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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting tired of people saying there is nothing to worry about here. The article mentions potential 3d video services as a possible business model on the Internet. 3d video requires 4x the frames as HD - you're going from 24 or 30 fps up to 120 fps. So, imagine Verizigoogle offers this fancy new 3d Youtube as a premium service, not subject to net neutrality at all, on it's own dedicated 100 megabit pipe.

You want to compete with that, but Verizigoogle only leaves 20 megabits for all other traffic. You're effectively shut down. The consumer has a 120 megabit pipe but 100 megabits is reserved for "premium content". This is exactly the opposite of net neutrality, yet it is exactly what Google and Verizon are proposing and expecting us all to swallow.

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There's confusion here between services being offered over IP and services offered via/from the Internet. Your access connection from $ISP, especially if it's DOCSIS or fiber, typically has more capacity than the bandwidth of the Internet connectivity they're selling you. It probably wouldn't be viable to offer you and everyone else that bandwidth to the Internet for business and technical reasons, but there is enough capacity between your house and $ISP's network to offer other services. As long as this doesn't affect your Internet connection, it shouldn't be a problem.

Any impingement on your network connection then becomes a truth-in-advertising issue -- getting what you've paid for -- as has been taken up in the FCC's National Broadband Plan and elsewhere regarding companies that label their connections as "up to" N Mbps. Holding providers to their promises here seems like a more serious issue than being concerned about VZ offering crappy video-on-demand via a separate bandwidth pool.

I agree that it would be nice to have a big, dumb pipe to the Internet by which we can all choose the 3D video services we want, but that's going to require serious competition in access or some sort of public utility for access provision, neither of which seem likely in the US.

I realize that a DOCSIS cable modem has a ton of bandwidth available to it. Each 6 MHz cable channel can send around 27 Mbps to the subscriber. Upstream is more difficult. If there wasn't any regulation, what is stopping cable and fiber to the home ISPs from just dialing down the Internet portion of your package until the competition can't fit in it any more?

> The article mentions potential 3d video services as a possible business model on the Internet.

"The internet" is covered in the proposal. This mythical 3d video service would have to be outside of the internet - a completely new service.

If verizon wants to create this new service, and use up all their available bandwidth on it (and therefore reducing their available internet bandwidth) then that is their choice, but I imagine their customers would just switch to a different ISP that offers better speed.

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