Comments on another CRTC draft submission

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Mon Mar 9 17:46:27 UTC 2009


| From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>

| http://clients.teksavvy.com/~walterdnes/crtc.txt

I'm reading your submission and nothing else.  Of course that is a
lazy approach that could be improved.

I agree with the vast majority of what you said.

| Page 4 Peter Grant's numbers are no longer valid

I think that arguing that the figures are wrong isn't important.  The
principles are not affected by smallish quantitative differences.
Worse, your argument butresses the idea that network neutrality is
bad.


|   I consulted Bell's web page on the evening of March
| 4, 2008, to check their rates.

I bet that was this year, not last year.

|   I worry about Bell and other major ISPs having a conflict of interest.

Amen.  But Rogers is probably worse.  No, I guess they all are trying
the same businesses with different levels of success.

| 1) Commission-approved, transparent, and equitable network management
| 2) Outside of item 1), no blocking/slowing of traffic, except where
|    required by Canadian federal legislation or an order by a court of
|    competent jurisdiction

Actually, one threat is subtly different: speeding up preferred
traffic.  Is that different from slowing other traffic?  (You and I
would say yes, but proponents would try to argue the opposite.)

And yet, forbidding speeding up traffic would seem to prevent good
engineering practice such as caches.

|   The submission by the CBC does raise the issue of handling
| millions of people simultaneously wanting to view live streaming video
| of news events.  The submission used the examples of the US 2008
| election and US President Obama's inauguration.  CBC's internet
| facilities were overloaded as were portions of the internet.  The
| problem is that streaming 1 megabit per second to 5 million simultaneous
| connections requires 5 terabits per second of throughput!  Let's just
| say "that does not scale".  Have we run into a "scarcity", requiring
| CRTC regulation?  The answer is "NO".
| 
|   There is a network protocol designed for just this situation.  It is
| called "multicast".

This would also be a good place to point out: the CBC should *want*
"piracy" since it spreads their message without having to provide the
bandwidth.

Seriously: thinking of new problems in old ways is limiting.  What is
called "piracy" is an opportunity for new models as well as a threat
to old ones.

Example: CBC radio suffers from too few listeners and yet tries to
control copies of its shows (only some are available as podcasts and
only for a limited time).
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