Mark A. Jamison

Stop the Cap! reader Joe sends along news of another one of those guest opinion hit pieces on Net Neutrality that pop up regularly in the media.  This one, The Internet is Never Neutral, printed in today’s Sun-Sentinel in south Florida, comes from Mark A. Jamison and Janice Hauge, a dynamic duo who have co-written several papers that always manage to turn up favorable conclusions for big telecommunications companies, including these page-turners:

• “Bureaucrats as Entrepreneurs: Do Municipal Telecom Providers Hinder Private Entrepreneurs?”
• “Subsidies and Distorted Markets: Do Telecom Subsidies Affect Competition?”
• “Dumbing Down the Net: A Further Look at the Net Neutrality Debate.”

The two are also working on other papers purporting to study regulatory policy and competition issues.  Let me illustrate my psychic powers by guessing they’ll find regulatory authorities to be obstacles to the well-oiled telecommunications machine and competition will be most hearty if there are no pesky regulations to hamper it.  We’ve seen how well that has worked so far for consumers in North America.

Remember Al Gore calling the Internet the information superhighway? The metaphor wasn’t and isn’t perfect, but it is instructive. Suppose we applied net neutrality to our transportation system — there would be no high-occupancy vehicle lanes during rush hour, no car-only lanes on interstates, and no toll road as an alternative to I-95 in South Florida. Transportation would be more costly and provide less value.

Forcing net neutrality would have similar results. Time-sensitive information, such as stock market transactions, would wait in line behind football game highlights.

Jamison, who is a former manager at Sprint Communications, and Hauge miss the entire point of the Internet’s biggest strength: its equal treatment of traffic from the smallest blog to Amazon.com.  Assuming providers, earning billions in profits even as their costs decline, invested appropriately in those networks, there would be no need for high-occupancy vehicle lanes and toll roads.  These kinds of “traffic management” techniques are proposed because provider dollars don’t keep up with consumer demand.  Social engineering tries to throttle traffic downwards by discouraging it with toll fees or manage it with special high cost lanes reserved only for those willing to pay or follow arbitrary rules governing their use.  More often than not, those premium lanes go underutilized while the rest of us remain stuck in the slow lane.

Net Neutrality would not impede network management that enhances the efficiency of traffic, except when it comes at the expense of someone else’s traffic. Net Neutrality also throws up a roadblock against providers who would plan to cash in with enhanced connectivity services that cannot exist unless  a market is created to sell them.  It’s similar to providers in Canada limiting your access to broadband, then throwing a penalty fee on your bill… unless you sign up and pay for their “insurance” plan to protect you from those charges.

Want to run a video streaming application on the Internet?  Pay for a broadband provider’s deluxe delivery insurance, and customers will be able to watch that video without buffering.  The alternative is to be stuck waiting because your video is being delivered on an artificial “slow lane.”

If you are thinking that it sounds like net neutrality restricts innovation and hurts customers, you’re right. Our research has shown that net neutrality limits innovation, contrary to the claims of the net neutrality proponents. How can this be? Imagine a one dimensional network — one that does nothing but carry information from point to point, which is how the old Internet has worked. What kinds of content providers flourish in that context? Those big enough to distribute their software across the net and those whose software takes advantage of the great bandwidth that they don’t have to pay for.

Their research makes numerous assumptions that might prove accurate in a laboratory environment, but simply discounts provider mischief in their efforts to maximize profits and minimize costs.  Providers have earned countless billions providing this “one dimensional network” to consumers.  It’s the one bright spot in a lackluster telecommunications sector.  Those who innovate new broadband applications have flourished.  Some providers who have not want to innovate in a different way – by inventing new Internet Overcharging schemes to profit from the service without actually improving it.  When their interests are at stake in owning and managing their own content services, bandwidth suddenly becomes plentiful.  The TV Everywhere project will potentially provide a value-added service to cable and telco TV providers, all made possible in marked contrast to their argument that other producers’ video content is clogging their networks.

