Net Neutrality --- For Once, Everyone Wins

They're the customer side if the intertubes. Their biggest role these days is marketing - the real tuby bits are provided by the main network operators. Their problem with network neutrality is that they have to invest in capacity as all the over-the-top content providers like YouTube and NetFlix squirt huge quantities of data at them without having to pay them do it but also get paid directly from the end user themselves.The ISPs now have to have a think about their business models.

The ISPs wanted to create a tiered network to prioritise the traffic they delivered to their customers. If all traffic carries the same priority, all is urgent and they have to build networks to cope. They wanted to be able to balance traffic based on percieved value so that their network investment is reduced. A telephone call could get a higher priority than a Youtube video about a dress for example.This would have meant that they could have charged for setting these priorities - both the content providers and the customer. Heavy use content providers whose business relies on really good streaming - such as Netflix - opposed this for obvious reasons. Network neutrality means that the ISPs have to build networks to cope with whatever is thrown at them. They argue that this is unfair and want a contribution from those businesses that they say are parasitic on them by sending huge amounts of data that they don't have to pay for.The only way out at the moment is for ISPs to change their as much as you can eat models and start charging more for consumption of bandwidth by the end user.

We should say too, that net neutrality also means that ISPs are not allowed to 'throttle' or bar traffic on their networks simply because they don't like it. I doubt anyone knows how that will work yet, but it's a big technical issue as all ISPs do some form of traffic management to ensure the smooth running of their networks. Business networks routinely throttle Youtube and similar services so that email, telephony and other more commercial traffic isn't compromised.

There are lots of problems with satellite; they're expensive, hard/impossible to maintain and upgrade (software apart), they don't scale (they're tiny in comparison to a data centre), power, resilience and redundancy are problems and because of the round trip distance from satellite to earth station, they have very high latency which makes real time applications like telephony and multiplayer games unworkable. (Until we find a way to send data faster than light speed, this can not be fixed.)Their strengths are in delivering asynchronous media using single transmissions to many points simultaneously - ie broadcast. Using them for many individual, independent, streams ie narrowcast is very inefficient. I don't see satellite as a credible solution.