The Upside: Killer Sales Tips from the folks at Glance Networks

[Here's a post from Ed Hardebeck, Glance's VP of Engineering...]

The issues of Net Neutrality (Neutrality on the Internet) and Traffic Shaping or Throttling as a network management practice by ISPs (particularly cable companies) are closely related, but often confused.

They have different motivations, and somewhat different negative consequences:

1. Traffic Throttling/Shaping

ISPs will use this if they oversold their bandwidth.  The problem is that they built networks better suited to typical web-surfing and email.  They don't want all that bitTorrent stuff or other file sharing to use up bandwidth.

The negative effects are:

• It sucks for people who like file sharing and think they've paid for the bandwidth to use as they wish.  You can't say these customers are "hogging" bandwidth.  They want it, they want to use it, they think they've paid for it.



• The ISP can't easily distinguish file sharing traffic from other services, like web conferencing.  So they can end up throttling us and and possibly other interesting or new services. (It's NOT easy to tell and it will likely get worse.  The file sharing developers will actively TRY to make their protocols look like something else.  I've seen these discussions among themselves.) 
  
  This has the potential to kill new or different services of the future.  Remember that the Internet was around for over TEN YEARS before the web appeared.  What if we were all stuck now using only the services AOL wanted to provide in 1998?  Short term, it hurts innovative new companies; long term, it throttles innovation on the 'net in general at the expense of the status quo applications.

2. Net Neutrality

This battle is over money.  The ISPs don't just want to be carriers, they want to make money from content providers.  Some want to strike deals with big providers, like