As is always the case, the IETF meeting will feature groups focusing on pretty much all the various technical aspects of Internet infrastructure: IPv6, DNS, DHCP, security, VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, routing, "Internet of Things", P2P, HTTP, TCP, video conferencing, congestion control, energy management… basically pick any Internet protocol acronym and you'll probably find some group there talking about the topic. If you just scan down the IETF 85 agenda, you will get a sense of the breadth of topics being covered.

If you can't get to Atlanta next week to participate face-to-face, the good news is that the IETF provides a variety of ways that you can participate remotely in the meetings. I recently wrote up instructions that you may find useful: How To Participate In IETF 85 Remotely.

Out of this meeting, new standards will emerge, new drafts will be created, new efforts will be started… and the multistakeholder open standards process that drives the Internet will continue. If you get a chance, the IETF meetings are open to anyone to attend — and anyone can also follow along remotely.

P.S. If you have not had any prior exposure to the IETF, you may want to first read The Tao of IETF: A Novice's Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force to understand a bit more about how it all works.

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies

Read full story: BBC

The following inforgraphic was released as part of the announcement presenting current stats on Skype usage.

The problem is more social and economic than technical. A whole web of subsidies and special services assured that everyone had access to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), which is still a regulated service. The cost of the subsidies — the universal service fund (USF) subsidy for rural service, for example — is spread over the whole customer base for traditional telephony, which used to be pretty much everybody. Regulated carriers are required to provide special equipment and services for the hearing impaired and others. Lifeline (basic) service is subsidized by more affluent telephone customers for those who are less affluent. Telephone customers pay for 911 service through their monthly bills. Regulated carriers are required to report significant outages and state public utility commissions regulate their quality of service.

However more and more people are getting their telecommunications from unregulated providers. Cellular service is somewhat regulated on a national basis but not at all at the state level. Cellular providers contribute less to the subsidies than landline providers because cell phones were initially considered an addition to rather than a substitute for landline service. Some VoIP providers contribute nothing to the subsidy pools, especially when they are not charging their customers for calls within their network (Skype, for example). Other VoIP providers like Vonage have agreed that they are essentially a PSTN replacement and, because they interconnect with the PSTN for almost every call, they do collect from their customers to support the various subsidies. The FCC has asserted jurisdiction over services which interconnect with the PSTN. States are considering how much jurisdiction they have over nonPSTN providers connected to the PSTN.

But what happens when there is no PSTN with which to interconnect? What basis is there for regulation? Whom do fees for subsidies get collected from? What if there's a major outage? Who has jurisdiction? That day is coming so these questions can't be avoided and they're tough. Should people who use services like Skype to make free calls have to pay a subsidy so that people who don't or can't use Skype can afford to make paid calls? Even if we wanted to require this in the US, what's to stop a new Estonian networking company from providing call connection services to US users via the Internet, especially if it's not charging for the service? Who is responsible for poor call quality during an emergency: Vonage which doesn't control the physical network or the ISP who doesn't control the Vonage servers or the end user software?

The problem of rural areas is particularly acute. The telephone network, like the electric grid, came later in rural areas than in the areas where the economics were more compelling. The electrical and phone network would have taken even more time than they did to reach rural America were it not for government-enforced cross-subsidies and a requirement that regulated monopoly carriers serve everyone in their area regardless of cost of service. This requirement wasn't a problem for the monopolies because they knew that they could charge well-above actual cost in urban areas and use that surplus for the more expensive areas. Regulators encouraged this socialization of cost; it's a lot like what the Post Office does. You can make a strong argument that universal access to service makes a whole nation strong — as good roads do — so that cross-subsidies are perfectly proper.

But we demonopolized, imperfectly and unevenly and incompletely; but we did. The result was a flood of innovation including cellular services (the old companies had to buy their way back into cellular) and the Internet. The result is much, much cheaper communication of all kinds. But we have a problem, Houston.