Another naked fallacy in the authors’ argument is that content providers don’t pay for the bandwidth to host and distribute their content.  They do — to the companies that host their content and provide connectivity to the Internet.  That’s the job of web hosting companies.  Internet service providers simply want to be paid extra for doing their job – providing connectivity to consumers who pay $4o or more a month Free Press found costs about $8 to provide, and then also charging content creators a second time to facilitate delivery of that content.  That’s akin to charging a phone customer for placing a long distance call and also demanding to bill the person who answers.

Now, suppose that the network can offer enhancements that improve customers’ experiences. Content providers whose sites would not benefit from such enhancements could ignore the offering. But there will be some content providers who could improve their services by buying the enhancements, such as priority packet delivery. These sites become better without net neutrality and offer customers more service. In other words, there is more innovation and greater customer welfare without net neutrality than with it.

Promises, promises.  Just getting these providers to upgrade broadband speeds to consumers has been a never-ending quest.  Many consumers are willing to pay for “improved service” in the form of faster connections to the Internet.  Consumers are not willing to pay more for artificially limited service, be it through throttled speeds or usage caps.

At the conclusion of their study, which assumes providers will not leverage their duopoly in most American markets to increase pricing/revenue and reduce costs by limiting demand on their networks, they readily admit they did not take into account several possible scenarios:

One issue is how the offering of premium transmission might affect the network provider’s incentive to change the standard transmission speed. At least AT&T has committed to not degrade service for any network user, but it is unclear how such a commitment would be enforced.

Secondly, we do not analyze the effects of peer-to-peer communication, which is growing in importance on the Internet.

Thirdly, we do not consider the effects of vertical integration by the network provider and whether this would provide an incentive for foreclosure.

The PURC is part of the University of Florida, but also receives private corporate funding

Because the broadband industry fights any attempt to regulate their service, it is unlikely any such promise from AT&T would be enforced.  What AT&T defines as “degraded” service is open to interpretation as well.  As broadband demand is dynamic and growing, should AT&T leave standard transmission speeds exactly as they are today, that non-premium service would be degraded through inattention to broadband growth.  Peer to peer communication is largely a story from the first round of the Net Neutrality debate in 2006-7.  A more significant amount of traffic is now attributed to online video.  Finally, not considering vertical integration in the cable and telephone industry is a fatal flaw.  The history of telecommunications regulation has largely been written during periods when the cable and telephone industry abused their market position to overcharge consumers for service, lock up content distribution channels, and forestall competition wherever and whenever possible.

Frankly, Jamison and Hauge’s world view only innovates new, even fatter profits for providers like AT&T.  Perhaps some of those profits can go towards even greater funding for the Public Utility Research Center, where Jamison serves as director and Hauge as a Senior Research Associate.  The PURC, part of the University of Florida, just happens to have, among others, AT&T and Embarq Florida as sponsors, and both companies have seats on the PURC Executive Committee.

Sun-Sentinel readers don’t have that information because it’s not included in the disclosure at the bottom of the piece.  Following the money would shed a lot more sun on this important debate.

Glenice Maclellan, Telstra's point person on broadband, has recently discovered Australians don't just want to browse the web and read e-mail on their broadband service.

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has responded to customers leaving their broadband service over its fraudband speeds and paltry usage caps by increasing both, but not nearly enough to change perceptions that Australian providers still serve up slow, overpriced and restrictive service.

Telstra’s CEO David Thodey, who replaced the oft-despised Sol Trujillo, told investors what every Australian contemplating broadband service already knows: “In some parts of the market we’ve gone too far out of line and we need to come back. We must focus on our core business and our customers, this is where we create value for shareholders. At its simplest, the next stage in Telstra’s long-term strategy is to focus on satisfying customers, invest in new capabilities, and drive growth in new businesses.”

Thodey’s approach is to do away with the company’s downright lousy “broadband” service in many rural areas of Australia.  More accurately called “fraudband,” there are still many Australians suffering with Telstra BigPond service that tops out at a ridiculously slow 256kbps.  And because company officials suspect you’ll even use that too much, they slapped a usage cap as low as 200 megabytes on the service, with a war crime overlimit fee of $0.15 per megabyte thereafter.  Your low price?  $27US a month.  For that.  But you can double your allowance to 400 megabytes for a mere $9US more per month.  Grab the bargain.

