Quality of Broadband Services in the EU | Digital Agenda for Europe - a year ago but published today

Quality of Broadband Services in the EU | Digital Agenda for Europe:

"October 2014 consumers received 76% of the advertised speed (the same as 2013). Differences were smaller in cable (86.5%) and FTTx (83%) than in DSL (63.3%)." Note from report p13:

"this compares poorly to the USA’s average of 101% of advertised download speed... actual download speeds attained in Europe were considerably higher than those in the USA

• xDSL services averaged 8.27Mbps in Europe and 7.67Mbps in the US. 
• Cable services averaged 66.57Mbps in Europe and 25.48Mbps in the US.
• [FTTx] averaging 53.09Mbps and US achieving 41.35Mbps."

Sadly even if headlines are higher (presumably because generally EU is more urban with shorter local loops) the false advertising continues...and we have far more DSL than the US, which brings our average down. 'via Blog this'

Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Torrent and VPN Throttling

Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Torrent and VPN Throttling - TorrentFreak: "Barbara van Schewick, Professor of Law and Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, tells us that in its current form the net neutrality regulations pose a significant threat to file-sharing protocols and services.

“This is a real problem for P2P applications. ISPs regularly throttle or otherwise interfere with peer-to-peer file-sharing applications to manage congestion if they are not prevented from doing so by network neutrality rules,” van Schewick says.

“The provisions would allow ISPs to throttle or de-prioritize P2P file-sharing around the clock based on the ‘objective technical requirement’ that P2P file-sharing is not sensitive to delay,” she adds." 'via Blog this'

Sprint sprints away from no-throttle policy – punishes 'unlimited' network hoggers

Sprint sprints away from no-throttle policy – punishes 'unlimited' network hoggers • The Register: "Sprint has confirmed plans to once again throttle data usage of customers who go over a 23GB limit each month.

 The company, which is the fourth largest mobile carrier in the US with nearly 58 million subscribers on its books, said that it was "unfair" to allow such behaviour to continue unchallenged, given that 97 per cent of its subscriber base did not hog the network's bandwidth.

Sprint recently expressed concerns about punishing download hogs – citing America's new net neutrality rules. In fact, it binned its "network management technique" in June this year, only to U-turn on that decision just yesterday.

 As of now, customers who "occupy an unreasonable share of network resources" will see the service throttled for the remainder of their monthly billing cycle, warned Sprint CTO John Saw." 'via Blog this'

CGI 20 Years Conference on Net Neutrality: Marsden slides

Presentation to CGI 20Years Net Neutrality Marsden: "Noam 1994: Common Carriage • Regretted & predicted end of common carriage • Information service Title I Communications Act 1934 • But the debate is much older… De Sola Pool (1983) Technologies of Freedom? Kingsbury Commitment (1913) AT&T universal service o Gladstone (1844) Railways Act UK • Common carriage is FRAND Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory treatment o permits apples and oranges charges! • Mergers: cable TV and broadband companies • AT&T/MediaOne and AOL/TimeWarner • Lessig and Lemley FCC submission:‘The end of End-to-End’ o(original May 1999, article 2001) • Fear of abuse of freedom of expression So net neutrality debate began in the last millenium 

Council of Europe Human Rights Commission • Mass Media Directorate, Strasbourg, France [1999] Pluralism in the Multi-Channel TV Market: Suggestions for Regulatory Scrutiny • MM-S-PL [99]12 Def2

Competition in telecom markets - European Commission

Competition in telecom markets - European Commission: "The merger would have created the largest mobile network operator in Denmark and would have resulted in a highly concentrated market structure.

If the deal had materialised, there would have been two large mobile operators – the merged entity and the former national monopolist, TDC. Between them, they would have had around 80% of the market. The third, smaller player would have been Hi3G.

The two merging companies already operated a joint network, which offers a network of similarly high quality as the network of the former incumbent TDC.

Of course, this fact is highly relevant in our assessment of mergers, as a high network quality can be achieved without having to sacrifice retail competition.

According to our analysis, the merger would have had anti-competitive unilateral effects across the board from retail private and business customers to wholesale customers and co-ordinated effects at least on certain retail customers." 'via Blog this'

BEREC work on net neutrality in 2016

Consultation open this month, work to be conducted largely in secret:
"BEREC has the task to develop guidelines for the implementation of the obligations of NRAs related to the supervision, enforcement and transparency measures for ensuring an open Internet access. Therefore, BEREC will especially ensure a common approach to net neutrality rules.
In addition to this BEREC will have a close look and get actively involved in the announced revision process of the Universal Service Directive as part of the review of the regulatory framework giving priority to user protection"
Deliverables: Public consultation on draft Guidelines after P2/2016Adoption of Guidelines within 9 months after entry into force (dependent on date of adoption)
It is important that quality monitoring is considered trustworthy among stakeholders, in particular within an evolving policy area as net neutrality, and a harmonised approach broadly supported by regulators could contribute to this. The collaborative functionality proposal would include enhanced features such as cross-border performance measurements and multi-country monitoring data analysis. The common system could also function as a platform for collaboration between regulators and facilitate development and testing of new monitoring methods and measurement tools which can be gradually phased in by individual participating regulators. The 2015 BEREC NN QoS Feasibility study will be the basis for the BoR to take a decision on whether to move forward to specifying an opt-in quality monitoring system (with a separate decision on whether to establish it to be taken in 2017).
Deliverables: Description of the framework for NRAs to collaborate in an opt-in quality monitoring system – P1/2017 (subject to a BoR decision) Overall system requirement specification for the opt-in quality monitoring system – P1/2017 (subject to a BoR decision) BEREC regulatory toolkit for NN QoS assessment – P1/2017

Slovenia and Netherlands formal objection to Council position on net neutrality/zero rating

30 September:
SL: "Slovenia fears that the new arrangements will result in a two-layer Internet: a slow 'best effort' service model and a high-speed Internet with guaranteed quality for an additional charge. Slovenia believes that this is the wrong response to the competitive challenges facing the European industry in the global digital market. Also, given the current legal protection of Internet neutrality in Slovenia, we cannot support the final TSM regulation."
NL: "Effective net neutrality rules also require discriminatory pricing practices to be clearly prohibited. Such a clear ban on price discrimination is unfortunately not included in the final compromise. The Netherlands will therefore be obliged to withdraw this ban from its national net neutrality rules, even though it was applied effectively. The lack of a clear ban on price discrimination has been a fundamental concern for the Netherlands throughout the negotiations. This fundamental concern is expressed by a vote against the Regulation."