Let’s not change what has worked so well. The Internet should provide a ubiquitous basic transport of datagrams. The endpoints of the networks, the computers, should use this basic IP transport to provide the applications that consumers are looking for.

National goals on reducing volumes of journeys, increasing home working, more care delivered at home will deliver one particular design, possibly an open and transparent data transport layer capable of deivering multiple assured services.

If the goals to deliver high definition TV to all, while leaving legacy voice services as they are, then the engineers will design something different.

The Internet principles have served the world well and this points to retaining an open and transparent approach to networking. This demands the emergent operation properties (throughput, loss and delay at busy periods) are explained to users and uses get to use the throughput and distribute the available quality as they wish. Thus neutrality is a property and part of the design.

This is not inconsistent with someone then building a virtual network on top to deliver IPTV, but the change in properties need to be explained and if there are centralised controls, then these need exposing to the user.

The Broadband planners have a key decision on what outcomes they are planning to meet. Is IPTV a critical service? If not, it should be made clear, the sooner the better.

I completely agree. The issue is that too many carriers want to build a network one way and sell it as something completely different. My concept of Network Neutrality is not so much about forcing carriers to build/operate their networks a certain way, but to force them to be open and honest about how they build/operate them. The excuse that this would somehow compromise their ability to compete is laughable given the tiny number of competitors, the fact that employees constantly hop between competitors and their vendors, and that most ideas about network build/operation come from the vendors and not the carriers.

Instead of worrying about making carriers be “neutral,” a meaningless state of affairs that will only hurt application developers, worry about making them deliver the service they promise.

Neutrality is an effort to engage in network engineering by people who don’t know enough to even begin the task. Leave engineering to the engineers, and let regulators worry about money and service.

By the way, Wireless Bandwidth is just as unlimited as wired, it’s just a question of cell density. You want higher peak throughput, you reduce the distance between base-station and user. You want higher average throughput, you reduce the number of users per cell. Both of these are obtained through the same method, reducing cell size (aka building more cell sites). Obviously there is a very real cost to building more cell sites (both capital and operational), but there are also very real costs (both capital and operational) to adding ever more sophisticated gear to perform intelligent and adaptive network management. I’ve yet to see any evidence that one method is more cost effective than another. I doubt anyone has even ever undertaken a serious study of such.

Virtual networks allow you to build multiple networks, each optimized for a different application, and run them over the same infrastructure. That’s the future of networking. Internet is a fine network for stored content, but it sucks for anything real-time. You can thank Jacobson’s Algorithm and BGP for that.

See the ITIF written comments for illumination: http://www.itif.org/files/20090903_The%20Future_of_the_Internet_FCC.pdf