Must reading from George Ou of ZDNet on the Comcast kerfuffle. (He benefits from a detailed exchange with Richard Bennett, as we also did when Richard was kind enough to join us for a TLF podcast on the issue two weeks ago). George goes into great detail about what is going on here and why it’s so important that people understand a bit about technology and network engineering before rushing to impose regulation making routine traffic management illegal. Ultimately, George concludes:
BitTorrent is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth and a single BitTorrent user is capable of generating hundreds of times more network load than conventional applications. Throttling the number of BitTorrent connections or any application that has similarly aggressive characteristics is critical to keeping the network healthy with reasonable round-trip response times. That means a better gaming and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) experience since they are both highly sensitive to network latency despite the fact that they are low-bandwidth. If the Net Neutrality extremists get their way and get the Government to ban active network management, cable broadband customers will suffer and those web hog TV commercials might just come true.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.