Hollyman’s World blog

We have all heard about the net-neutrality debate: consumers want all they can eat and service providers want to limit what we use. Why not discuss the ways that both can be happy at the same time? It reminds me of an old Political Science professor that lived and breathed the “win-win” situation.

Just this week, Qwest Communications announced plans to roll out a new fiber to the home (FTTH) service in 28 markets. Initially, I thought, “wow! I can get more than 3Mbs of speed!,” but then I realized, this plan might not make a lot of sense for many providers and customers. These two new packages are the Quantum (20Mbps) and Titanium (12Mbps).

The plans are $99/month and $49/month, respectively, if you bundle the service with your home phone line. Overall, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal, but will it really work? And if so, for how long? It does not take many subscribers using these links to the full capacity to quickly make Qwest re-think their costs and speeds.

So what will likely end up happening? My guess is that these lines will end up being rate-limited, especially during peak times of day. This will surely generate numerous complaints by consumers that they “paid for 20Mbps and expect 20Mbps at all times.” So why not be creative and offer service-specific offerings that people are willing to pay more for, but not cost the provider in expensive CAPEX funds for new interfaces and routers?

For example, I primarily work from home. I have a 3Mbps line that isn’t bad, but I would love some additional bandwidth for downloading ISO images. I would also enjoy more speed for VoIP calls and if my VPN were a priority, it would make working from home even better.

So how about this for a plan?

I primarily use my line during the day, which is typically the lower trough of traffic from a broadband subscriber. Give me this:

1. 5-10Mbps link speed down
2. 1-3Mbps link speed up
3. from 6AM to 6PM, prioritize my VPN/IPSEC traffic and VoIP
4. from 6PM to 6AM, put me in a big bucket with everyone else with limited bandwidth for applications hogs, like P2P.

Sounds like a Win-Win to me!

The provider gets to fill up their links with more traffic during the day.
I get great VPN and VoIP traffic during these hours.
The provider gets some relief at the peak hours of usage because I agree to be limited.

What’s wrong with that picture? Both parties get something good (me bandwidth when I need it most and the provider gets more revenue) and that makes for happy individuals.

Something to think about, I guess.