Remember earlier this year Comcast and several telecoms (particularly Verizon and AT&T) were trying very hard to destroy net neutrality? So hard in fact that many customers of Netflix found that “network congestion” was slowing down or even disrupting their movie watching experience. These companies were claiming that that in order for internet capacity to expand they had to charge heavy users of the internet (and movies do transmit a lot of data) more because they use more.
Fortunately, they didn’t get their way. The FCC ruled that companies had to stop slowing down traffic in an effort to make more money.
And you know what? The “network congestion” magically went away. For example, one of the companies that was trying to alleviate internet traffic congestion was Cogent:
Speaking to investors during the Deutsche Bank 23rd Annual Leveraged Finance Conference, Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent, said that the FCC’s adoption of net neutrality rules that include Title II regulation, and passage of similar rules in the European Union, have led to ports on other networks becoming unclogged.
In particular, the service provider has seen its connections to Comcast become uncongested, while it continues to add capacity to AT&T and Verizon where it has signed agreements.
So is this going to hurt capacity in the long run? Nope! Cogent is seeing the growth rate of the internet to reaccelerate from 3% back up to 10%.
I just hope we remember this the next time some big companies try to hold the internet hostage.
2 Comments
Well, they are still allowed to charge heavy users more under net neutrality. They just aren’t allowed to selectively block or degrade service.
I might have been unclear. When I said “heavy users” I was referring to Netflix and users like that (content providers), not end users. They are not allows to charge content providers different rates.