Effective December 1st, Telstra will move its rural customers to 1996-level broadband service, offering 1.5Mbps minimum to those doing their web surfing over DSL lines.  For those paying $27 a month, they’re increasing your usage allowance to a still-paltry 2 gigabytes per month, and leaving the $0.15/mb overlimit fee in place.  Most DSL customers stuck on these plans will be herded up to the $36 a month plan which is “generous” in comparison with a new download quota of 12 gigabytes per month and no overlimit fee.  Instead, once you hit your limit, they cut your speed to 64kbps for the rest of the month.

Oh but wait, there are some more gotchas:

• Unless you are bundling your molasses-slow Internet service with a phone line package that brings Telstra at least $81US per month in revenue, add $9 to these plan prices.  You wouldn’t want Telstra management to go home hungry, would you?
• Uploads are also a part of your usage allowance.
• Many of their plans lock you in with a 24-month service commitment.  They’ve got you right where they want you.

If you find Telstra’s Oliver Twistian-usage allowances leave you hungry for more, no worries.  Telstra will happily upgrade your service to a higher usage plan, with correspondingly higher prices, by the following day.  That’s good to know if Microsoft obliterated a good part of your usage allowance for the month with critical Windows updates.

Or you could always take your business elsewhere, as many budget conscious Australians have.  Thodey’s fear about out-of-touch broadband pricing is real when considering Telstra’s competitor iiNet offers 4GB (2GB peak/2GB off peak) for just about the same price Telstra charges for its $27 a month/200 megabyte plan.

The company has also recently discovered that Australians want to use their broadband service for more than just web browsing and e-mail.  That’s apparently news to Telstra management, who threw this into their PR push:

“Telstra’s new plans cater for the changing ways Australians use broadband for communications and entertainment at home.  Gone are the days when broadband was used only to check email or internet surf. Australian families now also use broadband to download videos, play online games, or check social networking sites all at the same time”. — Glenice Maclellan, the Acting Group Managing Director of the Consumer division, Telstra

Thanks, Glenice.  The only problem here is that Australians didn’t get to do those things much because of your rationed broadband plans which either overcharged them if they tried, or speed throttled them back to dial-up as a reminder not to be a naughty data hog.

Now, Australians can at least feed at the trough… for a little while.

Telstra offers other plans, which vary on whether you qualify for ADSL 1 service (original DSL) or live in an urban/suburban area upgraded for ADSL 2 or cable modem service.  All prices hereafter are in Australian dollars – $10AUD = $0.91US at time of writing):

New Broadband Pricing for full service fixed phone customers

Those prices are enough to give North American providers dreams of Money Parties in their heads forever.  Only Time Warner Cable came close with their infamous $150 unlimited usage plan they tried to stick customers with in several cities this past April.

That platinum-deluxe BigPond Liberty 200GB plan bundled with a TV package will cost you more than $4,560US over the life of the 24-month contract.

Australians continue to wait for a National Broadband Network plan that the government says should finally free Australians from a life of being told you have to spend more… a lot more, to save just a little from companies like Telstra.

A spoof on Telstra’s BigPond Internet Support Call Center (1 minute)

You won't have this logo to kick around any longer.

AOL (the forgettable part of Time Warner) is desperately trying to rebrand itself in an effort to stay… relevant.  The shortened namesake of America Online, which began life as QuantumLink in 1985, peaked with 30 million subscribers before merging with Time Warner in 2001.  It was all downhill from there.  The once-enormous Internet Service Provider has now become far lesser known as a content producer and distributor, although the company still has almost six million legacy dial-up account users paying between $9.99 and $25.90 a month for access.  They discontinued broadband service several years ago, which was a shame because it offered an Internet access alternative to whatever one’s phone or cable provider had on offer.

This week, with details finalized for December’s AOL severance from Time Warner, the “all-new” Aol. was previewed with a new image branding campaign.

Aol. It's capital "A" and lowercase "ol" with a period.

Yup… that’s it.  There’s now a period in there.  The old triangle, which never meant anything to me either, is gone for good.  Instead, a simple sans-serif logo with a period replaces it, designed to blend into one of hundreds of background images the service will introduce to its new look this December.

