[Mesh] Infographic

[Stuart Gathman]

On 08/15/2017 05:48 PM, John wrote:
> Also I had some downtime on a Windows machine and made some propaganda
> (same image in two formats):
>
> https://cityofclay.000webhostapp.com/CMN.svg
On a political note, I see [lack of] net neutrality as a side effect of
the perverse incentives inherent in unmetered pricing of internet
services.  When you are paying more for more gigabytes transferred, a
greedy (as required by law) telco is going to do all they can to *not*
slow you down so you can pay them more.  When your usage is unmetered,
the greedy telco will try to cram as many customers on the same
equipment as possible, and try to make high bandwidth content providers
pay part of the cost - i.e. the "net neutrality" issue.

It is easy to make net neutrality issues go away with centralized ISPs
also - just get a tiered, or even a more finely grained pay for usage
plan.  There are many other drawbacks to centralized ISPs (e.g. makes
"wiretapping" without a warrant way too easy) - but "net neutrality" is
only a problem with unmetered pricing. 

Note that unmetered pricing is also a perverse incentive for the
consumer - who has no financial motivation to not waste bandwidth.  What
constitutes "waste" is highly subjective, and *should* be decided by the
consumer ("sure it's expensive to keep ESPN on 24/7 - but it's worth
every penny to me!").  But unmetered service cedes those decisions to
the ISP.

Most consumers pick unmetered pricing because it is easier to
understand.  ("What's a gigabyte?")  The best proposal I've seen to
simplify metered pricing for such consumers simply changes your queuing
priority from "high" to "space available" when the paid for limit is
reached.  (More technical users can use QoS to flag their big downloads
as "space available" and conserve their high priority bandwidth.)

Finally, the constitutional thing that the federal government can do is
define the "unlimited internet" marketing term to mean, in essence, "net
neutrality".  Then ISPs wanting to do throttling/charge content
providers/etc with unmetered service would have to call it something
else.  "Turbo internet" / "movie watcher plan" / etc