Broadband Politics - Latest Comments in David Sohn of CDT makes the right points

Re: David Sohn of CDT makes the right points

Brett Glass — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:33:39 -0000

Alas, you cannot remove scarcity so long as you have an infinite (or nearly so) scarcity-creating mechanism: P2P. So long as content is free (even if it's free because it's pirated), people will download as much of it as they can. (Why not? There's zero marginal cost.) What's more, even if someone has his or her fill of free content, that person's computer will continue to saturate the pipes by sending it to others.If there's no penalty for doing that, more and more people will do it until any pipe is saturated. We have seen this in Japan, where 100 Mbps FTTH has not created a dent in resource exhaustion due to P2P.

In short, the problem is not any inherent scarcity but rather an artificially created one -- created by a mechanism that will always outpace the expansion of facilities.

Re: David Sohn of CDT makes the right points

George Ou — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:07:06 -0000

Stefano,

You should ask the Japanese if 100 Mbps FTTH (Fiber To The Home) solves the scarcity problem.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?...

The fact of the matter is, you give me a gigabit pipe today and me and my friends/peers will be more than happy to fill it up tomorrow. I have home electronics devices with HDMI ports in the back that can output 3 gigabits per second of 1080 60p video and that will increase by a factor of 16 when we have quad-1080 resolution video. No amount of bandwidth will ever be “enough” just like I’ve never met a hard drive I couldn’t fill even though hard drives 100,000 times larger today than they were 18 years ago.

Having said that, network management is not a substitute for raw bandwidth and no amount of network management will allow you to run higher-resolution higher-quality and more simultaneous channels. On the other hand, no amount of capacity will every be a substitute for intelligent network management. Network capacity and network management are two independent things and we always need more of both.

George Ou

Re: David Sohn of CDT makes the right points

Stefano Quintarelli — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:47:24 -0000

he said most, but not all...

one further thing to say could be "informing prospects and customers on mgmt policy and providing them transparency on the implementation" ?

to remove mgmt you need to remove scarcity
to remove scarcity you need FTTH (to allow going from Moore to Photonics)
to build FTTH you need remunerability
to have remunerability you need to reduce costs and increase price

it is something you need to do at a system-wide level, otherwise you will have free riders

it is a matter of public policy, IMHO.

I hope (from Europe) that FCC rules, somehow "overriding" Congress.

this could be a wakeup call to take on seriously the discussion on "common" infrastructure development for 21st century and choosing priorities.

then, as is often the case in TLC, europe will follow..