• Ars Technica, Tuesday, August 5, 2008 12:15 PM

The issue of network congestion isn't going away anytime soon, but the FCC recently made it clear that Comcast's P2P "delaying" technology wasn't an acceptable way to deal with the problem. So what's an ISP to do? In a blog post, Google's Vint Cerf (who happens to be one of the founding fathers of the Internet) offered up a new alternative: data transmission rate caps.

Whereas billing by bandwidth usage (what Cerf calls a "volume cap") would curtail the use of Web 2.0 services like YouTube and Hulu, a rate cap allows users to freely access such services as long as the data exchange doesn't exceed a minimum rate. Cerf would have ISPs guarantee that rate and make more bandwidth available when network conditions allow.

The Google Chief Internet Evangelist also indicated that Comcast had the right idea in moving to protocol-agnostic management techniques. "The real question for today's broadband networks is not whether they need to be managed, but rather how," he said. Ars Technica's Nate Anderson disagrees. He argues that, "the Internet core has plenty of capacity and is in no danger of being overwhelmed; the problem, especially in the US, is in last-mile links." In other words, U.S. ISPs simply don't want to put up the money necessary to ensure faster delivery speeds.

Read the whole story at Ars Technica »