Jeff Pulver met with Comcast last week.
“Comcast and I have something in common, which is odd, but once in a while things happen,” the Vonage cofounder said over coffee at Technical.ly Philly’s office in University City.
Pulver, who’s based in New York City, and the telecommunications giant indeed have a common goal: stopping the Federal Communications Commission from classifying broadband companies as “telecommunications services,” which would allow the FCC to regulate them under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. It’s widely thought of as the only way to net neutrality. Comcast has said the move would “harm innovation and investment” by giving the government too much regulatory power over the Internet.
Pulver agrees.
If the FCC goes through with using Title II, “the Internet as we know it will be over,” he said, echoing what opponents of his stance would also say.
Tech companies won’t want to put up with FCC regulations and they’ll move overseas or start charging for apps that were once free, like Skype and FaceTime, Pulver said. Title II is going to hurt consumers, he said, and for what? To protect against something that hasn’t happened yet?
Pulver believes the idea that there would one day be “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” on the Internet is hogwash.
“It’s utter bullshit,” he said. “I’ve never seen slow lanes before.”
It’s as if the FCC, he said, believes they’re in the Office of Future Crimes and can predict what someone might do in the future.
But what about Netflix?
“Netflix incited several million people to create a riot,” he said.
They got millions of people to write to the FCC and push the Netflix business agenda, he said.
Pulver came to Philly to have a series of meetings about Title II. (A Comcast spokesman told us that the company has met with many individuals and groups to talk about Title II, both those that agree and oppose Comcast’s stance.) For Pulver, it’s more than just a business matter. It’s personal.
Ten years ago, Pulver was fighting a similar fight with the FCC, who considered reclassifying voice over IP as a telecommunications service. That time, he won. The FCC adopted the “Pulver Order,” which declares that the FCC will not regulate VoIP companies.
(That’s why, if you grew up with Skype and FaceTime, which are powered by VoIP, Pulver likes to say: “You’re welcome.”)
He admits there’s also some ego involved in this present-day battle.
“I’m trying to preserve my legacy,” he said. “It’s been an amazing 10 years. If you destroy my legacy, there will be darkness.”
““I’ve never seen slow lanes before.” Okay, this is simple. You prepare for the worse you don’t wait until the hurricane hits then board up your windows. As for Netflix, it’s been proven in at least one case that all that Verizon needed to fix a bottleneck in L.A. was to work with the vendor to install a new peer link. If bandwidth were truly the problem telecoms wouldn’t be doubling wireless speeds. Remember when “unlimited” had to mean something other than “unlimited” because bandwidth was in such short supply? Suddenly, they’re finding bandwidth in couch cushions. The bandwidth for Netflix is already paid for…by the customer.
You heard it here first folks: If net neutrality is passed, Comcast will uproot from their virtual monopoly and move to another country where they have no copper/fiber lines. Oh the regulatory horror!
Get real.
Would love to see Comcast go!
He clearly doesn’t get it. If he still owned Vonage and these phone and cable companies started slowing his customer’s VoIP connection speeds making the Vonage service virtually unusable for the sole purpose of forcing (EXTORTING) payments from his company, he would be singing a different tune!
I’m thinking….Netflix!
No, you don’t understand what he did from a technology perspective to solve his service problems. Because Netflix is a whiny brat and won’t do what he did. He’s 100% right.
Care to explain that comment?
There is NOTHING he could do if the phone and cable companies had the authority to degrade Vonage service (aka “throttle” and/or block Vonage connections) *and* they decided to utilize that authority! Since Vonage traffic MUST pass through an ISP’s “last mile” network, there would be NOTHING he could do – except pay his ransom or risk losing those ISP customers using Vonage to the services offered by the ISP! Either way, the ISP wins!
So, the guy above is totally beholden to other carriers, right? I mean, you are right, Comcast MIGHT say, “Screw Vonage, we are blocking all your traffic.” That would suck. Why would he oppose Net Neutrality??? So, maybe, you should think this through from his perspective: He’s not corp-suicidal.
What did Vonage do? Paid Comcast. They became a Comcast customer. They bought bandwidth, hosted services on Comcast’s network, and raised their service level on Comcast’s network. They found it was in their TECHNOLOGICAL best interest to peer/host directly with Comcast. They found this gave Vonage customers a superior experience (fast lane – gasp!).
Netflix just doesn’t want to do that. Despite the fact that they are ONE THIRD of all Internet traffic, forcing massive growth of Internet pipes the world over, they don’t want to buy a direct pipe to Comcast’s network. Or AT&T. Boo hoo.
I’ve built a US national service provider network. I’ve worked for Charter Communications on their backbone team. I’m not just anyone: Arguing Net Neutrality with me is like arguing Global Warming with a climatologist. I know it at a staggeringly boring depth of indisputable fact.
