100 mbits? that's IT? come on guys. 

How disappointing to see the FCC set such a low low low goal for our internet speeds in 10 years.

even today, we could already have TERABIT per user speeds using a truly optical network.

we already have much of the fiber necessary.

I'm just sad that they have set the bar so very low. so low, indeed, that the 100mbit speed is already something many other countries have TODAY... and to hope to have that in TEN YEARS? seriously? come on guys. think BIGGER... we should IMMEDIATELY do at least the GIGABIT UP/DOWN that Google wants to offer, and move rapidly faster from there.

Where is the challenge to good old American Ingenuity? When JFK Set a goal of landing on the moon and safely returning by 1969, we had to invent whole entire new technologies, that never existed before that. We had to figure out how to get a computer that was the size of a minivan down to under the size of a basketball. We got the microprocessor out of that by the way.

When George Whitesides set out to get medical diagnostic test costs down from hundreds or thousands of dollars per test, to pennies per hundred tests, he invented whole new technologies. See his video at http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html He calls his system "zero cost diagnostics."

When we try to deploy a multi-terabit national internet, we will have to invent some new technologies, and we will love doing it, too.

But we cannot count on the phone and cable companies to bring us there. they never wanted this network in the first place. they dragged their feet for years. they didn't like people even using modems in the 90's, but the internet was practically forced upon them. if you expect them to put their own lucrative content businesses in jeopardy just so individuals can have more freedom to communicate, i have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

We cannot ever get faster if we allow the phone and cable companies to keep using their proprietary protocols because those protocols limit end users on what devices they connect to the network. how are we ever going to have speed innovation, if we are locked into using cable boxes designed 15 years ago, which are "just fine" for the monopolistic giants?

We need net neutrality so this kind of garbage doesn't happen. 

Disney Pulls ABC From Cablevision After Deal Fails
By BRIAN STELTER AND BROOKS BARNES

Updated at 4:15 p.m. Sunday
Cablevision and The Walt Disney Company traded barbs Sunday after WABC was removed from the company’s cable television line-ups, a consequence of a failed contract negotiation....

--New York Times, March 7, 2010

---

What the government should do, and nothing more, and nothing less, is just make sure every man/woman/child in this country has free unfettered access to at least a terabit up/down connectivity to every one else.

That speed should be constantly upgraded on a regular basis so that new technologies based on all the increased bandwidth become an everyday occurrence.

We cannot afford to have a system where a fight between some cable provider and some information provider results in this kind of greedy behavior. It wouldn't be possible with high speed inter-connectivity for all because there would be many ways to send and receive information.

It is a matter of national security that we must be able to communicate with each other in an unfettered way with ever increasing speeds, and no opportunity for anybody to attain any kind of position of control like what cablevision has done.

A swift kick in the butt... 

is what this country needs.

Google had the right idea when it announced in the last few days that they'd be trying out a gigabit fully neutral internet connection for maybe up to 500,000 users. that's a gigabit UP and DOWN... with no data shaping. no looking at our data. no limits. and a cost of only about $20 a month...

If you look at what happened to the economy in the wake of the commercialization of the internet, you can see that what originally started as about a $11B investment by the government in network infrastructure, research and development, turned into trillions of dollars in innovation, entrepreneurship, and disruptive technologies.

But all that is dying off now because the internet has become bogged down by monopoly phone and cable companies who don't want us to have the fast speeds necessary for the next generation of innovation.

That's why I think the actual broadband initiative should be to get a TERABIT (that's 1000 gigabits, or a million megabits) of UP and DOWN connectivity to every single user, in every home and every office and wherever else, in this nation.

yes it is true that we don't have the computing power to handle that kind of throughput, YET, but just imagine the gold rush as computer designers finally have a real reason to make something far faster than ever before.

imagine the gold rush as trillions in untapped gdp are suddenly accessible through this new far faster connectivity between all of us.

we NEED to have a new faster playing field. and if the internet is fast enough, we won't have to worry about all these limitations that the current usual suspects are trying to impose on us, because we will have the wherewithal to do an end run around them, and make our own way.

We need to take it to the next level, people.

The panelists missed a very important point... 

I attended this workshop yesterday, and I got to listen to and converse with several of the panelists. The frustrating talk that I heard a lot from people on the panel was how, "well if this isn't profitable for the monopoly isps, then i guess we'll have to...

