Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality

[Nick Hilliard <nick () foobar org>]

On 28/02/2015 22:38, Barry Shein wrote:
> Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from
> deploying "commercial" services.

there were several reasons for asymmetric services, one of which was
commercial.  Another was that most users' bandwidth profiles were massively
asymmetric to start with so it made sense for consumers to have more
bandwidth in one direction than another.  Another still was that cross-talk
causes enough interference to prevent reverse adsl (i.e. greater bandwidth
from customer to exchange) from working well.

> As were bandwidth caps.

Bandwidth caps were introduced in many cases to stop gratuitous abuse of
service by the 1% of users who persistently ran their links at a rate that
the pricing model they selected was not designed to handle.  You've been
around the block a bit so I'm sure you remember the days when transit was
expensive and a major cost factor in running an isp.

Some operators used and continue to use asymmetric bandwidth profiles and
bandwidth caps as methods for driving up revenue rather than anything else
in particular.  International cellular roaming plans come to mind as one of
the more egregious example of this, but there are many others.

Nick