What is Neutrality of Network
Many of you may have heard the computer jargon ‘neutrality of network’ but I am not sure how many of you actually know what it means. It is all about ISPs, bandwidth, ADSL and many other things too complicated to be understood by any newbie. This articles aims at explaining such ostensibly complex issues to you. Not very long ago, a simple 56K change on one of your webpage could have taken it minutes to take effect. But that was seven years ago. Since then, technology has come a long way as have cheap web hosting, ISPs etc.
In today’s supersonic world, a customer is utterly ‘disappointed’ if it’s takes longer than a few seconds for his internet service to open a webpage. The digital images, embedded videos, songs, HD resolutions are things which need big muscles of a widespread bandwidth of any internet service provider. While all the bombardment of information on the web is appreciated but it is a little irksome that most websites make money from publicity rather than content subscription. It that annoys then let me just try and draw your attention to a simple fact here. Most of us, do not like to pay for access to content, let’s face it, we are partly to blame here. This way, we help the sites to develop this symbiant relationship. We are happy to pay our ISP on a monthly basis, whereas the pages get the content and earn via advertisements. Surprising as it may seem, not everyone is benefiting from this relationship. ISPs are not satisfied and are looking for more. AOL once required their users to use a certain customized browser to access certain pages. Same is true with some of the other content related websites. Several other companies are following the route like British Telecom. That means, for some of us, the party is offer while for others, it soon will be.
Take Google for example. The major chunk of income of Google comes from its Search Engine. Do you know just why Google is the best search engine out there? Because of the fact that it takes Google a fraction of a section to return results and that is faster than all other search engines. If it were like the other, slower search engines Google would be nowhere near the tycoon it is in the business web hosting today. There is a term used by ISPs, with which not many of you will be familiar; traffic shaping. Remember how ISPs united against peer to peer services like bit torrent, kaaza, emule and other such consoles? That is exactly what will be happening now, the neutrality of network. Bigwig companies could pay ISPs to ‘prioritize’ company listings. There is a minute glitch in this plan as it would be mighty difficult to execute a plan like this on an international scale but when there is a mutual benefit like this, things often work out.
Content providers play a huge rule in setting up cheap web hosting services or any internet based infrastructure for that matter. The problem starts when the ISPs want EVERYONE pay to be net neutral, whether or not you have anything to do with it. It is almost as if the writers are not paying enough for their access already, meaning that it treats content providers too as end-users. And with that, the ISPs in the UK are all set to ruin internet experience for most of the users.