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| Tuesday, May 16, 2006 |
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Seeing hearing 
| | For the geography impaired, the meeting will also be streamed here. |
PreReboot
Network _________
| | It has been interesting to watch the entry on Network Neutrality in Wikipedia change over time. Here's how its opening paragraphsw currently stand, as of 6:52am EDST: |
| | Network neutrality is synonymous with common carrier status for providers of the pipe to the network. It is a term devised by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu to support an open access theory of network regulation that holds that packet data networks such as the Internet access as common carriage should be just like traditional railroads and telephone networks. According to this view, the Internet transport and service system, having received valuable public right of way should not be allowed to be privately owned without open access so that owners could provide services that they own on favorable terms and thus unfairly compete with third-party services. |
| | Network neutrality has been expanded by others into a general theory of of network operational architecture. It means that the network is operated under the three principles of neutrality: non-discrimination, interconnection, and access. The principles can apply to any network, but are generally ascribed to the Internet. They govern the operation of the network, not the content or business practices of the network operator. Inherent in the definition is that network operations are distinct from the content side. Network neutrality is one way to describe the operational architecture of the global Internet. Nearly every nation operating a portion of the Internet, often by default, has adopted some form of the neutrality principle, depending on its definition. |
| | "Network neutrality" is a term used in legal and political theory, not in network engineering; it is not used in any of the 4500+ design documents (Requests for Comments or RFCs) that describe the Internet's architecture and operation. The closest analogy in network engineering may be the concept of transparency, a design goal that is met when the network delivers messages without delay, jitter, loss, and reordering. No packet-switched network is truly transparent, as the basic service model in packet networks depends on resource contention, congestion reduction, and queuing. Circuit-switched telecommunications networks are highly transparent as distortion is minimized by isochronous access methods and hop-by-hop error recovery. Packet networks apply a number of different methods of queue management and packet forwarding, some of them quite sophisticated and each "discriminatory" in some way. Circuit-switched networks avoid queuing by pre-allocating communication resources for each call in progress. |
| | Be interesting to watch how it continues to change. |
Gang out
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