Time Shifting of Internet Traffic

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

I am not finding the net neutrality debate according to K-Street to be very
useful or stimulating.

At the end of the day we have a limited amount of bandwidth available and we
can help matters if people co-operate where it is in their interests.
Whether or not we choose to do so does not in any way justify using the fact
that I have limited choices in bandwidth provider to ensure that my options
for content and/or VOIP telephone service are similarly limited.


One area that might be fruitful for cooperation is in bulk time shifting of
traffic. I am not so much talking about packet level prioritization here. I
am thinking more of when I choose to back up my systems over the net.

The way I look at it, the net is a bit like the power grid in that there is
an opportunity to reduce capacity requirements by shifting tasks from peak
to off-peak. In particular I have several RAID arrays that I would like to
back up with a total of something like 2Tb of data.

At present there is no incentive for me to play nice other than the risk
that my activities will clog my local net. In fact it is arguably in my
interest to do at least some of my backups at peak time when I am not using
the net since that encourages my ISP to upgrade their circuits. I don't
actually do that but others might.

It would be nice if there was some way that really high bandwidth apps that
can tolerate long latency could negotiate a good time to do this sort of
thing so as to minimize inconvenience.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/