John Bartlett's post below reminded me that I'd received this announcement from New Edge Networks, that New Edge, which provides enterprise broadband, is now offering Class of Service over DSL (they claim to be the first to do this).
John Bartlett's post below reminded me that I'd received this announcement from New Edge Networks, that New Edge, which provides enterprise broadband, is now offering Class of Service over DSL (they claim to be the first to do this).This is one answer to the question I raised in the post I did last week about "Home-Based Hogs," i.e., what happens when ISPs use their Terms of Service to monkey with user traffic. The topic is heating up, with the FCC now saying it's going to examine whether and how ISPs should be allowed to "degrade" P2P traffic.
Enterprises may not be able to wait for the FCC to going through the lengthy process of sorting all this out, so business-class DSL services featuring CoS/QoS seem like an appealing way to deal with the problem if your home-based workers represent a critical part of your everyday communications environment.
On another business broadband note, GigaOM features a very useful listing of the "10 Things You Need to Know About the Future of Broadband."
The author, Martin Geddes, makes a lot of great points, and I especially agree with his first one:
Telecom is a logistics business for valuable data. It's about providing personalized delivery of that data, and removing the "customs barriers" (such as network provisioning, authentication) to that delivery. This is much more complex (and profitable) than being a "dumb pipe," but doesn't mean being an applications or media business (something telcos are notoriously bad at doing).
Martin has really found a way of saying something I've often thought: That the "smart pipe/dumb pipe" dichotomy is really a false choice. And as Martin's further points elaborate, the telecom infrastructure of the future is going to be much more complex that the notion of "dumb pipes" suggests; your telco doesn't have to be the 5th carrier in your market trying to sell you "The Wire" to be successful and highly profitable.
I also like Martin's point: "Voice is the catalyst." Read the whole post. It's really good.
