ISP guarantees net neutrality
They can take away our bandwidth, but they'll never take our freedom
A NEW ISP is trading on the bandwagon that it will guarantee punters' net neutrality.
Copowi aims to capture the US's customers' interest by claiming it has a neutral network. The outfit is marketing itself as a "social enterprise" instead of a traditional business, and sends free Ubuntu CDs to its punters.
Currently the outfit only offers a service in 12 Western states, but wants to eventually become international.
It claims that the telcos want to "privatise the Internet" because they can use it to make big bucks. Copowi wants usage to be unrestricted and traffic will not be shaped, throttled, or otherwise prioritised.
Cynical hacks at Ars Technica have quizzed Copowi boss George Matafonov on how long his outfit will remain net neutral when a couple of P2P people suck up all the bandwidth. They also asked how, since Copowi has to lease lines from the dark evil telcos, they can guarantee a free interweb.
Matafonov claims that telcos provide unregulated access if Copowi is willing to pay for the bandwidth.
The price of this freedom is huge. Arse points out that in Colorado users will have to pay $33.95 a month for a 256Kbps DSL connection. This is the most expensive service outside Kazakhstan. µ
Comments
technica
lolOld News
Old news is so exciting.This article is based from ars technica dated August 19, 2007.
Someone should tell Copowi they've only been online 2 weeks now. I'll bet they'll be surprised.
Oh, and they're down to $41.95/month for a 6mbit connection the last I heard.
That's some nice report'en there.
Bandwidth doesn´t grow on trees
I don´t understand how people can argue for net neutrality, yet complain about a price of $33.95. It´s fabulous that p2pers get all that bandwidth on the cheap, but somebody has to pay for it sooner or later.I think that instead of passing a net neutrality law, they should phase in a flat amount per gigabyte law. You´d basically have a minimum price for access, and if they number of gigabytes downloaded times the cost per gigabyte gets higher than the minimum price, then you´re charged according to how much each gigabyte costs. Also, gaming has tiny packets that need to get where they´re going in a hurry, but p2p and the web aren´t quite as much of an emergency, so they should get different treatment.
How about, instead of a net neutrality law, we have a throttling neutrality law? Everybody gets throttled equally. They could change the rules on the fly, but the rules would apply to everybody on the network, instead of the suspected p2pers.