Without regulated geographic monopolies there's no good way to get the cheap-to-serve areas to subsidize service in the expensive areas. Verizon, for example, sold off its landline business in northern New England to FairPoint so Verizon could concentrate its capital on more lucrative fiber service in more populated areas. Not long after, FairPoint went bankrupt as landline defections increased and capital needs proved greater than anticipated. Even now that it has emerged from bankruptcy without the burden of the debt it took on to buy the assets from Verizon, it's still not clear that there's a path to profitability as landline losses to cellular, cable, and VoIP continue to mount. Verizon's earnings from fiber and cell service are no longer available to subsidize our landline services in Vermont.

It's easy to envision a future — it's almost here — when nobody is using copper landlines for plain old voice services except those rural pockets where both the erecting of poles and the original provision of telephone service was subsidized and where telephone service is still being subsidized today. People in these areas are stuck using POTS for the same reason that they needed a subsidy to get POTS in the first place: it isn't economical to provide cable or cellular or broadband services where the population is thin. The early money goes into areas with a better payoff (reasonably). Not only is there no cross-subsidy to assure buildout of broadband or cellular alternatives to POTS in rural areas; there is also a huge threat to the existing subsidies for rural POTs. These subsidies are collected from other users of POTS; if we country people are the only remaining users of POTS, where's the subsidy going to come from? We can't move forward to the brave new telecommunication world and we can't stay where we are!

But it's not all as bleak as it seems. Some answers in future posts.

Written by Tom Evslin

... the product that came from the grey areas of P2P file sharing and created some truly revolutionary network technology and created a software client that "just worked" like magic from behind any firewall…

... a company from Estonia of all places, which pre-Skype most of us could only vaguely put on a map but now many of us know more about, including that fact that many Estonians have multiple vowels together in their names in ways we don't in English (ex. "Jaanus" and "Liive")…

... a product that was given away for free across multiple operating systems (even if some of us whined about the lack of attention to our chosen platform)…

... a service that just went ahead and implemented SRTP and encrypted call control when all the major telcos were whining about why they couldn't secure calls over IP because of the demands, latency, blah, blah, blah…

... a product that gave most all of us the first experience we ever had with wideband audio — where it felt like you were right there with the other person… and in fact, many of us found we could record podcasts over Skype (even using video)…

... a product that offers the best implementation of persistent group chats I've yet to see… and that allows globally distributed companies and organizations to work so well together across all timezones and regions…

... a product that truly offered a multi-modal/multi-channel user experience… and raised the bar for all the enterprise products that were trying to deliver "Unified Communications" ... Skype was offering the "UC" experience before "UC was even coined as a term…

... a product that became a verb… "just skype me"…

... and a product that had enough of a sense of humor — and roguishness — to implement emoticons like these:

banghead)
(bandit)
(moon)
(finger)

(Tip: Don't type the last two in a chat window where people might be offended… and methinks the first one might come in VERY handy with meetings between Skypers and their new masters. :-) )

I started using Skype back in 2004 or so when it was still very early days. In 2005 I started using it to record the Blue Box podcast and to contribute to the For Immediate Release podcast. I was at Mitel in those days in the product management team and I remember back then talking to my peers about how Skype "just worked" through firewalls and how the wideband audio was outstanding.

Since that time, Skype has become part of the DNA of my personal IT infrastructure… I use it extensively for my own communication… and I use it very extensively within Voxeo where it is our Unified Communications tool of choice right now (for reasons I wrote about before). If there's one tool that's always open on my computers, it is Skype.

And Skype is probably the one company/product/service I've written about the MOST on Disruptive Telephony blog since I launched the blog back at the beginning of 2006. Largely because Skype has been one of the single most disruptive influences on our industry. Sure, many of my posts have been critical, particularly of the new Skype 5.0 for Mac, but they have been critical out of my passion for the product — and of wanting it to be so much better.

And now we who have been raging Skype fanboys confront a new reality…

Microsoft acquiring Skype!

