I noted Dave Isenberg emailed some friends a comment (copied in full below) to his F2C list serve about my response to a question he asked at the F2C Conference recently.  To quote Dave’s observation:

 

The big moment came when Verizon VP Kathy Brown answered my question, "Would Verizon block, throttle or cap video conferencing over FIOS?"  Her answer -- and I paraphrase only because I did not record her exact words -- she said absolutely not.

 

Video conferencing, using hi-res formats and wideband sound, can occupy up to 20 mbit/s in each direction for hours at a time.  Unlike movies and audio, you can't compress it or delay it or buffer it much because it needs to happen in real time. Video conferencing is the corner case that proves the network.

 

If Verizon's network will tolerate video conferencing, for sure it will not choke on the kind of peer-to-peer traffic that Comcast is trying to . . . ahem, control.

 

I appreciate David’s comments, and I want to add to it but, first, I want to thank David for inviting me and for leading such a great conference.  My goal was to bring to an informed and engaged ‘Net a rarely discussed aspect of broadband deployment, namely that broadband should be part of every effort to reduce energy consumption and environmental damage (see my talk at F2C “Broadband: It’s the Green Network”).

 

From Verizon’s perspective, the delivery of broadband is symbolized by our creation of FiOS – the country’s only big, all-fiber network that reaches directly to people’s homes. Our fiber network has robust capacity in BOTH directions – both downstream into the home and upstream back to the Internet.  Our technology is already capable of offering 50 megabit downstream service and we are trialing 100 megabits as well.  And we are offering 20 megabit FiOS symmetrical service (i.e., in both directions) today and new versions of our FiOS technology will make it possible to offer literally hundreds of megabits to our consumers.

 

Why is this important? Because it is the speed in broadband networks that make the ability to telecommute real and vastly improves office-to-office communication.  FiOS makes it possible to offer two-way video conferencing of very high quality which I believe will prove valuable not only to applications that reduce energy but also help address urgent healthcare needs like home medical monitoring.

 

Of course, we’re building more broadband than just FiOS. Our wireless data network is already available to more than 250 million people and we’re working on the next generation, 4G, national broadband network.

 

This is a good dialogue – and one that I would like to continue. We build networks so people can use them and I hope that this discussion will, in a similar way, help us exchange views and information.