Teknovis

I read an article during the week about a letter of support for Net Neutrality from some of the biggest, and most well-known, Internet based companies in the world. The article is Big names support net neutrality, and it lists the following supporters:

The letter, signed by the chief executives of Google, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Amazon and Sony Electronics among others, says that maintaining data neutrality helps businesses to compete on the basis of content alone.

And…

Other signatories included community websites Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn and Craigslist.

This list of companies does not really surprise me, as they probably have the most to gain from Net Neutrality. Conversely, it is probably the telcos who have the most to loose!

Tags: Amazon, Craigslist, Digg, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Google, LinkedIn, Net Neutrality, Skype, Sony

Google is developing a set of tools that will enable users to determine if their ISPs are interfering with their packets. That should be very useful, especially if more users become aware of the fact that some ISPs might do this!

More details about this are described in Google Introduces A New Weapon In The Fight For Net Neutrality: Measurement Labs.

I am not necessarily an advocate of Net Neutrality. I do not think that a very small proportion of users should be allowed to negatively impact the majority of users. However, this can be ensured through network management without necessarily compromising on Net Neutrality. However, I do think that ISPs should clearly state their network management policies. This enables consumers to make the final decision!

Tags: Google, ISP, Net Neutrality

I read an interesting article earlier in the week describing how Virgin Media has launched its new broadband service. This service will be available throughout the UK in the next six months, and it providers users with a maximum download speed of 50Mbps. This will make Virgin Media the fastest ISP in the UK.

More details about this can be read in Virgin unveils next-gen broadband.

The same article describes how BT is beginning a fibre to the cabinet trial that will provide users with speeds up to 40Mbps.

This is very interesting, because in the middle of 2007 I attended an event hosted by T-Com in Berlin. One of the topics at this event was broadband, and T-Com told us that it would have fibre to the cabinet deployed in the 50 largest cities in Germany in 2008. This would be capable of supplying 17 million homes. At that time T-Com had already installed fibre to the cabinet in the 26 largest cities in Germany, and we were shown some of the new cabinets on the streets in Berlin. It was then easy to spot these new cabinets ourselves, because they are slightly larger than the standard cabinets, and if you listen carefully you can hear the cooling equipment running inside them! T-Com were offering a triple play service of phone, television, and Internet to customers using this infrastructure. There were some BT representatives at the meeting also, and I recall them being impressed :o

Independently, it appears that Virgin Media will start traffic shaping P2P traffic next year according to Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users. I wonder if the Net Neutrality war is being lost in Europe :|

Tags: BT, Germany, ISP, Net Neutrality, P2P, T-Com, Traffic Shaping, UK, Virgin