The two-tiered internet is a very current topic of discussion in many circles. During the last panel, Jack Waters of Level3 offered a clear description that I found useful so I have summarized it below.
The two-tiered internet is about “best effort delivery” vs “better than best effort”. Best effort delivery is of course one of the core architectural priniciples of today’s internet — your router takes a best guess as to how to deliver your packet, and forwards it along. Your packet might get there, it might not, so you need to design your application with this in mind. “better than best effort” refers to the carrier (generally the ILEC or CableCo) offering a better class of service, whether it’s gaurenteed or prioritized or low-latency or whatever. So, there would be two tiers of services in this new model.
This has become such a hot topic because the carriers feel someone needs to pay for the “better than best effort”. The carriers are talking about charging the content providers or app providers to be in this advantaged class. E.g. Google has to pay Ed Whitacre if they want their pages to load quickly. Vonage has to pay off the carriers if they want their calls to have low latency, etc.
Now, I think what concerns many people including me is that if you head down this path, you deliver the carriers the very tempting leverage tool of letting their existing best-effort networks degrade just enough to make many VoIP service unusable (where V is Voice, or Video, or even streaming Video) — in turn letting them strong arm the app and content providers into paying fees for priority service. How many carriers do you think will be able to resist doing this? Hint: read Ed Whitacre’s quote again.
BTW, the wikipedia does not yet have an entry for the two-tiered internet although it does have one for two-tiered health care — if I had time I’d go create the entry (and maybe I will later on tonight). If so I will update here.
UPDATE: Jeff wrote a long piece on Mark Cuban’s call for a multi-tiered internet.
UPDATE2: Martin sent me this nice Slate article. Pretty well done and worth a read.
Well said and I totally agree.
However I believe there may be a much larger agenda be played out.
The recent mega mergers have created powerful mega providers that command large market share that include both wireless and wireline users. Not only are these executives attacking the very basis of what has allowed the internet the ability to necessitate technology & market evolution, but also the commercial dynamics that govern them (e.g. peering relationships).
Two-tiered internet flows would require every provider between the content/application provider and user to implement consistent end to end application of Quality of Service. In this model, would Google be required to pay each provider?
Or is the agenda an opportunity for these mega providers to assert their market dominance of their existing base thereby eliminating transit peering coupling content directly with users. Cable operators do this today, but the difference is content is broadcast over satellite enabling one to many distribution and internet content is bi-directional.
The real issue for these mega providers is they have committed to increase broadband to the home/business, need to keep of with cable operators and application providers and are attempting to high jack the revenue opportunity that may be realized by enabling technology & market evolution as the internet provided.
Didn’t the FCC allow Network Unbundling Obligations (March 2003) to fuel these build outs already?