Primarily, I think opponents of Net Neutrality just lack a catchy title. Maybe “Net Sanity” or “Peers Without Fears” would work?
I’m sure you’ve “built” networks the same way my brother had built Boeing airplanes because he had manufactured parts that were used in airplane assembly. So what?
So he peered and paid Comcast and now his Comcast fears are resolved – yahoo!
Oops, Verizon suddenly started blocking his Vonage customers. Now what, do the same with Verizon? Now AT&T is doing it. What’s an entrepreneur to do? He has no real options that are NOT going to cost his company money or customers (customers = money). And you do realize that he had already setup access to the Internet with some other broadband company. Does he just kiss them off? He is suddenly beholden to EVERY ISP in the US.
I see no choice except to pay each and every ISP for their “toll road”. Yeah, that’s a great technological decision! Most would call that the mafia!
In case you didn’t realize, this doesn’t apply to only Netflix. They are only the beginning. “Fast lanes” don’t work when there’s NO congestion.
One other point. Netflix had their Own Connect where they will bring in (cache – ) their content so there’s a huge reduction from outside of these ISP networks. Butiguess what, combat, AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner alk refused. And guess who netflix had to “pay” to reach those ISP customers. You guessed it!
Many other ISPs are using Netflix’s Open Connect service without issue or payments.
In the case of Voice over the Internet, which is what Vonage is, you have two basic issues. First, congestion causes call quality to degrade. So, you go where there’s not congestion. You must. Second, latency is important because echo cancellation only works to a spec of 60 ms in much of the old phone network, and even newer technology often only expands this gap to 128 ms. You cannot just trust that a packet will take the shortest geographical route – particularly if you are routing across a generic drain like Level(3) or Cogent. This means that you have to peer with networks on a diverse, geographic basis, to make sure that your round trip beats that 128 ms; and beats 60 ms, if you can. in our backbone design, I insisted on being 30 ms one-way from our customers. Therefore, we had a “north” and “south” pop in each time zone (except Mountain – we just had Denver).
When I say I built it, judge away, but since you still don’t really understand the tech, it doesn’t matter how I explain my role. You are religiously attached to “Net Neutrality” as a concept, but are completely divorced from how it could be executed in reality. I’m not. I carried the routers, I designed the networks, I configured the peers, and in some cases, I even negotiated the contract. This is not just “some other thing” to me. It’s where I freaking LIVE.
As to the Bureau of Future Crimes, yeah, gee, every ISP COULD certainly block Vonage. Or MagicJack. And yet, weirdly, Vonage’s own founder is saying that doesn’t happen. So, again, this is a “crime” that simply doesn’t happen. If this becomes an issue, then there’s an argument to be made. But unless your name is Netflix, everyone else already knows how to deal with it.
You do understand that for the last decade the Internet has operated on Net Neutrality principles/rules, right? And before that it worked the same way, it just wasn’t codified into any FCC principles/rules. It wasn’t until Comcast blocked bit torrent that the recently invalidated rules were set in 2010 (there’s some theory for you).
So tell me what has not worked over the last 10 years while Net Neutrality was the law of the land?
I understand the issues just fine even if I’m no expert in the back-end tech, thanks for you’re concern.
Further, Verizon (and others?) are on record saying they would setup “fast” lanes if they could (there are plenty of articles reporting on their court transcripts – just google), so this is not conjecture. The only thing holding them back has been the recently invalidated rules.
Let’s concentrate on the last item. Why is Verizon selling a “fast lane” a bad thing? We created the technology to do this: MPLS, DiffServ, and other QoS constructs. Games, Voice-over-IP, and other time-sensitive applications work best in low-latency queues and given higher priority over other traffic. Private networks use these tools all the time to improve the quality of these applications. Why is it bad for public networks to do it?
So, I’m a guy knee-deep in the nuts-and-bolts of this “concept.” I remember going from Compuserve and Prodigy that showed you only what they wanted to the “open Internet” in the mid 1990’s. That genie is out of the bottle – we aren’t going back, which is the fearmongering of the Net Neutrality argument. So the concept of the “open Internet” is considerably older than the term Net Neutrality and also considerably older than a decade.
To come back to the “fast lane” concept, a “fast lane” does not block or slow any other content (well, depending on the architecture of the actual queuing in the chips on the router, but let’s stick with concept). Verizon sells a “fast lane” to Riot Games, for example. If you are a League of Legends player, this is a huge deal for you! Those extra milliseconds really matter in team fights (if you are young – I’m not sure they matter for me ;-). The ability to react to what’s happening as fast as possible is a huge advantage. But that doesn’t mean that Verizon has told World of Warcraft to piss off – those packets still get through. They are just not granted the same latency sensitivity as other traffic. Meanwhile, a protocol like BitTorrent actually ASSUMES the network is unreliable and will re-transmit things if traffic gets dropped. In the case of BitTorrent, not only does it not need a “fast lane,” but it would do just fine in an earnestly “slow lane” so long is it wasn’t completely starved. None of the traffic is blocked – it is merely adapted by the content TYPE or the APPLICATION to accommodate the best result for all.
