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Brett Glass (on the left) runs Lariat, a small wired and wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) on the prairie in Laramie, Wyoming.  Bob Frankston (right) programmed VisiCalc, the first personal computer spreadsheet and for several years worked on home networking issues for Microsoft, somehow without having to move from his beloved Newton, Massachusetts.  Two nerds, a decade apart in age yet both vastly experienced, they have completely different views on Net Neutrality. Bob loves it. Brett hates it. Yet coming to understand each man’s position helps us better understand the whole Net Neutrality issue and what really matters.

Net Neutrality discussions usually come down to pitting home users against Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T.  The ISP is presented as a bogeyman and a multi-billion-dollar bogeyman at that.  It’s easy to oppose big, rich companies that maybe aren’t as attentive to customer service as they ought to be. But what if the ISP is Lariat and the customer service comes straight from the owner? That’s when things start to get interesting.

Brett is trying to get the most bang for his Internet backbone buck, so things like traffic shaping, web proxying, and restricting certain protocols like BitTorrent appeal to Brett because without those policies he’d have higher costs and lousier service for most users.  So would Comcast and Verizon, by the way.  ISPs large and small generally want to limit their users to certain bandwidth and download caps and don’t like enabling software and media piracy.

Bob Frankston, as an outspoken proponent of Net Neutrality, is really more about outright defeating the telephone and cable companies.  He wants to put them out of business.  Or, more properly, he wants to put them out of their present business. Bob thinks ISPs should simply be schleppers of bits, not paying the slightest attention to ports, protocols, or applications.  In Bob’s ideal world we as individuals would control the copper wires and glass fibers that connect us to the Internet, with the ISP simply standing-by at the utility pole or neighborhood gateway to give or take bits that we’ll transmit at a rate of 100 million per second.

Bob’s concept of the Internet is actually fairly common in the darnedest places, like much of Eastern Europe.  In Moscow, readers tell me, there are neighborhoods where you can get a coax connection to the net running at a blazing 100 megabits-per-second.  But at the same time the meter is running and you may be paying individually for every one of those hundred million bits.

And this is where the two concepts — Brett’s and Bob’s – differ enough to matter.  By calling for the very broadest definition of Net Neutrality it seems to Brett that Bob is trying to put him out of business.  Brett identifies with his VoIP telco role.  But what Bob proposes would force a change of business model on Brett and all the other ISPs right up to Comcast and Verizon: no more e-mail, McAffee, Net Nanny stuff — just the bits, please.  Bob wants to take away everything that Brett sees as making his service charming.

The truth lies somewhere in-between.  Business models ARE changing and they always have, though not quickly, in the telecommunications space.  Back in 1983 when it divested its locl operating companies, AT&T (a different AT&T, remember, not the current company by that name) was choosing to deliberately abandon local phone service because long-distance made nearly all the profit.  So AT&T became a long-distance telephone company, squandered lots of money on cable TV and cellphones, then saw itself implode when long distance became a commodity that’s effectively free for most customers.  The AT&T business model changed (from full-service to strictly long-distance) then changed again (from long-distance to bankruptcy).

ISPs big and small are fighting to retain their present business models, which they view as essential to their survival and see threatened by Net Neutrality.  They are making good money with the current model and so are loathe to change it.  That’s it: they are resisting change, seeing it as bad. Until you get down to the level of Brett Glass trying to make some customer’s VoIP phone work well over a wireless link it’s fear of change that we’re seeing and not much else.  Yet change is inevitable as markets grow and mature.

Brett may not be able to survive as a pure schlepper of bits.  He sees his added value as bringing connectivity to places where it didn’t exist before.  Bob respects that but concentrates on a bigger picture where the virtualization of networks is carried all the way to our property lines.

In the long run Bob Frankston is more correct, though in his zeal he seems to need the current class of big ISPs to die and be replaced.  I’m not sure that is really needed, though it might be nice since that would at least end their reactionary lobbying.

Twenty years ago this month the Berlin Wall fell, changing European and Western culture as a result.  Within the next 20 years we’ll see a similar revolution in digital networks as distinctions between wired and wireless, Internet and television, voice and data blur to insignificance.  I just hope there’s still a role in there for Brett Glass, out on the prairie.  I strongly suspect there will be.

