[1st-mile-nm] Vint Cerf supports municipal broadband networks

[Richard Lowenberg]

Vint Cerf supports municipal broadband networks
IDG News Service 5/12/08
Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service

www.itworld.com/Net/2613/vint-cerf-supports-municipal-broadband-080512/

Municipal broadband networks could help boost the availability of high-speed
Internet access and even help to ensure Net neutrality in the U.S., said Vint
Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the Internet for his role in creating its
basic architecture, spoke at a lunch in Seattle, a city that is investigating
the possibility of building its own broadband network. Seattle would follow its
southern neighbor Tacoma, which has been operating its own fiber network for
several years.

Cerf disputed arguments that operators sometimes give for why they should be
able to limit or block bandwidth-hungry applications on their networks, and
suggested that since they don't have technology facts to back up their
arguments, people should be able to build their own networks to meet their
needs.

"Many people raise the issue that video use on the Net is somehow going to drive
it into congestion," he said. While in certain scenarios that could be true, the
reality is that increasing the throughput solves the problem, he said.

A person could transfer an hour's worth of video over a gigabit channel in about
16 seconds, he said. That means that rather than streaming video, which is
indeed taxing on the Internet, users would download it instead. "It's much
easier on the network, and people have more than enough storage to download,"
he said.

Some operators also talk about the capacity of the Internet backbone itself. "As
for running out of capacity, we've barely touched the surface of the fiber
capacity. We are far from having exhausted this capacity," he said.

Operators may simply not want to invest in their networks to bring higher
bandwidth to users, he said. "That comes back to the municipal argument.
Citizens that want the capacity should be able to decide among themselves to
put the resources in place to get that kind of capacity," he said.

Some operators contend that municipal networks create competition between the
government and private companies. "That's nonsense," Cerf said. Governments
would contract with the private sector to build the network and maybe even
operate it, he said, so the two would be partners. In Tacoma the city maintains
the network, but other companies serve as ISPs (Internet service providers),
selling access to end-users.

Cerf's comments come as a new bill was introduced by lawmakers in the U.S. this
week that would subject broadband providers to antitrust violations if they
block or slow Internet traffic. Some lawmakers and operators argue that such
legislation is unnecessary and would slow investment in broadband networks. The
bill follows discussions across the industry and by government leaders around
practices at Comcast, which says it has slowed some customer access to the
BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol during times of network congestion.

Cerf has been a vocal opponent of operators that limit access to certain
applications. "I still think it's not a bad idea to have legislation that says
don't discriminate unfairly simply because you happen to have control over this
shared resource," he said on Friday.

Nancy Gohring is Seattle correspondent for the IDG News Service.

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Richard Lowenberg
1st-Mile Institute
P.O. Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110;   505-603-5200 cell
rl at 1st-mile.com  www.1st-mile.com

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