Promise them Anything, But Give Them a Web Page

By Carl Ford, Partner, Crossfire Media

On Friday, we are streaming our Regulatory 2.0 event, which is focused on net neutrality and the National Broadband Plan. We will be streaming the event live at http://www.4gwe.mobi, thanks to Google’s (News - Alert) sponsorship and Towerstream’s bandwidth. I have been working to catch the attention of Congress by sending them e-mails from their various websites.

House of Representative Congressmen are harder; often their sites require your zip code to contact them.

The result was that I was forced to use Facebook (News - Alert) to contact the congressmen.

It was not pretty. First of all, about a third of the congressmen have either no Web pages or no way to provide them with feedback on issues.

Speaking of issues, it’s easy to see why we are having problems talking about net neutrality. Senators are easy to get to their pages, as they all have contact forms. However, it’s clear why we can’t even got on the same page. 

The pull-down menus of the senators were all over the place. It was hard to find a classification for informing them of the event. About a third of the senators did not even have categories such as “Communication,” “Internet,” “Technology,” and “Telecommunications.”

Two senators (Ms. Maria Cantwell and Mr. Al Franken), who agree they are talking about telecommunications, have written a draft Net Neutrality Bill.

It has a lot of good merits; for example, the suggestion of allowing Naked DSL to be offered.

However, the ability to offer higher quality services is still misunderstood. The assumption that in order to sell higher services you have to hinder best effort is not exactly accurate. Best effort is being augmented by all sorts of strategies. 

• Access services, such as Cablevision’s Boost, for example, or dedicated access solutions that connect to aggregation points; 
• Cloud and Cache solutions bring the Internet closer to the access points;
• At the carriage of the backbone we have MPLS and DiffServ.

Is there a real issue with net neutrality? 

It’s unclear. This week NANOG (News - Alert) met here in Miami while we are running 4GWE at ITEXPO East 2011. Last year, we showed that the backbone of the Internet is not under the control of the carriers, but the content delivery networks. 

When we get together this week, we will look for the places where end to end meets access and asks the question: Are there monopolistic powers? Ultimately competition is one way net neutrality can be assured, but there are lots of ways to ensure you see the Web page. Congress should not assure neutrality by stifling innovation.

Join us on Friday at 9 AM EDT at http://www.4gwe.mobi. It will be interesting – I promise.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications & technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2011, taking place Feb 2-4, 2011, in Miami. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

(source: http://4g-wirelessevolution.tmcnet.com/topics/4g-wirelessevolution/articles/140708-promise-them-anything-but-give-them-web-page.htm)