I mentioned that I saw Dave Caputo last week at the Scotia Capital investor event.
When we spoke, Dave reminded me that Sandvine wrote a white paper nearly 3 years ago – long before many of us had even heard the term Net Neutrality, let alone formed an opinion about it.
The white paper provides a different perspective on the term, suggesting that carrier management of traffic ensures true network neutrality by means of fair allocation of limited network resources between potentially competing uses of the network. The paper speaks of the Tragedy of the Commons.
When too many owners are endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, the resource is prone to overuse and eventual depletion or destruction.
Individual subscribers are concerned about maximizing their own personal utility of the broadband service. There is no incentive for the subscriber to moderate their use of the network without some form of feedback via the service plan definition, cost, structure and enforcement.
Of course, Sandvine provides tools to network operators that provide visibility into the traffic, enabling them to control the allocation of ‘common’ resources between subscribers, applications, and content providers. The objective is to maximize the utility of the network.