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| AT&T: Our Network Can Handle The Traffic |
| Monday, 20 October 2008 03:14 |
 AT&T: DSL Network Holding Up Fine Donovan: Network not taxed by growth. That's a key advantage over cable Ten years ago, AT&T ran ads about "Webhogs" and the problems cable would have because of it's shared local loop. This argument fell flat fairly soon, as the cable networks did decent traffic engineering and problems were few. Now, as the cablecos are in Washington saying they need to throttle traffic because they have congestion problems, smart telcos like Verizon have a strategic advantage over cable. They can handle the traffic while Joe Waz and David Cohen of Comcast says they can't. So when AT&T's John Donovan was quoted that traffic was "taxing the network," I doublechecked. CEO Ed Whitacre has testified to the Senate that AT&T never "degrades' customer Internet traffic. SVP Jim Cicconi has confirmed that AT&T matched Verizon's promise, "If the consumer has purchased three megabits of capacity from us and there is video coming to them, whatever comes from the Internet we will deliver to them without any blocking, degradation, or other interference." (Tom Tauke) A "taxed" network couldn't meet that promise. This came back quickly: "First, let's be clear, Donovan did not say "taxing our network." All Donovan said was that 1% of users were consuming 20% of bandwidth and 5% of users were consuming 40% of bandwidth. He, of course, didn't say anything about degrading service. " British Telecom's Sally Davis writes she was similarly misquoted. British Telecom: No Congestion Problem |
| Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 01:39 |