Goodbye, bandits…

... you are no longer fighting "against THE MAN”… you now are "THE MAN"! It's hard to get much bigger of a megacorp than Microsoft!

I do actually think the acquisition is good for Skype in a number of ways:

• Financial stability – Being part of as large an organization as Microsoft will finally give Skype a bit of room to really figure out their monetization play beyond what they've done so far.
• Enterprise credibility – Skype has struggled for years to get any kind of real credibility within enterprises. Many have completely blocked Skype and many have no understanding of what it can do. Microsoft completely gets the enterprise… in some ways they own the enterprise… so this can only help Skype grow in business usage… and that's a GOOD thing for those of us who already use it that way.
• Security – Whatever you want to say about Microsoft, they do understand how to communicate about security, something Skype is lacking. I can only hope that MS will now bring a higher level of communication to this aspect of Skype.
• Synergy – I'm not a fan of that word… but it makes sense here. Think of the other products Microsoft makes… what if you could get Skype integration into Microsoft Office? what if Skype and Lync could play nice together to connect the whole Skype world to the enterprise UC offering of Lync? what about making Kinect work with Skype? There are a lot of cool things that could be done. (And, of course, we'll undoubtedly see Skype on Windows Phone 7, etc.)
• Customer Support – And hey, maybe Microsoft can help Skype get a proper customer support organization so that I am no longer their corporate receptionist!

I worry, of course, about the acquisition and what it will do to the tool I use so much. Those of us on NON-Microsoft platforms have complained for years about Skype's lack of attention to our Skype clients. The Mac OS X client has at least received more attention and near-parity with the Windows client (even though many may not be fans of the new UI)… while the Linux client has languished. In the new world of Microsoft, will those other platforms really receive much attention? (despite the requisite platitudes mouthed in the news conferences and stated in the news releases)

And how about the iPad client for Skype that has been rumored? Will that ever see the light of day?

Will Skype truly be able to function independently as a "disruptor of telecom" now that it is part of such a large corporation?

The answers remain to be seen over the next months as the deal moves toward closing. I have many friends who work at Skype and I do wish them all the best through this whole transition… I wish them well seeing how long they can hang on to their Mac laptops and iPhones ;-) ...

... and I wish them much ":-D” and hope they don't experience too much "(banghead)”.

Welcome to the new era of Skype!

Written by Dan York, Author and Speaker on Internet technologies

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: "MSFT") and Skype Global S.à r.l today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype.

... Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

Going through previous iterations of Mikko's presentations on mobile malware is a fascinating exercise.

Mikko has been saying much the same thing for a long time — and he was (quite a few years back) seeing / predicting some dual purpose type viruses, mobile viruses that also had a PC virus that'd get dropped drop if a dongle got connected. [according to a presentation he did on a panel I was chairing]

The same thing in writeups by other AV vendors such as Kaspersky Labs — an old release they wrote in 2006 reads a lot like it could have been written today ... except for the amount of mobile malware which has shown a steady and worrying growth. Cross platform (phone to PC) malware like Cxover gets described in this one too.

The threat potential is far more scary on mobile platforms. Some because of the platform and some because of service provider issues.

On the phone — a key worry is the lack of control / vetting of apps. Some OS and phone vendors vet and sign apps before allowing them to run on a platform. However, for other mobile platforms, even more than for operating systems, you can get a variety of apps from all kinds of sources. Not all of them very well designed, so that the least they do is hang your phone, with the worst being to actively infect it, or at least leave it more vulnerable to infection than it was before.

Open access to phones, with features that allow unsolicited entry are the most worrying. For example, open bluetooth access, if enabled on a phone, means that apps (or malware) can jump to other phones within range. Such malware would travel rather slower than malware that propagates over the internet but…

Software can be sent to a mobile number so that opening a text message would trigger an attempted install. And everyone knows just how many users click "no" instead of "yes". Or should I have said "how few". Very few phones have AV and firewall programs installed so that the probability that any malicious app, once it makes it onto the device, will cause damage, is extremely high.

