Look, it's actually different.
Currently you pay for the bandwidth and you supoposed to get whatever you paid for (you pay more for highrer speeds, pay less for lower)
Recently one law expired (which allow now the telco companies to interfere with the traffic passing through their routers).
Before and actually right now still the traffic is treated the same no matter if it's a traffic to microsoft server, userfriendly.org or your web server at home (routers treat it the same - so they are - keyword: neutral)
What the telco companies want to do is prioritize some traffic going through their routers. Whoever pays them more will get more bandwidth for the traffic passing their routers (this would be additional fee besides paying for internet acces).
Basically what they do is when you're serving some content (let say you have a web server) your traffic will have much lower priority than one to web server who's owners paid that fee.
Eventually people who'll loose on it are the ones who won't be able to afford to pay that fee, but want to set up their own servers.
It's also sure, they'll do everything to make VoiP unusable, since it competes with their service.
As for companies like google, well they're are on right side, but I belive they're doing it for a different reason (video.google.com most likely uses a lot of bandwidth so they might pay a lot)
Anyway that's pitty, the telcos claim that the network might not handle that much data as they're predicting, which might be true, but as far as I know they were receiving billions of dollars in tax breaks to help them improve the network.
And they did nothing, currently USA is behind other countries (I recently read that people in Japan already have 100mbps for $36/month). |
