Punters respond to Sol T's suggestions to Barack Obama

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 20 January 2009 10:44

Opinion and Analysis

One specific issue on which Trujillo was brought to task was his observations about net neutrality.

"Getting the right policy mix also would require shattering the myth of net neutrality," wrote Trujillo, and went on to argue charging should be based on usage.

But that seems to overlook the fact that businesses already pay more for higher bandwidth. For example, T1 (1.5 Mbps) line is cheaper than a T3 (6 Mbps) line.

Net neutrality is all about treating traffic equally - just because a carrier has a deal with a particular service provider, it shouldn't be allowed to throttle or block traffic relating to competing services.

One particular comment had me scratching my head: "Sol, dude, no one in the US(or anywhere else outside of Asia) will pay for stuff they DONT need or can get for FREE with free Wi-Fi(especially in this economic downturn)."

Yes, I agree that many of us are looking closely at unnecessary expensiture at present, but does anyone actually trust free Wi-Fi services? It's one thing if you can use a VPN to ensure a secure connection back to the office, or if you just want to do some innocuous web surfing.

But with weaknesses being found recently in both WPA2 (how many free Wi-Fi locations use any kind of encryption?) and in the PKI infrastructure used by SSL, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing anything that requires a password at a hot spot.

Maybe I'm paranoid, maybe there are other things I should be worrying about, but it just seems like an unnecessary risk. A 3G connection (or even GPRS), on the other hand, seem much more trustworthy.