we get it... daily
August 12, 2006
Scope back your ISP...
Long-time users of the Internet know that not all ISPs are created equal. In the name of making their own lives/jobs easier, ISPs are known to deprecate some types of communication over their lines, to treat some types like "second class citizens." Voice over IP is a typically sited example. In some cases this might be because they don't want to improve their systems to handle additional bandwidth, but in others it's a competitive move - like your phone system based ISP who wants you to give up on Skype and go back to land-line calls.
So how can the consumer really know if their ISP is being a dick?
Looks like soon because there's a guy named Dan Kaminsky in Seattle who has developed a way to test for "Net Neutrality." Eventually this will be rolled into a free software tool that can tell whether your ISP is dropping data in the transmission (which causes a re-transmit, slowing down the connection for that data stream) based on what you're trying to do with it.
In an shockingly forward-thinking move, the U.S. Congress is currently debating whether to enact Net neutrality laws to prevent such data discrimination. While interesting on it's surface, we always watch carefully when any regulatory group gets close to the Internet. There's usually a second cyber-shoe ready to drop.
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