The subject of net neutrality came up in a meeting I had yesterday and the conversation turned to current affairs in Canada and various hearings in the US.
Our discussion included an examination of the vocabulary being used in the discourse and one of the meeting participants spoke of network fairness associated with the intelligent management of traffic.
Some would have the network treat all bits as they come – first come, first serve without any triage even in times of peak network loading. Such people say that the carriers just need to pry additional capital from their wretched fingers: invest in more network assets and then there will be no congestion.
I read lots of comments from people who believe we just need the government to nationalize the access networks – that will fix things. That camp believes that a benevolent government will pour whatever capital resources are required to provide limitless capacity.
Hospitals, a public resource in this country at least, experience times that emergency rooms are crowded and other times that there is no waiting time. We don’t expect hospitals to take patients on a first come, first served basis. We expect the emergency room to prioritize patients based on their condition – their tolerance of latency.
There are off peak periods – increasingly rare – where even sore throats get seen without delay. But during the rest of the day, we still consider it to be fair to apply intelligent emergency room management.
Is network fairness a more important goal than an unachievable network neutrality?
We’ll be looking at all aspects of net neutrality at a special session at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.
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net neutrality, Canada, network fairness