Service provider issues —

Mobile providers are usually from the Telco wing of various carriers, and they'd be bound by common carrier rules that the carrier's ISP division wouldn't be subject to. So — filtering content becomes a regulatorily much more dicey proposition.

Comparatively few wireless carriers are active in the security / malware conferences, so a lot of training / knowledge sharing / operational cooperation etc will be required before providers will be able to react appropriately to mobile malware threats on their network. To be sure, there are some major wireless carriers active in MAAWG, and efforts are made to reach out to conferences that wireless providers are more likely to attend, but… there is a lot to do, far more than there is in the ISP sector.

There're of course going to be far more such threats — but that wasn't why I started to write this post.

So, why isn't mobile malware spreading as rapidly as it should have, based on all our fears, predictions, readings of how precarious the security readiness of both mobile carriers and phone users is?

Maybe I'm way off base, but I would appreciate some comments on why mobile malware isn't spreading as fast as it should given the wide open nature of the platform and the lack of security, either on the device or on the network. I've a few thoughts on why this is the case… could be completely wrong of course.

My thoughts —

The fact that malware artists are still in what is seen as a testing phase (by the AV vendors, and as Wout's article points out) is indicative of, maybe one or likely several of these reasons.

1. Far less smartphones — just dumb phones that get used for voice and text messaging. Especially in less developed markets with very high mobile penetration — there'll be far more "basic phones" around rather than smartphones.

2. Far more PCs with a limited subset of platforms than there are smartphones, plus the smartphones have a much more diverse platform base so the opportunity cost of developing PC malware (and later, mac / linux malware) might be far more favorable to malware artists. Of course, with several new mobile platforms placing much more reliance on the browser — and as mobile versions of Safari, Firefox, Opera etc are widely popular, there's a readymade common vector for spammers to launch attacks that are browser specific rather than OS specific, so got to see how this trend changes things.

3. Cumbersome security measures for mobile transactions — people may or may not carry out too many financial / banking transactions online [but that's changing, and gradually increasing]. And while people do book tickets or carry out financial transactions online, but it might get more inconvenient to transact over a phone if this becomes a larger threat, perhaps more severe than in web based transactions. This may in fact discourage people from doing financial transactions on the Internet. For example the Indian banking regulator + central bank, RBI, recently mandated that all mobile txns must use an one time password that the credit card issuer provides when the customer texts them at a number / calls their helpdesk.

... any more?

Written by Suresh Ramasubramanian, Architect, Antispam and Compliance

Further findings from the study:

"… P2P continues to dominate at more than 60% of all IPv6 traffic. ... Unlike IPv4 P2P, the data suggests most IPv6 P2P application makes little effort to encrypt or use randomized ports. This IPv6 P2P behavior may correspond to the relative lack of IPv6 capable firewall and traffic management solutions. At a distant second and third, Web and SSH both average 4.6% of IPv6 traffic."

Read full story: InformationWeek

"We haven't organized yet, but trying to. The background for this project is that we want the internet to be uncensored! Having a centralised system thatcontrols our information flow is not acceptable.

There will be a press release shortly with more details."

Related Links:
P2P-based alternative to DNS hopes to challenge ICANN IDG News, Nov.30.2010
Pirate Bay Founder Eyes Decentralized P2P DNS DSLReports.com, Nov.30.2010
BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures TorrentFreak, Nov.30.2010
With Domain Name Seizures Increasing, It's Time For A Decentralized DNS System TechDirt, Nov.30.2010
Fed up with ICANN, Pirate Bay cofounder floats P2P DNS system Ars Technica, Nov.30.2010
About Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi Wikipedia

We shouldn't settle for network neutrality. It's a poor substitute for what we had and much less than what we need. Let me explain. There are two topics to discuss. The first is "common carriage," a centuries old legal concept that applied to the US telecom industry throughout most of the 20th century. The second involves communications protocols. Both topics are complex, so I will cover only what's needed to understand why we shouldn't accept network neutrality and why, at a minimum, we should fight for enforcement of existing common carriage rules.

