Subject: Cable Co's view: NAT is bad because we want to charge per IP, etc

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 16:27:56 -0500

[email-masked] said:
Of course, cable companies probably won't impose rate limits as long as DSL
remains an option, because then they wouldn't be able to claim
(inaccurately) that cable gives you more bandwidth than DSL. At least
publicly ... In Canada, several cable carriers put rate limits on the
upstream at 14 Kbytes/sec and on the downstream at 2 Mbit/sec. Of course,
the service is much slower than that on evenings, but it cannot be faster
than that imposed by the rate limits either.

What is the real problem is that no cable carrier will actually file their
rate limits in their regulated rates before the CRTC.  They clearly benefit
from the fact that end-users have no way of actually knowing that they are
being rate limited.

Now that Bell Canada has just filed an economic evaluation demonstrating
profitability of providing residential ADSL at $19 CDN ($12-13US) per
month, cable carriers in Canada will have no other choice to increase those
rate limits or risk loosing most of their subs to Bell.  That being said,
this will only happen if they can survive...

Cable carriers have an infrastructure which cannot be used to play the
bandwidth game.  That's why they're so fond of walled content gardens and
free portals.  The problem is that in Canada, they wont't be able to play
that game since higher-speed services over cable is regulated as a telecom
service as per CRTC decision 1996-1, something that DN00-185 @the FCC is
taking very long to come up to the same conclusions.
=Francois=-

Dan K says:
We make CATV equipment and both CATV and telco's have practices which reduce
bandwidth access. Since not too many people stop by the DOC or FCC offices
on the way to work to read a few hundred pounds of dockets, I don't see it
really is compelling to document the nasties. Seems like fodder for tort law
and class action court cases. But I see you point sneaky is uncool in principle!

Bell here allowed (I don't know this is still the case) only a small number
of sockets to open, so multiple windows calling port 80 were self blocking.
This is an equally devious, technological implementation. It is not obvious
its happening intentionally, that one app stalls while another finishes up. 

Other cable companies have a back off algorhythm such that if you really use
a lot of forward bandwidth you get entire slow days...

Its not true you can't have amazing bandwidth on CATV. One system we built
gave 622 Meg/Bit/Sec on the top of each city block. The system was just
transparent to the Media access interconnect including MBONE. Its *not*
commonly done, obviously and its all about cost.

The real complexities are still to come. Is QoS going to be a cost plus
service? Does the non-QoS subscriber live with scraps between the QoS
people? QoS seems to favor telco technologies, allmost circuit switched
systems in some ways.

I'm being circular in some ways but suggesting all allocation schemes suffer
with fairness doctrines. Economics isn't called "the dismal science" for
nothing.

Finder's keepers, first come first serve, pay for everything by use, etc all
inconvienence somebody.

I guess the goals of goverments in North America anyway is to somehow
configure the marketplace to maximize bandwidth enough to make the fine
points dissappear, that the playing field gets so close to flat its very
close to ideal. Elithiel de sola Pool's book; "Technologies of freedom"
argues that bandwidth should be close to free and only bad policies
endlessly interfere.

However, as a person making a living off purchases of telecom gear, I
suggest there seems to be a lot more mouths to feed when a big pipe is
activated than you might imagine. 

Interesting questions, however.

Thanks
Dan