CEO Reflections

Network Neutrality?

I think that there is a lot of hype about network neutrality these days. At its simplest, network neutrality is the principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally. Advocates of this equate it to phone service providers not being able to control who you can call.

From our stand point, if the internet does not have network neutrality, will it place Egnyte at a disadvantage compared to the competition? Will we be required to pay for making sure the users' experience with Egnyte be as fast, if not faster than the competition?I think these questions may be moot since we are already trying to provide a faster, better network optimized route from a user's computer to the Egnyte cloud, by using third party services that overlay on top of the basic internet. These are kind of “CDN” solutions, except that I am referring not to static content, but to optimized TCP/IP traffic and optimized network route.I also believe that today’s internet is not neutral, since it is designed to favor non time sensitive applications over real-time applications like video streaming. Furthermore, larger companies can buy higher quality and fatter bandwidth pipes that a small company can not match, thereby gaining a performance advantage.Therefore, until these “inequities” remain, the current debate on network neutrality does appear to be overblown.