Network neutrality is about allowing any Internet application to run over an Internet connection, i.e. over a connection that uses Internet Protocol (IP). But under common carriage as it applied prior to the late 1990s, we had a more powerful right — the right to run any kind of network protocol, IP or otherwise, over a lower, simpler service which today we call a "bit stream*." Why does this matter? Because real innovation is also possible at these lower layers and that innovation continues to be important. But today, such lower layer innovation is restricted to inside one building or one campus. Yes, we can tunnel some lower level innovations over IP, but not all of them and only at a cost.

IP telephony (VoIP) is one place where problems arise. Most enterprises use IP PBXs internally, yet calls between enterprises use the PSTN. Many companies have attempted to address this gap, but progress is slow and expensive. Within an enterprise, IP telephony packets are given priority, but that priority is not supported on Internet access links and network neutrality doesn't help. As a result, to interconnect VoIP calls, enterprises must lease separate dedicated access circuits — circuits usually based on bit stream access — to support "SIP trunks." Up until the late 1990s, these circuits were regulated under common carriage. Today they are an unregulated monopoly, with prices derived from the cost of voice circuits 15-20 years ago, i.e. abnormally expensive for today.

Common carriage is the legal concept that, in exchange for government granted monopoly access to rights-of-way, the monopolist must carry anyone's traffic over the resulting infrastructure, at regulated rates. For centuries this has applied, to canals, to roads, to railroads, to telegraph lines and, until nearly the end of the 20th century, to telecommunications lines. But during the legal battles after the Telecom Act of 1996, the FCC basically gave up on common carriage.

If we accept Network Neutrality instead of common carriage, we guarantee future innovations happen only above the IP layer. Innovation at lower layers will be restricted to enterprise or campus applications. That's too bad as it was the existence of common carriage that allowed the Internet to develop in the first place. Do we want to eliminate that kind of innovation in the future?

If anything, we should be fighting to extend the ideas of common carriage to lower layers, e.g. dark fiber. Installing dark fiber is expensive and requires access to rights-of-way that are limited. The installed fiber is capital expensive infrastructure that lasts for decades. Such conditions justify granting monopoly access, in exchange for common carriage and regulated rates of return. But when you light up a dark fiber, you use (relatively) low cost gear with a short life (even if it can survive for ten years, Moore's Law renders it functionally obsolete within 2-3 years). What's more, there's rapid innovation in opto-electronics gear. Just look at the order of magnitude difference in cost between enterprise and carrier fiber-optic gear.

Today, the US is loosing leadership in all things Internet. Network Neutrality will just put a nail in our coffin. To stop our decline, fight for restoration of the common carriage principals that existed through most of the 20th century and still exist in law. To regain world leadership, fight to extent those principals to include access to dark fiber at regulated rates.

* Bit stream access. In the 20th century two regulated services provided what the 21st century calls bit stream access. These were voice telephony and T1 circuits. T1 circuits directly carry a stream of digital bits. Modems allowed voice connections to carry digital bits, for example, for bulletin board services and other purposes long before the Internet became popular.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at netBlazr

There's little doubt that Skype's continued growth has made them an attractive vehicle for investors. Having customers is key for any company's success, and having lots of customers raises the bar on what success could look like. Skype doesn't have everyone on the planet as a customer, but they're as close anyone is likely to get. According to their S-1 filing, the current user base is 560 million, and this has increased by 163 million from last year. Although "users" aren't true customers in terms of being paying subscriber or tied to contracts, anyone who can add this many in one year must be doing something right.

