Game Over for LECs

I have been meaning top read this article for a few weeks. It is the Verizon view on network neutrality and there are some good points made by the telecom giant. But here is a thought that hasn’t come up yet. Let’s assume that Verizon charges Google for high-speed access to their customers and let’s say that Google tells Verizon to find the deepest lake they can and take a high-dive into it.

Google then sends its customers a Tivo like device that delays broadcasts a bit. Imagine a box with a huge buffer that can suck down hours of TV at a time – trying to anticipate what viewers might watch.

You really don’t even need a separate box to do this – you just tell your customers that they will need 5 gigabytes of free space to use Google TV or GTV as it is likely to be called.

The concept here would be to suck up more bandwidth and store it locally as you aren’t guaranteed quality of service.

It seems to me there would be no way for Verizon to get Google to stop this practice.

In addition this concept can be coupled with or replaced by a p2p model allowing consumers access to programming in a similar manner.

Game over for the LECs.

  • Dave Siegel
    February 24, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    I’m not so sure that it’s game over.
    The LEC can still implement tiers in their network, which we’ll call Classes of Service (CoS), such that their applications get preference over all other Internet-bound traffic. The result is that these high-bandwidth “background” applications coming in from the Internet help the LEC’s own services in the higher classes perform way better by comparison because the best effort class is so congested.
    This paves the way for the LEC to be the only player to offer any sort of real-time service, and they still win.

  • VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com
    February 25, 2006 at 2:23 pm

    PPLive and Net Neutrality

    I was a bit harsh when I said it was game over for the LECs in a recent blog entry about content providers providing a Tivo-like service that prerecords a number of programs so as to simulate live TV. This…

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