Canada consults the end-user on traffic management

Whether they listen more than Ofcom with its terribly dull blogs, we will see - but its a promising start!

EC compromise jettisons net neutrality

Well, what did you expect? The EC has a quasi-regulator with a quasi-veto (or "binding recommendation", lawyers will enjoy that wording!), quasi-broadband universal service but UK wording on net neutrality, it seems. The Commissioner got most of what she wanted.

I like the Svensson amendment which it seems has failed:

Amendment 135 +++

• Article 1 – point 13 amending Directive 2002/22/EC Article 22 – paragraph 1 tabled by Eva-Britt SVENSSON, GUE/NGL, SE
• Net Neutrality/Discrimination

1. Member States shall ensure that national regulatory authorities are, after taking account of the views of interested parties, able to require undertakings that provide publicly available electronic communications networks and/or services to publish equivalent, adequate and up-todate information for end-users on the quality of their services and measures taken to ensure comparable access for disabled end-users and to disclose traffic management policies. That information shall, on request,be supplied to the national regulatory authority in advance of its publication. 

Member States shall ensure that national regulatory authorities are able to take appropriate measures in cases where operators fail to disclose their traffic management policies or where the traffic management policy does not respect the rights of users to access the content, applications and services of their choice. National regulatory authorities shall additionally ensure that there is a facility in place by which users can monitor and identify any problems created by traffic management policies in cases where disputes may arise.

Abuse of process as MEPs didn't know what they were voting on? Well, yes, but that's not unusual - in any case, the devil is in the detail as we will see in the EP vote on agreed texts on 22 April.

Network Management Guide by George Ou

I have been alerted to a paper on network management written for Washington that is now circulating in Brussels, by journalist Ou, written in his role at the ITIF, from which the excellent Weiser/Atkinson paper emerged in 2006.

This paper trashes net neutrality extremists (what The Register calls "freetards") in a way that I find unhelpful in both tone and substance as they're not the only NN proponents, but nevertheless generally its not a bad document - but be very aware of several items that are much more related to the Washington debate:

[1] the proponents of NN in general DO NOT want to entirely outlaw all network management - at least not in my experience. He is generalising from the lunatic fringe.
[2] for reasons I don't understand, he talks about network management ensuring users always get more than their ISP's minimum promise: "If a network can be built to guarantee 1 megabit per second (Mbps) of performance for each user, for example, it can just as easily offer the customer 1 Mbps of guaranteed performance and up to 20 Mbps of unguaranteed performance."
BUT in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, ISPs advertise misleading claims based on maximum THEORETICAL speeds - so their dishonesty means that they ALWAYS over-promise and under-deliver.
[3] He acknowledges three incumbent-paid technical experts - including the excellent Bob Briscoe from BT.

However, he is calling for significantly MORE regulation of ISPs if you read closely, and this I agree with:
"the FCC should oversee broadband providers and ensure that ISP network management practices are open, transparent and not anti-competitive. And the ISP industry should continue its efforts to develop and abide by industry codes of good conduct regarding network management that include, but are not limited to, fuller and more transparent disclosure to consumers of network management practices."

However, he drops it in at the end of both his executive summary and the paper itself, so I assume this is an after-thought as a result of editing/comments by someone else. That's a pity, as it offers balance and shows just how little information ISPs are willing voluntarily to give their customers.

If I can add some information that is actually useful to make that information regulation actually effective, then I would offer the Norwegian solution here. Now that's effective co-regulation of traffic management to ensure transparency and non-discrimination - not just lip service to consumer demands;-)

Sky plays April Fool's Joke

And asks to be allowed to duct-share on Virgin Media's cable network - after all they've done for the last 20 years with their monopoly of satellite TV, and 15 years' exclusive live Premier League football - so it must be a joke, right?

More on mobile termination rates

On another blog, I've been reporting on the special pleading of mobiles, and the incompetent regulation of their termination rates, to the detriment of consumers with fixed line connections. 

The number 100billion€ keeps coming up - first its the minimm number in what ECTA claims has been the effect of these distorted rates over the past decade; second its what the mobiles lost on the 3G auction (the total cost in Europe was substantially higher but the spectrum was never going to be given away); third, it would make an enormous hole in the cost of getting every European household onto at least 50Mbps broadband lines - even if the backhaul would still be a bottleneck.  Should thes 3 numbers be related? The regulatory purists would say no, the realists would say of course they are!

The European broadbnd environment has been so enormously distorted by these problems for the past decade, and arguably its one reason why competitive broadband has been pachy at best.

Consumers want open Internet and politics joins in...

Surprise surprise, European consumers want an open Internet. (They also want it for free, I guess...and yes, the poll was funded by the big pro-NN US corporates).

Will the US net neutrality debate lead to a redrawing of the political discourse through the blogosphere, typically US news agendas are dominated by right-wing radio and TV (Fox) talk-show hosts and the outright lies of the Bush administration rode that to victory in 2004. Will it change radically?

The importance of these two stories is that they underline the political aspect of the debate - this is not just telecoms economics!

'The Economist' and rats smelling discrimination

Will the 100million mobile broadband users be allowed to exploit their dongles? Of course not!

"The growth, however, comes with a couple of big drawbacks for the operators. One is loss of control. Subscribers can do what they want: the operator is merely a “dumb pipe” to the internet. Next, rates have been falling quickly. “The pricing is crazy—mobile broadband is becoming a commodity way too fast,” notes Didier Bonnet of Capgemini, a consulting firm. Another problem is overuse. Operators complain that a small group of users eats up most of the available network capacity. Some are users of illegal file-sharing networks who want to be harder to track down. To throttle them, operators are thinking of giving some data packets (such as web traffic) priority over others (such as file-sharing). “Network neutrality”, the principle that operators should not discriminate between different forms of traffic, will not succeed on mobile networks, says Holger Knöpke of T-Mobile, a European operator."