We all know that many "users" have multiple identities or aren't really active, so a subset of this is needed to get a more meaningful read on what Skype actually has. One metric would be "connected users", which averages out at 124 million per month. This is still a substantial community, although the majority is not using any paid services. In fact, the paid segment is a fraction of this, at 8.1 million.

While 8.1 million is a far cry from 560 million, Skype generated $406 million in revenues during the first half of 2010, and with this being a 25 percent bump from 2009, the company is on track to hit $1 billion in revenues next year.

In some ways, Skype has the best of both worlds. They are generating decent revenue from a small portion of their base with hardly any marketing expense. On the other hand, free is hard to beat, and they keep building a massive user base from which they keep trying to upsell. This is a very different model from conventional service providers who only offer paid services, and do not have a feeder pool of free "users" they can convert to paying subscribers. Of course, their operating expenses are much higher than Skype, and they could never survive on the relatively small ARPU that Skype generates from their calling services.

Skype hasn't yet become very profitable, and the thinking is by going public they'll have enough working capital to find new ways to increase ARPU, develop new revenue streams, and convert more free users to paid. Whether the $100 million they expect to raise will be enough is open to debate, but I see their IPO as being a strong validation for a new model and a different kind of service provider.

Of course I'm using the term "service provider" loosely, since Skype is Web-based and has little control over the last mile connection. Their technology is not as open as other operators, which limits their ability to interwork with other user communities and achieve a more universal federation to grow the user base. Furthermore, their ability to extend Skype beyond desktop telephony depends heavily on partnerships with other operators and vendors. Skype may have strong brand recognition, but little leverage when it comes to entering new markets from a position of strength.

Two such scenarios were noted in their IPO filing. One is their dependence on smartphone vendors — primarily Apple — to get Skype featured as a downloadable application. This can provide a broad entrée into the mobile VoIP market, but only to the point that the vendor feels it is worthwhile. There is no exclusivity here, and the vendors are free to offer other comparable services or even limit the features that Skype can provide.

The second scenario would be the partnerships Skype has developed with wireless carriers. Verizon is the most notable here, and again, there is a delicate balance that both parties must strike. Verizon will gladly support Skype so long as the relationship helps retain subscribers, drive network usage, and develop new sources of revenues. However, once Skype starts to cut into established revenues, they become more of a competitor, at which point the relationship can sour quickly.

As such, Skype does not hold all the cards, but neither does anyone else. With the right partnerships and market positioning, Skype has many paths to growth. Their user base is attractive to any operator, especially those seeking global coverage. Skype recognizes the challenges of growing in both the video market and the business market, both of which are large untapped opportunities. Video already accounts for 40 percent of their calls, but they have not yet been able to monetize this. The fact that they're considering subsidizing free video calls with advertising says a lot about how important this opportunity is to them. In the early days, this would never have been an option, but the stakes are higher now, and market forces may leave them little choice.

Skype certainly has an attractive product mix, and with such a large user base, their main challenge is mainly around market positioning and creating the right business models to capitalize on their strengths. This is a very different problem set from what conventional service providers must contend with, and whether Skype goes it alone or as a complement with other operators, their IPO should give them enough resources to get to the next level. Skype is certainly not going away, and as these pieces come together, they will start to look more and more like more like these operators. At that point, service providers will have some complex decisions to make, and depending on where Skype is having success, they may well end up working more as equal partners than being a minor add-on to stay competitive.

This article of mine originally ran on Friday in my Service Provider Views column on TMCnet.

Written by Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates

They've required the carriers to clearly inform customers about throttling. That's under consideration in Britain and the U.S. as well, but probably in a meaningless fashion. The minimum disclosure should inform users about how many hours/month they are affected and how much users are slowed down, but the FCC is allowing telcos to say "sometimes we throttle" without the details needed to determine if it's negligible or abusive.