Comcast required a “fast lane” for Netflix. The traffic level exceeded what Comcast could reasonable pull through a “regular” pipe. Netflix had a tantrum, and now the public is demanding “Net Neutrality.” A CONCEPT which has existed for decades, but they think their very freedom is at stake if some Washington bureaucrat doesn’t look over our shoulders to enforce it. So, what are they going to enforce, then? If they make “fast lanes” illegal, then what happens to gamers and VOIP companies? (Which is WHY Jeff Pulver is AGAINST Net Neutrality – he actually NEEDS that fast lane.) What if the rules say “no traffic can be discriminated against based on origin or application.” Sounds good, right? Nice concept. Except you are screwing everything about Internet security and where attacks originate from.
If Comcast truly “throttled” Netflix in an attempt to get money from them, then that is EXTORTION. Which, incidentally, is already illegal. But that’s not what happened. What happened is that demand for Netflix grew faster than Comcast planned to grow their interconnects. That’s all. It’s nothing nefarious – it’s just what happens when an application that launched in 2008 grows in 6 years to take up 30%+ of available bandwidth everywhere. It isn’t threatening the Open Internet or Net Neutrality or any of those concepts. It’s just telling Netflix, “Grow up and quit freeloading.”
Here’s what Vonage said in 2005 when a provide was blocking their VoIP service. Still apropos today nearly 10 years later:
http://news.CNET.com/telco-agrees-to-stop-blocking+VoIP-calls/2100-7352_3-5598633.html
Doesn’t seem like he thought it was “bullshit” back then.
Why are so many billionaires and “internet-oriented pioneers” jewish? Do they get no-interest loans from their jewish relatives at the Federal Reserve. And why are “americans ” so cowardly and braindead they see nothing wrong with this? In related news …
The jews/communists are having their buttboys in Congress and the FCC restrict the internet so REAL CHRISTIANS and REAL CONSERVATIVES can no longer tell the truth about jews founding communism (http://ow.ly/eRYm7) and engineering 9/11(http://ow.ly/FR1pp). (Of course, that’s not how they would ever frame their arguments – they’re never forthright.)
Under the emerging rules, if we continue to expose this synagogue of satan bent on turning America into the next Soviet Union, our IP address will be blocked and we could be arrested.
You’ll notice none of the mainstream media has even warned us about this. Why not? Because they’re all jew-owned, they don’t want to spill the beans on what their masters are up to. During the last fifty years, our jewish overseers have made it policy to slide major legislation right on by us without saying anything.
Like electricity, the internet was intended to be accessible by everybody. After all, our taxes paid for its development. Not the jews’ taxes – they don’t pay any.
It’s bad enough that jews/communists own our economy, our legal system, and our media, we don’t want them to own the internet too. They’d have the same dictatorial control over content that they’ve exercised over conventional media for fifty years. In a nutshell, you’ll be able to criticize anybody else but them.
“To learn who rules over you find out who you’re not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire. In America’s case, it’s the jews (communists) we’re not allowed to criticize.
Many Americans will continue to be taken in by the jew/communist propaganda they see on jew-owned TV – like their counterparts 100 years ago who helped the communists take over Russia – but America’s future is counting on you to be a Real Man and a Real Patriot and stop this bullshit in its tracks.
Contact the FCC to demand they keep the internet a level playing field. To demand that they don’t give telecommunications corporations the right to decide who’s worthy of service and who isn’t. Too many jews/communists sit on the boards of these companies, and they’ll make sure their critics are not heard.
You don’t want to sit out this battle then feel like a spineless coward when you look back on it in ten years. Knowing you could have helped America remain a free country but you chose to believe who are really your worst enemies rather than your brothers in arms.
And if you don’t think the ability to communicate ideas unhindered has a relationship to freedom, then you’re not thinking at all.
Don’t be a traitor.
Truthmonger.info
Government control is a bad thing! Those on the Far Right will want to invoke decency laws which go against their platform of limited government, but then once it would be in the control of the Government it would be in fact controlled by Far Left and it’s activists that will use it to intimidate their opposition (The Right). Yes leftists use Government to beat the heads of their opposition! So Right Wingers chill and fight to keep the Internet out of the hands of the FCC! Remember the Fairness Doctrine and multiply its effect by infinity!