Regardless of the FCC’s final outcome on network neutrality some form of usage-based billing may not be such a bad thing.

For example, as a result of being situated next to one of the world’s largest fresh water lakes, the city of Chicago offers an un-metered water service and flat-rate billing based upon the size of your house.
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On September 21, 2009, The US Federal Communications Commission chairman, Julius Genachowski, gave a speech in which he outlined two new principles to augment the “Four Freedoms” originally articulated in 2004 by then chairman Michael Powell. The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. An implicit assumption is present in this principle (and in the speech as a whole) that discrimination is a bad thing.
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In August 2009, the upstream provider of thepiratebay was forced to disconnect the popular tracker site. Now, this is one of many tracker sites (but a popular one). What effect would this have on Bittorrent globally? Sandvine did a short analysis and concluded that the effect was quite noticeable, a ~15-20% drop in overall bandwidth. You can read more detail [here], but the interesting thing is: bandwidth and applications are fickle and unstable. One applications 20% drop could be just as easily a 50% increase in another. When you are talking about the overall top applications, this can significantly skew the quality of experience and capital requirements for a broadband service provider.

Sandvine recently posted some high-level findings from our most recent Broadband Phenomena study.  When conducting a study like this, the sheer volume of data is almost overwhelming, and there are endless interesting observations that can be found by peering deeply.  Part of the challenge is to highlight points that are interesting to a broad global audience, new enough to grab attention, and simple enough to be conveyed in a few sentences.  This last point is particularly challenging given the complex and dynamic nature of the Internet and the technologies that enable the worldwide connectivity on which we’ve come to rely.

I’d like to take this space to expand on a few of our high-level findings beyond what was possible in a press release or summary document.

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