*pay more
*go slower
*do less
*give up freedom
*compromise

so that they can remain profitable when they 'offer us internet service.'"

The representative from lucent went as far as to draw a chart that forebodingly portended an end to profit for the isps by 2014 or so, if we don't make severe cuts in speeds, raise prices, limit data, or do something like that.

But their whole entire thought pattern has this one huge blind spot. The Internet is not, and never was supposed to be just some kind of profit making service offered by cable and phone companies. The internet was making an end run AROUND such entities, and they have scrambled to regain their choke hold on our ability to send and receive information.

We should not be measuring the 'profit that the cable company makes' to determine if a level of service is worthwhile, but we should measure the profit to society as a whole, which is many orders of magnitude greater than what some cable company is making. We really can't go worrying about whether or not a cable company is making a profit when there is so much more benefit to making as fast a network as possible, and upgrading that network as often as possible, reaching the limits of inventors' imaginations, not the limits set by a marketing department in a monopoly "provider."

It evidently is not enough to just force these companies to be fair to all of us netizens. We are going to have to make a serious investment in R&D as well as deploying far more infrastructure, including fiber to every premise in the nation.

If investing in building out national information infrastructure hurts a cable company who wants to make lots of money from us, then too bad. We are all much more important than their bottom line. They should go the way of compuserve with their slow, inferior service, if they can't compete with the best network physically possible.

Stop anti-competitive laws written by bribed legislatures! 

I read this disturbing article the other day:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934

Time Warner, Embarq Fight to Outlaw 100 Mbps Community Broadband in Wilson, NC

It reminds me of what Verizon did in PA when they got the legislature there to prohibit public WIFI networks from being built.

The FCC should make sure laws like these are squashed.

CB-IP 

Julius,

I've been told by reliable sources that you guys are actually reading all these notes, so I'd like to put this one directly to you.

If you take valuable beach front spectrum away from the TV broadcasters and then just auction it all off to the highest bidder (AT&T, etc.) then that's just taking our problem out of the frying pan and throwing it into the fire. Out of one monopoly's hands, and into another.

Let's not do that.

Instead, I think it would be MUCH MORE EXCITING to take that spectrum and open it up into an IP Citizen's band, and then just see what comes of it.

One naysayer I met yesterday at the Open Internet Innovation workshop invoked Shannon-Hartley as an excuse for why "this wouldn't work." but I remember that there were also people like that who declared the internet wouldn't work, either. But the way I see it, people will invent all sorts of novel technologies, that will connect into, and enhance the existing internet (as long as you make sure everybody can)

If we open that spectrum up to the public, who knows what kind of exciting technologies will come out of it? The only way to find out is to set us free, and give it a try.

Let's make another Internet--thoughts about the Boston workshop. 

I just attended the Open Internet and Innovation workshop in Boston yesterday, and I was disturbed by the basic tone, which was, "gee, how can we keep making money with this thing to keep it alive?"

There were a lot of ideas that seemed to me very similar to the way network operators were thinking, pre-internet-era. The current internet has become too polluted by large corporate stakeholders who have their own selfish ideas about how the network shall be built.

They had all sorts of new ways they wanted to charge money, all sorts of new limitations on users, no interest in a user as a contributor to the network, but merely as the consumer of some monopoly's service.

That's not what the internet was about, when it was first deployed. I remember a political friend of mine in 1990 declaring the entire internet “welfare for geeks, and a complete waste of money.” Do you think it was a waste of money?

"Stakeholders" have come along and taken it over enough that all eyes are on them, and what they can do to be profitable, and choke our speeds, and limit our connectivity.

When a plumber encounters a clogged valve, he cuts it out and puts in a new one. It's really much easier than trying to deal with the old one. That's also the easiest way to renovate a house. You just put up a new one instead of trying to fiddle with all the problems of the old one.

I say we keep the Internet…

But in parallel, we should also build a new faster, more open one, too. If the cable companies are offering good value, people will stay with them, just like people would have stayed with compuserve when the internet first appeared. If not, then that obviously wasn't such a good service.

To start, let's figure out what it would take to just put a tarabit up/down to every premise in the country, and this time, make sure that every single component of the entire network is, as David Clark said, an interchangeable puzzle piece that fits into the whole. That goes for every single component, software and hardware, so that anybody at any time, can enhance the network.

The government has dropped the ball on Internet research, leaving us in the biased hands of entities such as cable labs, who have developed proprietary protocols that are good for the cable company, but not really good for a real “internet.”

