Comcast Traffic Shaping - The beginning of a Tiered Net?
Aug 20th, 2008 by Casey
“Hmm, I dont see that email you sent, maybe I need to upgrade my internet plan.”
This line of thinking is non existent today but may be coming to the forefront with the little bit of news today that Comcast will be slowing certain web traffic during peak times (Source). Without getting into the political discussion of Net Neutrality you can see how this could have a negative impact on the web. So Susie is waiting for an important email and she goes to Yahoo to check but doesn’t see it as Comcast is under high strain and decided that her piece of email will be delayed. Say this same example happens but Google decides it doesn’t want any of its web traffic delayed so it pays Comcast a fee to allow its customers unfettered access. Now if Susie is using Gmail she now can see the email immediately. This situation is overly basic and could be seen as a stretch but is possible especially with their decision announced today.
Take a look at this popular web image used to describe a very different internet than we see today:
Tiered Pricing for the Internet
I would assume that if Comcast is successful with this many other internet providers will follow and the internet will look much different than it does today.