Net Neutrality = Diet Soda, part 1

It seems like a stretch, but stick with me for a minute.

First, my credentials: I’m a 20-year veteran of various IT functions, almost all related to networking. I’ve been actively using the internet since 1982-ish, and I’ve used several of the predecessor and offshoot networks (BITnet, Fido, and yes, even CompuServe and The Source – bet you forgot that one). While I don’t work for a carrier now, I have worked for a couple, where I have had primary design and management responsibility for networks supporting very large user groups. I won’t say exactly which ones, but it’s safe to say that depending on which company I’m talking about, an “oops” would be noticed by most of the population of at least one large state and would affect at least one other country.

Here’s a few not-so-secret items that might help when considering this flowery idea of network neutrality:

The typical residential internet user generates about 28kb/s average traffic over any given month.

When one carrier buys bandwidth from another, a reasonable price would be in the area of $110 per mb/s per month.

There are a lot of other costs, too. Let’s look at the customer side first. We’ll use a hypothetical $60 a month invoice.

80% of that might go to the local company that you’re buying service from. 20% likely is allocated to an internal or external partner that runs the network for them.

So of that 80%, or $45 a month, we’ll round it off to $500 a year. Where does it go? Stay tuned.

Next: Part 2 – where does that money go?