“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic. Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL.

Unfortunately for all concerned, there are going to be a lot fewer employees doing the work to create that “world-class” experience.  More than 2,500 employees, one-third of the company’s workforce, will be offered buyouts to get out.

The Associated Press reports on AOL’s plans to shed 2500 workers.  (1 minute)

The company is showcasing the all-new pretty wrapping paper for its December relaunch.

“Historically brand identity has been monolithic and controlling, little more than stamping a company name on a product.  AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational. We’re delighted to have worked so closely with the AOL leadership team to create something bold and exciting that sets AOL apart,” said Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins.

The question is, do most consumers actually associate AOL with a 21st century media company, or a distant memory of dial-up access days gone by?  Aspiring to be the next best thing when your company formerly was the ISP tens of millions of Americans said goodbye to when broadband service arrived is a challenge.  The Internet is filled with yesterday’s sensations whose glory days are long since passed.  Just ask Yahoo!, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Napster, or GeoCities.

[flv width=”640″ height=”405″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/aol_brand-H.264.flv[/flv]

A video reel showcasing some of AOL’s new branding.  (1 minute)

FairPoint Communications’ performance in New England, finally leading to bankruptcy, harms not only itself but also smaller local Internet companies providing jobs and service across the region.  That’s the gist of a report in this morning’s Kennebec Journal outlining a dispute between FairPoint and Great Works Internet, a Biddeford, Maine Internet Service Provider caught between FairPoint’s fiber optic network and a billing dispute that demands GWI pay more than $3 million dollars by December 19th, or face service termination by FairPoint.

GWI leased fiber optic cables with FairPoint’s predecessor Verizon back in 2005.  As part of the Communications Act of 1996, designed to spur competition, GWI obtained access at special interconnection rates, lower than the prices charged for retail customers.  Verizon felt the price was too low, and went to court in 2005 to seek the right to charge “market rates” for access, but the issue was never settled before Verizon sold its landline network to FairPoint last year.  In March of this year, FairPoint stopped accepting new orders from GWI for fiber service, which has kept the company from growing beyond its current fiber network agreements, costing the company plenty in new business.  Then, in September, FairPoint back-billed GWI for $3,085,025, representing the price FairPoint felt GWI should have been paying since 2006.  If the Maine-owned ISP doesn’t pay up, it has been threatened with having its service cut off altogether.

Fletcher Kittredge, GWI’s founder and chief executive officer, has been around the ISP business a long time.  The company was founded in 1994, before Internet access became common, and he has grown the company into a locally owned business serving 18,000 customers with phone and Internet connections.  At risk are the loss of up to 75 local jobs and a significant part of $13 million in annual revenues earned by what the Journal calls one of Maine’s leading Internet providers.

“For us, it’s vital that this be settled soon,” Kittredge told the newspaper. “FairPoint has been threatening us with some pretty draconian action.”

FairPoint’s threat has already cost the company customers, Kittredge said, and the uncertainty makes it hard to go after new business accounts.

But growth has been trimmed by FairPoint’s actions, according to Kittredge. For instance: The company signed a contract with the Skowhegan school system for high-speed access and set up equipment. But the connections it needed from FairPoint were never made, Kittredge said, and he had to cancel the school contract. That has had a chilling effect on efforts to go after new accounts.

“We can’t go out and solicit new businesses,” he said. “We can’t say, ‘This is going to be great, but we may not be able to deliver it to you.’ ”

Great Works hasn’t wanted to make a big deal in public of its fight with FairPoint. It’s concerned that the news will cause existing customers to worry that they could lose their Internet connections.

“It’s a threat I’m going to watch,” said Mitch Davis, chief information officer at Bowdoin College in Brunswick.

Bowdoin gets phone service from FairPoint, but most of its Internet access is from Great Works. Davis was aware of the initial court dispute, but didn’t realize FairPoint was threatening to cut line access. He hopes the bankruptcy judge will let the case go forward and get settled.

GWI told the Journal the company may just be trying to steal Great Works’ lucrative business customers.  That might come to pass if the circuits are cut.  Despite Davis believing FairPoint probably wouldn’t make good on their threat because of the bad publicity it would generate, he admits if they do, he might be forced to transfer the college account to FairPoint.