So somebody said to me, when I mentioned the above idea, "what about the cost of doing that? It's not free, you know." No good investment is, but the small $11B investment in the original Internet, has paid $Trillions into the economy, so it's a pretty good investment, I'd say. $11B is how much we have been spending each few weeks in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s how much we have been spending every 5 days on interest on the national debt. The real questions are, what’s a better investment? Bombing people in Afghanistan? Paying $400 per gallon for gas there? Or having every premise in the country connected with a terabit up/down?

exclusive content deals: is this a problem? 

don't let people like fox and rupert murdoch start to limit what certain search engines can list.

I don't mind this for fox, exactly, because i'd prefer fewer people are able to find their content, to be honest.

what worries me though, is that they will set a precedent where there will be discrimination against search engines who want to be able to index as much content as possible.

if more companies start to charge these search engines, where will this eventually lead?

perhaps we should let those who think they can fight the tide and be kings limit their exposure to the internet so they shrivel up and die... but as soon as their behavior starts to thwart the open free use of the internet, there's where there can be real problems...

No Closed WIFI 

Cable and Phone companies around the country are trying to hijack public wifi frequencies for their own profit.

As part of net neutrality rules, no public wifi should be closed to the public. There should be no passwords and no "terms and conditions" to utilize what is part of public airwaves.

Open standards and open networks are necessary if we are to have innovation, and to have a large swath of public wifi space blocked off goes against net neutrality philosophy. It also stifles the internet in general.

Don't let commercial interests make a grab for WIFI frequencies 

WIFI should remain open, especially in public spaces, because it was meant for information infrastructure, not to be used as an income source for cable and phone companies.

Cable and phone companies have been preventing municipalities all around the country from putting up big public wifi systems through lobbying. they instead have been putting up their own garden walled wifi networks that require users to be a subscriber to their services...

we must not let this continue. if a municipality wants to build a wifi network, they should not be stopped by the phone company in the legislature.

We must stop these companies from putting up their own toll booths on our public wifi frequencies, thus limiting neutral access to the network.

Leave our freedom of speech alone! 

I am very concerned about the "lawful content" clause in the net neutrality rules.

It causes a situation where every internet provider and website must snoop on every single bit of communication to make sure it is legal.

The writers of the rule have good intentions, but the result of having that clause in there will have a chilling effect on the internet that has never happened before.

Today, a judge actually made a ruling that would demonstrate how foolish such a rule would be:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27tue3.html

Just imagine if the owners of craigslist, or worse, the companies who provide internet service to users or to craigslist for their servers had to police every single packet for potential unlawful activity. It would turn this country into a police state, with everybody having to be a snitch. It's just a bad idea.

Instead, leave law enforcement to the authorities. If they have probable cause for any breech of the law, then fine, start an investigation, and make some arrests, but don't make all of us into cops.

ISP's: the bus drivers of the information superhighway. why do we really need them? 

In 1991, I was on the internet, directly, through UUCP. My ISP was a company based in my area that had bought a few T1 phone lines, and set up some modems that people like me could call into.

For the most part, I was driving on the information superhighway in my own car. A very American way of getting around.

When the telecommunications act of 1996 changed the rules about how much the phone companies could charge to ISPs, they rapidly all went out of business. See they were not allowed, by law, to unfairly charge anybody more money than they charged to their own subsidiaries. They whined and cried to congress and said that they couldn't innovate if they had to let all these little companies have fair prices. the result is now none of us are really ON the internet at all. we are on proprietary networks built by the phone and cable companies with our money, instead. they get to choose what equipment we have. they get to limit our speeds. they get to be in the driver's seat.

unfortunately this whole net neutrality debate has assumed that's the way it must always be now. we couldn't have end users actually DRIVING on the superhighway... gasp... goodness forbid!

Well I say that REAL net neutrality means that we all are REALLY on the internet.. which simply means we are all wired to each other, period... that means that we can directly communicate with each other, in any way we please, with any equipment we please... and make any new connections with the deployment of new wires, as we please...

we need to restore the ability, at all levels, to innovate, and create new network infrastructure, with must interconnect rules, once again. we have to take away the special privileges that the phone and cable companies have grabbed onto for themselves to such an extent that few can even imagine a world without them.

upgrade through innovation, not permission. 