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This week the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) releases its proposed new rules for Internet Service Provider (ISP) network neutrality.  I have written many times about Network Neutrality and once I have a look at the FCC proposal I am sure I’ll have comments to make here.  In general I’m in favor of rules that allow me, as a consumer, more digital freedom. It would be great to run Skype over my iPhone, for example, just as I can already run it over the cellular connection on my notebook. But right now I’m talking about a different kind of network neutrality, the kind I’m struggling to achieve in my own home.

I live in Charleston, South Carolina where my primary ISP is Comcast. I have a 16 megabit-per-second (mbps) business Internet service with five static IPs and an upstream speed that I think is supposed to be 2.0 mbps but actually measures around 2.5. On the Speakeasy Speed Test I have no problem clocking the full 16 mbps to Atlanta, either.  It’s not Verizon’s FIOS, it costs three times as much as FIOS, but my connection more than does the job.  Compared to some other places in the world of course my speeds are laughable.

So why is it that when I surf the net while speaking on my Voice-over-IP (VOIP) telephone, it breaks up?  It’s not like I don’t have enough bandwidth, both up and down. And the network in my house is 100 mbps wired Ethernet using Cat5 cable throughout.  Ah, but I’m using the hated Vonage telephone service you say, not Comcast’s VOIP offering.  That explains it: net neutrality violation!!!

Except it isn’t. Comcast and Vonage have been pretending to be friends for a while now. It’s all part of the “We don’t really need that old Net Neutrality” song Comcast and the other big ISPs have been singing, including the verse that says Vonage is okay by them.

Then why does my Vonage-connected fax machine not function reliably, either?

Maybe I need traffic shaping, you say. Let’s just adjust my router to give priority to those VOIP packets, as I am sure Comcast would do if I were using their service.

Except I already do traffic shaping. I run a rather robust firewall as a sort of Internet gateway that includes local DNS and Squid (proxy) service. VOIP Packets get first dibs on my cable modem and always have.

This problem has been driving me crazy for some time now, but I believe I know what’s happening and it has nothing to do with Comcast or net neutrality.

I’m pretty sure the problem is in the Vonage boxes that connect my phone and fax machine to the network, called Analog Telephony Adapters or ATAs. First, I don’t use my ATA’s as Vonage suggests. Vonage envisions a single-ATA network generally with a single PC, or at least they did when I got these puppies. They want me to plug my ATA into the cable modem and my PC into the ATA so the ATA automatically takes precedence. I can’t do that for three reasons: 1) my office is three floors above my cable modem; 2) my fax machine is not in the same room as my PC, and; 3) I’m pretty sure the Vonage Ethernet ports are limited to 10 mbps so hooking-in there would limit the bandwidth available to my PC. If I’m paying for 16 mbps, dag nabbit I want to use 16 mbps!

Given that I’m already doing traffic shaping in the router and have a huge excess of bandwidth for VOIP anyway, what’s the big deal using the ATA’s as I do, simply plugged into a 10/100 Ethernet switch? It shouldn’t matter.

Then I spoke with my friend Paul and came to a sudden realization. I’ve been messing with my Internet gateway, trying to convert it to a trio of $99 SheevaPlug computers that I’ll run as a tiny cluster just to see if I can do it. Paul said his testing showed each 1.2 GHz Sheeva was the equivalent of about a 10^th of his four-core AMD box. “But even that’s plenty to saturate an Ethernet connection,” he said.

The Sheeva installation isn’t even ready to go yet, but what came to me is that the poor Vonage ATAs just can’t keep up. I got them when I signed up for Vonage service in 2002!  Back then my computer had a single core and ran at 400 MHz. Today I have four cores and run at 3.0 GHz. While it technically isn’t supposed to work that way I’m guessing my PC is just so darned fast at grabbing and releasing bandwidth those little seven year-old Motorola ATAs from Vonage are having trouble getting a packet in edgewise. Yes, the switch should compensate for that but you know I think that switch is about seven years old, too.

That explains why VOIP clients like Skype and Gizmo that run entirely on my PC (no ATA) don’t have any problems.

Most of my hardware is replaced every three years, but these network components have been running undisturbed since they were first installed. And being digital they probably run as well as ever. They just weren’t built with the idea that one day there would be a bully in the house.