in isolation. Bandwidth is only a meaningful measure when we deploy a particular technology. But it becomes a billable unit only when we take the next step and a service provider puts a meter on the wire. Nothing is being consumed but billable events are being created.
Even if we argue there are constrictions at various points in the infrastructure it doesn’t make to use those constrictions as a reason to create false scarcity in every segment of wire. Fortunately I managed to exempt the wires within the home form this form of billing by making sure that home networking was DIY and not a service.
This applies to airwaves also. Spectrum allocation is an artificial construct based on the technology available in the 1920’s and the lack of a corresponding wired infrastructure to relay the traffic. So we adopted the idea of single hop signaling over long distances and wired for local connections. Nicholas Negroponte observed that with the Internet and digital connectivity this has been turned on its head. Wireless is increasingly used for local connectivity in place of phone wires and network wires. Fiber and other digital paths work far better for distance a milliwatt radio now reaches the world. If we convert existing access points to transfer points the issue of whitespace may be moot.
OPEC 2.0 -- Barrels vs Bandwidth By TIM WU
Published: July 30, 2008
AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth - the capacity to move information - as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.
Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren't careful, we're going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.
Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can't run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That's why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Wired connections to the home - cable and telephone lines - are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments - similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home.
Encouraging competition is another path, though not an easy one: most of the much-hyped competitors from earlier this decade, like businesses that would provide broadband Internet over power lines, are dead or moribund. But alternatives are important. Relying on monopoly producers for the transmission of information is a dangerous path.
After physical wires, the other major way to move information is through the airwaves, a natural resource with enormous potential. But that potential is untapped because of a false scarcity created by bad government policy.
Our current approach is a command and control system dating from the 1920s. The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.
Many "owners" of spectrum either hardly use the stuff or use it in highly inefficient ways. At any given moment, more than 90 percent of the nation's airwaves are empty.
The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.
Such technologies would not work perfectly right away, but over time clever entrepreneurs would find a way, if we gave them the chance. The Federal Communications Commission promised this kind of reform nearly a decade ago, but it continues to drag its heels.
In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters, in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for the whole economy.
And that's why there is a pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late. Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?"
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company