There was a time, in the wake of the supreme court's carterfone ruling in 1968, when suddenly, people could hook any devices they wanted to up to the phone network.

The phone companies hated this so much because they wanted the ability to charge additional monthly fees for every single little thing that anybody could do on the phone system. fees for voice messages. fees to have a touchtone phone. extremely high fees to send/receive data.

the dirty secret was none of these things actually COST anything more.

Along came the acoustic modem. it could transmit 110 bits per second. that's slower than most people can type.

as long as any two people on the phone network had one of these modems, they could communicate electronically.

modem manufacturers quickly sprouted and there got to be an innovation war.

even though they were utilizing the same connection, at the same exact cost, one modem after another kept coming onto the market that could go faster. they all adhered to publicly known standards, which meant they'd work together right away. the speeds, to the horror of the phone companies, went up from 110bps to 300, for less money. then to 1200... for less money... then 2400, 9600, 19200, 56K... so the people who bought a modem that went at 56K actually paid less money for their device than the trailblazers who got those 110 bps modems. but all that any of these modems did was use one phone connection. these things were not taxing the network. they were innovating in the way they utilized the same amount of bandwidth.

we need to restore that kind of free market innovation, in the broadband arena.

When broadband came along, though, the phone companies, who had just watched a public keep upgrading speeds without their permission and without paying them more money each time they got faster, even though it didn't cost the phone companies more, decided to make a land grab. nobody would notice, would they, if the phone and cable companies would completely take over what devices would be connected to the network? if the phone companies control the devices, and the protocols, and the speeds, then there couldn't be this lively market of speed innovation anymore, and so now we have been stuck at around the same speeds... for going on 15 years.

to make a long story short, I say that violates net neutrality, and phone and cable companies have to just GIVE US A CONNECTION to the real internet, and if somebody invents a faster communications device, we should have the freedom to install that and get faster, without having to pay somebody for whom it does not cost more anyway.

Upload speeds = freedom of speech 

Right now, if any person in the world wanted to make a long video to show the world, they wouldn't really be able to do it cheaply of free, because the vast majority of users don't know how to get such a file.

Youtube is a symptom of slow upload speeds.

Facebook is another symptom. There was a time before these websites when each person simply set up their own website, on their own computer.

but severe limits in upload bandwidth that are not technical, but only marketing reasons, have caused those with websites to migrate to hosting companies and eventually to these websites.

Of course computing power is another part of the issue, but we need to restore the kind of neutrality to the internet that allows device manufacturers to once again innovate openly with higher and higher speed network interface technologies, such that any user at any time could upgrade their upload speed without some phone or cable company restricting them.

Just for a nice comparison between choked networks like the ones run by phone and cable companies, and a real free internet style network, just look at internet2, which is now upgrading every single user to a 100GBIT upload speed. we are decades behind because of these monopolies!

the goal should be to find a way to make it possible for anybody anywhere to freely share their message with everybody everywhere.

No more TV "channels" or radio "stations" 

TV and Radio as we know it are ancient technologies that waste huge portions of spectrum and only empower the most wealthy station owners.

I say we take back all of the bandwidth used to bequeath large portions of broadcast spectrum to private ownership.

Instead, all that bandwidth should be used for completely neutral multi-way internet infrastructure.

If one of the "tv" or "radio" stations that used to broadcast would care to continue to do so, then they can get a website.

Then it is only important that there is a ubiquitous signal to get online with from any device... by having that spectrum open to all standards following devices.

Then we can have a completely neutral playing field where anybody who wants to can broadcast to the world.

Dovetailing with this idea would be the fact that we must have far faster upload speeds for all so that there are no financial barriers to being able to talk to the world.

ISPs are not cops, and never should be. 

The big problem with representative Markey's Net Neutrality bill, is that it bequeaths onto ISPs the power to be police by giving them the responsibility to figure out which users are lawfully using the internet.

For one thing that violates the due process clause of the constitution.

For another it means that ISPs will inherently be able to watch our data... I have a big problem with that. That violates the prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures in the constitution.

Imagine if our roads were being operated and policed by the same company that paved the roads. That would be similar to an ISP laying cables and also policing the network. That simply is not their job, nor is it any of their business.

Also, it severely slows the data down, to look at everything.

If the police have probable cause to consider that some individual or entity is committing a crime, then they should follow due process of the law, and obtain a search warrant from a judge, to tap into just that user, from their residence, without interfering with the integrity of the network for all the (presumed innocent) users who use it.