“I would do what I need to do to keep the college running,” Davis said.

One Journal reader characterized the dispute as just one more consequence of approving FairPoint Communications’ takeover of Verizon service in Maine.

“I would like to thank the governor of Maine for letting such a strong stable company like FairPoint in this state. You really did your homework.  I thought we had a Public Utilities Commission that watched out for public interest.  Boy are they on the ball.  I am glad to see […] they are not running my business.”

America's Broadband Emergency Plan Allows Up to Three Cat-Chasing-Laser-Pointer videos per day

The mainstream media loves a scare story.  Suggestions that a national H1N1 pandemic could bring the Internet as we know it to its knees is a surefire way to get plenty of attention.

The Chicago Tribune, among others, reports that a nationwide outbreak of virus forcing 40% of American workers to remain housebound could result in too many people sitting at home watching Hulu, bringing the entire Internet to a screeching halt.

The answer? Shut down video streaming sites and throttle users during national emergencies.

Of course, even more interesting is what never turns up in these kinds of stories — the news behind the sensationalist headlines.

The report on which this story is based comes courtesy of the General Accounting Office.  The GAO doesn’t simply issue reports willy-nilly.  A member or members of Congress specifically request the government office to research and report back on the issues that concern them.  In this instance, the report comes at the request of:

• Rep. Henry Waxman
• Rep. John D. Dingell
• Rep. Joe Barton
• Rep. Barney Frank
• Rep. Bennie G. Thompson
• Rep. Rick Boucher
• Rep. Cliff Stearns
• Rep. Edward J. Markey

The congressmen weren’t worrying exclusively about your broadband interests.  The GAO notes the study came from concern that such a pandemic could impact the financial services sector (the people that brought you the near-Depression of 2008-09).  The Wall Street crowd could be left without broadband while recovering from flu, and that simply wouldn’t do.

“Concerns exist that a more severe pandemic outbreak than 2009’s could cause large numbers of people staying home to increase their Internet use and overwhelm Internet providers’ network capacities. Such network congestion could prevent staff from broker-dealers and other securities market participants from teleworking during a pandemic. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for ensuring that critical telecommunications infrastructure is protected. GAO was asked to examine a pandemic’s impact on Internet congestion and what actions can be and are being taken to address it, the adequacy of securities market organizations’ pandemic plans, and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) oversight of these efforts,” the report states.

Putting aside my personal desire that a little less broadband for deal-making, bailout-demanding “kings of the world” might not be a bad idea, the GAO’s report concludes what we already know — the business model of residential broadband is based on sharing connections and when too many people stay home and use them, it’s slow and doesn’t work well.

Providers do not build networks to handle 100 percent of the total traffic that could be generated because users are neither active on the network all at the same time, nor are they sending maximum traffic at all times. Instead, providers use statistical models based upon past users’ patterns and projected growth to estimate the likely peak load of traffic that could occur and then design and build networks based on the results of the statistical model to accommodate at least this level. According to one provider, this engineering method serves to optimize available capacity for all users. For example, under a cable architecture, 200 to 500 individual cable modems may be connected to a provider’s CMTS, depending on average usage in an area. Although each of these individual modems may be capable of receiving up to 7 or 8 megabits per second (Mbps) of incoming information, the CMTS can transmit a maximum of only about 38 Mbps. Providers’ staff told us that building the residential parts of networks to be capable of handling 100 percent of the traffic that all users could potentially generate would be prohibitively expensive.

In other words, guess your customer demand correctly and 200-500 homes can all share one 38Mbps connection.  Guess incorrectly, or put off expanding that network to meet the anticipated demands because your company wants to collect “cost savings” from reduced investment, and everyone’s connection slows down, especially at peak times.

One way to dramatically boost capacity for cable operators is to bond multiple channels of broadband service together, using the latest DOCSIS 3 standard.  It provides cable operators with increased flexibility to meet growing demands on their network without spending top dollar on wholesale infrastructure upgrades.  Many operators are already reaping the rewards this upgrade provides, by charging customers higher prices for higher speed service.  But it also makes network management easier without inconveniencing existing customers with slowdowns during peak usage.