Comcast currently throttles far fewer than 1% of users and then only to a speed of 7 megabits faster than most DSL connections. They rarely do that for more than 15 minutes. If that were clearly disclosed, most of the criticism would disappear. But there is a problem if a carrier slows down, for example, Netflix streaming video. The current "complete information" doesn't let me distinguish. How often are users throttled? How much are they slowed down? Typical disclosure hides what we really need to know. Dale Hatfield, are you listening?

The minimal Comcast throttling is possible because they have essentially solved the p2p upstream congestion issue. Comcast top technical people have described how they've made inexpensive upgrades to 10-20 megabits from the 2 megabits of older systems. Explaining why they are moving slowly on DOCSIS 3.0 bonding, 4 CTO-level execs told Cable Show audiences they have essentially no upstream congestion these days. The speakers were in charge of several of the largest networks in the world. It's amazing how many in D.C., including just about all the cable lobbyists, don't seem to know the progress they've made.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

Arielle Sumits of Cisco warns to be cautious with future predictions because "we try to be conservative in our estimates." One reason to consider is that China Telecom's estimates for growth the next few years are higher than Cisco's. NTT America's Mike Wheeler is seeing 70%+ growth rates currently. He's seeing exceptional demand from Latin America, where broadband is booming.

Sumits expects p2p growth to fall to 16% in some markets, corresponding to many reports over the last three years. AT&T actually had a quarter where p2p traffic fell in absolute terms, although that was an exception. People who download typically already have more than they can listen to for the remainder of their life. In the U.S. and Britain, most of the current popular shows are available to watch for free at Hulu and similar. It's easier to listen to a few commercials than go through the hassle of downloading.

Ironically, this drop in p2p growth is occurring when the actual speed of downloads has been going up dramatically. I did some tests on Bittorrent and was typically able to get 3 or 4 times the speed two years ago. On a ten meg Time Warner Cable connection, popular downloads came in at 2 meg to 8 meg most of the time. The typical hour long TV show, encoded at 700K (not great), took 10-20 minutes. Set it running overnight and 22 episodes of Lost are there in the morning.

Even 10-25% growth in bandwidth per user is still a great deal in absolute terms and will require thoughtful network planning.

More, including a chart with crucial data and highlights from Cisco's report on DSL Prime.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

Internet Service Providers offer convergent services that blend telecommunications, as in bit transport, with telecommunications services, such as telephony and arguably first and last mile Internet access, with video services, such as Internet Protocol Television, and with information services that ride on top of the bit transmission link. For administrative convenience and not as required by law, the FCC likes to apply an either/or single regulatory classification to convergent operators. Having classified ISPs as information service providers, the Commission unsuccessfully sought to sanction Comcast's meddling with subscribers' peer-to-peer traffic. Now Chairman Genachowski wants to further narrow and nuance regulatory oversight without changing the organic information service classification.

Some network neutrality advocates have urged the FCC simply to abandon the information service classification and reclassify aspects of ISP Internet access as Title II, common carrier regulated telecommunications service. Why use tortured and legally suspect analysis to craft an absolute dichotomy?

What is wrong with the FCC acknowledging that providers of convergent services trigger different regulatory classifications as a function of what service they provide? Even thought the FCC largely emphasizes wireless carriers' information services, the Commission occasionally reminds cellular radio service providers that they still operate as common carriers that for example have to interconnect with other wireless carriers to provide seamless roaming opportunities for users. So it's possible for the FCC to recognize that in the case of wireless carriers, a single venture using the same conduit can configure both regulated telecommunications services and generally unregulated information services.

The FCC has to confront the messy reality that when ventures offer convergent services that combine conduit and content and when these ventures vertically and horizontally integrate throughout many market segments, the Commission cannot rely on absolute either/or service dichotomies to classify everything a venture provides. Even to this day the Commission cannot bring itself to confront this reality as evidenced by its utter silence on what regulatory regime should apply to Voice over the Internet Protocol and Internet Protocol Television.

It's time to recognize that layered and convergent services defy compartmentalization into convenient, single regulatory classifications and regimes.

Written by Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law