There should not be a network that is designed, like the one in communist china, to easily be tapped by anybody.

all devices: open and unlocked. Licensed devices, not licensed providers. 

The law used to be in place and it should be restored.

There cannot be any jailed and/or locked devices. they must all adhere to all the public protocols any user would like to use. I'm talking to you Apple and AT&T.

There should be a vast swath of beachfront bandwidth allocated to free multi-way service.

If there were such a swath of bandwidth, then anybody anywhere should be able to add to the national information infrastructure with a MIMO (multiple-in-multiple-out) base station, or device, that not only connects that user to the rest of the users but also helps add to the network's backbone.

Must interconnect rules should apply.

Auctioning off bandwidth is a crazy idea, because whoever wins the auction simply gets every one of us, the public, to pay them back for that. why not cut out the middle man and see what happens when we have a large swath of bandwidth available as the commons, with licensed devices?

as for 802.11, nobody anywhere, should be allowed to charge money, or require passwords to get on. the FCC should do anything and everything in its power to encourage open 802.11 that allows mobile device users reasonable access to the internet, as well as the reasonable ability to contribute to the network with their devices.

Conflict of interest: cable companies, and their content businesses. 

A company that lays any cable, or contributes in any way to the physical infrastructure of the internet should not also be in the business of selling content, the way that telephone companies and cable companies now can.

a few years ago, the phone companies were only allowed to lay cables, and could not be in the tv business. they complained that they couldn't compete with cable companies who could sell cable connections, phone service, and tv service.

I say that instead of allowing phone companies to enter into the tv business, they should have taken the cable companies OUT of it.

There is an inherent conflict of interest when the same company that lays cable can also sell bandwidth hogging content. It gives cable companies the incentive to give themselves all the best lanes on the information superhighway, while relegating the rest of us to the information dirt sidewalk.

if a tv network, or phone company was not in the business of laying cable, then it would have to compete with everybody else who wanted to offer such services, and it would not have the kind of leverage that the one running the cables would have.

I also don't think the cables should be able to be owned by any private companies as long as they are passing through public rights of way. there can be contractors hired by the government to maintain these cables and upgrade them, just like on the national highway system, but nobody who is in that business should have any business deciding the rules of the road. Therefore I call to break up the phone companies and cable companies, and make them separate their content and infrastructure businesses completely, and be regulated by common carrier rules.

I have seen calls to bequeath police powers onto ISPs... to not only allow them to slow us all down, but to also be the gate keepers who decide what is and isn't legal. that is a direct violation of the constitution and must not be allowed to happen. if anything we need to undo the damage of the 1996 telecommunications act and make it possible once again for there to be not a hand full but millions of isps. Of course to take that a step further, if we each had a real high speed connection coming to our house we would not need isps, because we would be simply connected, just like our driveway is connected to the road system.

NO "management" or "data shaping" at all. 

Packets should be treated like US mail. while they are in transit, they are sacred and their integrity is sacrosanct.

Nobody, anywhere in the network, should have any right whatsoever to look at data, shape data, count data, or anything like that. Especially for the purposes of controlling it.

the best way to accomplish this is to make sure there are absolutely no proprietary portions of the internet. right now huge swaths of the network have been subverted to protocols such as DOCSIS which only cable companies can control. that means that if i find a cable modem on the market that goes at 1gbit, i can't use it because the cable company is controlling a portion of the internet. this harks back to the pre-carterfone days before the supreme court ruled that bell telephone had to allow third party telephones onto its network.

we should all have highly redundant mesh-like connections to the internet, and we should all be directly connected to the real internet, with our own public ip#, and everything that goes along with that. if somebody invents a faster communications technology, we should be able to deploy that without asking anybody for permission.

If the backbone suffers congestion because people are upgrading their speeds, then that must simply be strengthened, but i would like to point out that 300bps telephone modems used the exact same amount of telephone infrastructure as 56Kbit modems. this idea that it costs more to serve a higher speed connection is merely a figment of monopolists' imagination.

Follow Canada's lead: innovate first to solve congestion problems 

Canada has just implemented sensible net neutrality rules, and one of the major ideas is that anybody who seeks to slow down the internet, or complains that their portion of the network is overburdened must prove that there is absolutely no technological solution that would involve bolstering network infrastructure that can solve the problem, before they can do anything to limit anything.

That's a very good start.