The GAO didn’t need 77 pages to produce a report that concludes broadband usage skyrockets when people are at home.  Just watching holiday shopping traffic online spike during deal days like “Cyber Monday,” after Thanksgiving would illustrate that.  Should 40 percent of Americans stay home from work, instead of browsing the Internet from their work machines, they’ll be doing it from home.  That moves the bottleneck from commercial broadband accounts to residential broadband networks.

The GAO says such congestion could create all sorts of problems for the financial services sector, slowing down their broadband access.

Providers’ options for addressing expected pandemic-related Internet congestion include providing extra capacity, using network management controls, installing direct lines to organizations, temporarily reducing the maximum transmission rate, and shutting down some Internet sites. Each of these methods is limited either by technical difficulties or questions of authority. In the normal course of business, providers attempt to address congestion in particular neighborhoods by building out additional infrastructure—for example, by adding new or expanding lines and cables. Internet provider staff told us that providers determine how much to invest in expanding network infrastructure based on business expectations. If they determine that a demand for increased capacity exists that can profitably be met, they may choose to invest to increase network capacity in large increments using a variety of methods such as replacing old equipment and increasing the number of devices serving particular neighborhoods. Providers will not attempt to increase network capacity to meet the increased demand resulting from a pandemic, as no one knows when a pandemic outbreak is likely to occur or which neighborhoods would experience congestion. Staff at Internet providers whom we interviewed said they monitor capacity usage constantly and try to run their networks between 40 and 80 percent capacity at peak hours. They added that in the normal course of business, their companies begin the process to expand capacity when a certain utilization threshold is reached, generally 70 to 80 percent of full capacity over a sustained period of time at peak hours.

However, during a pandemic, providers are not likely to be able to address congestion by physically expanding capacity in residential neighborhoods for several reasons. First, building out infrastructure can be very costly and takes time to complete. For example, one provider we spoke with said that it had spent billions of dollars building out infrastructure across the nation over time, and adding capacity to large areas quickly is likely not possible. Second, another provider told us that increasing network capacity requires the physical presence of technicians and advance planning, including preordering the necessary equipment from suppliers or manufacturers. The process can take anywhere from 6 to 8 weeks from the time the order is placed to actual installation. According to this provider, a major constraint to increasing capacity is the number of technicians the firm has available to install the equipment. In addition to the cost and time associated with expanding capacity, during a pandemic outbreak providers may also experience high absenteeism due to staff illnesses, and thus might not have enough staff to upgrade network capacities. Providers said they would, out of necessity, refrain from provisioning new residential services if their staff were reduced significantly during a pandemic. Instead, they would focus on ensuring services for the federal government priority communication programs and performing network management techniques to re-route traffic around congested areas in regional networks or the national backbone. However, these activities would likely not relieve congestion in the residential Internet access networks.

It’s clear some broadband providers are not willing to change their business models to redefine congestion from measurements taken during peak usage when speeds slow, to those that anticipate and tolerate traffic spikes.  That means making due with what broadband providers are delivering today and developing technical and legal means to ration, traffic shape, or simply cut access to high bandwidth traffic during ‘appropriate emergencies.’  Right on cue, the high bandwidth barrage of self-serving provider talking points are on display in the report:

Providers identified one technically feasible alternative that has the potential to reduce Internet congestion during a pandemic, but raised concerns that it could violate customer service agreements and thus would require a directive from the government to implement. Although providers cannot identify users at the computer level to manage traffic from that point, two providers stated that if the residential Internet access network in a particular neighborhood was experiencing congestion, a provider could attempt to reduce congestion by reducing the amount of traffic that each user could send to and receive from his or her network. Such a reduction would require adjusting the configuration file within each customer’s modem to temporarily reduce the maximum transmission speed that that modem was capable of performing—for example, by reducing its incoming capability from 7 Mbps to 1 Mbps. However, according to providers we spoke with, such reductions could violate the agreed-upon levels of services for which customers have paid. Therefore, under current agreements, two providers indicated they would need a directive from the government to take such actions.

