Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist As we said a few weeks ago , the Federal Communications Commission's order last Friday in the Comcast-BitTorrent dispute should help ensure that today's broadband networks remain open platforms to the Internet. But more broadly, the recent attention on Comcast -- and on Time Warner's recently launched trial of "consumption-based billing" -- raises the question: what is a reasonable approach for broadband networks to manage their Internet traffic?FiOS , Verizon's speedy fiber-based broadband service, divides up the available wavelengths to carry video and data applications. Wireless broadband networks have capacity issues based on their own unique technical characteristics. The end result is the potential for traffic congestion, leading to service delays and even outages for consumers.proposal has surfaced that would charge users by the byte after a certain amount of data has been transmitted during a given period. This is a kind of volume cap, which I do not find to be a very useful practice. Given an arbitrary amount of time, one can transfer arbitrarily large amounts of information. Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate and be free to transfer data at at least up to that rate in any way they wish.packets that call for low latency (the period of time it takes for a packet to travel from Point A to Point B), but such prioritization should be applied across the board to all low latency traffic, not just particular application providers. Broadband carriers should not be in the business of picking winners and losers in the market under the rubric of network management.protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.
