Fight for Net Neutrality

The Internet doesn't function without data being transported from your machine to other remote machines. If you think the data the other machines hold you are connecting to as the "Internet", then you are going to have a bad time. If you count the "network" of equipment in between your computer and the that remote machine as the "Internet" then you are thinking we are fucked on this whole net neutrality topic. And we are, and rightfully so. We let them do this to us, WE LET THEM.

We seem to be at a strange road with technology and society. There is this idea that the Internet is not owned by anyone, that is is a free and open zone that is somehow ethereal. This is not true, and if you think so you don't understand the Transport Layer of the OSI model.

This layer consists of very expensive to purchase, expensive to monitor, and expensive to maintain equipment and cabling. You supposedly pay your carrier fees to cover these costs, and they make a profits on it. These carriers can be many varied types of companies, but most are re-sellers of telephone company bandwidth. Even cable companies. Mostly cable companies.

What most people don't know is that these cable companies often don't own much of their "network" and they are just piggybacking the telephone company high speed lines (OC48 to OC192 level and such). They only cover the getting from their gateway to yours. You are paying them way too much for this and it's obvious, and you are angry, most of you.

The problem is the telephone company isn't offering consumers any better options. They are using the cable companies as a shield from you. Know this. They don't want you to get DSL, they want you to get cable. It's like how companies now aren't even staffing HR departments, they just use staffing companies. Think of the cable companies as those people, just taking money for really nothing. I wont get into the differences in line speeds between DSL and cable broadband, and how the cable networks "pool" neighborhoods and business areas and nothing is "dedicated" like with DSL (why cable sees more extreme slow downs than DSL during peak times, but overall seems to run much faster than DSL on off hours) but know that even though you are paying Comcast, your data is using the telephone company. KNOW IT!

In most cases even those VOIP Cable Telephone are the telcos also. Wide Open West and many others simply re-brand a Sprint VOIP network that they set up to purely sell to cable companies so they didn't have to set up their own call centers. There is nothing WOW about it, 100% Sprint. Cable companies are not necessary, and they know it. They are a middle man that serves absolutely no purpose other than setting up call centers in India. Or wouldn't if the telcos would shape up and get their fiber networks ran.