Shutting down specific Internet sites would also reduce congestion, although many we spoke with expressed concerns about the feasibility of such an approach. Overall Internet congestion could be reduced if Web sites that accounted for significant amounts of traffic—such as those with video streaming—were shut down during a pandemic. According to one recently issued study, the number of adults who watch videos on video-sharing sites has nearly doubled since 2006, far outpacing the growth of many other Internet activities. However, most providers’ staff told us that blocking users from accessing such sites, while technically possible, would be very difficult and, in their view, would not address the congestion problem and would require a directive from the government.

Enjoy up to one Hogan's Heroes episode per day during the H1N1 flu pandemic

You have to love some of the players in the broadband industry who trot out their most-favored “network management” talking points to handle a national emergency.  It’s interesting to note providers told the GAO they were concerned with violating customer agreements regarding speed guarantees, when most providers never guarantee residential service speeds.  Their first solution is the Net Neutrality-busting traffic throttle, to slow everyone down to ration the “good enough for you” network in your neighborhood.  Shutting down too-popular, high bandwidth websites like Hulu (no worries – you can watch your favorite shows on our cable TV package) is apparently someone’s good idea, but considering providers admit it wouldn’t actually solve the congestion problem, one’s imagination can ponder what other problems such a shutdown might solve.

One provider indicated that such blocking would be difficult because determining which sites should be blocked would be a very subjective process. Additionally, this provider noted that technologically savvy site operators could change their Internet protocol addresses, allowing users to access the site regardless. Another provider told us that some of these large bandwidth sites stream critical news information. Furthermore, some state, local, and federal government offices and agencies, including DHS, currently use or have plans to increase their use of social media Web sites and to use video streaming as a means to communicate with the public. Shutting down such sites without affecting pertinent information would be a challenge for providers and could create more Internet congestion as users would repeatedly try to access these sites. According to one provider, two added complications are the potential liability resulting from lawsuits filed by businesses that lose revenue when their sites are shutdown or restricted and potential claims of anticompetitive practices, denial of free speech, or both. Some providers said that the operators of specific Internet sites could shut down their respective sites with less disruption and more effectively than Internet providers, and suggested that a better course of action would be for the government to work directly with the site operators.

A very subjective process indeed, but one many providers have sought to keep within their “network management” control as they battle Net Neutrality.  One would think “potential claims of anti-competitive practices” would represent an understatement, particularly if cable industry-operated TV Everywhere theoretically kept right on running even while Hulu could not.  As long time net users already know, outright censorship or content blockades almost always meet resistance from enterprising net users who make it their personal mission to get around such limits.

Expanding broadband networks to provide a better safety cushion during periods of peak usage is looking better and better.

Providers could help reduce the potential for a pandemic to cause Internet congestion by ongoing expansions of their networks’ capacities. Some providers are upgrading their networks by moving to higher capacity modems or fiber-to-the-home systems. For example, some cable providers are introducing a network specification that will increase the download capacity of residential networks from the 38 Mbps to about 152 to 155 Mbps. In addition to cable network upgrades, at least one telecommunications provider is offering fiber-to-the home, which is a broadband service operating over a fiber-optic communications network. Specifically, fiber-to-the-home Internet service is designed to provide Internet access with connection speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps.

Hello.

Sounds like a plan to me, and not just for the benefit of the Wall Street crowd sick at home with the flu.  Such network upgrades can be economical and profitable when leveraged to upsell the broadband enthusiast to higher speed service tiers.  During periods of peak usage, such networks will withstand considerably more demand and provide a better answer to that nagging congestion problem.

The alternative is Comcast or Time Warner Cable, in association with the Department of Homeland Security, having to appear on Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room telling Americans they have a broadband rationing plan that will give you six options of usage per day.  Choose any one:

• Up to three videos of cats chasing laser pointers on YouTube
• One episode of Hogan’s Heroes
• Up to six videos of your friends playing Guitar Hero on Dailymotion
• Unlimited access to Drugstore.com to browse remedies
• Five MySpace videos of your favorite bands
• Up to 500 “tweets” boring your followers with every possible detail of your stuck-at-home-sick routine