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Network Neutrality - FCC issues NPRM

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I wrote earlier about FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s plans for regulations aimed at network neutrality. The FCC today came through with a Notice of Proposed Rule Making. Here are the relevant documents from the FCC website:

Summary Presentation: Acrobat
NPRM: Word | Acrobat
News Release: Word | Acrobat
Genachowski Statement: Word | Acrobat
Copps Statement: Word | Acrobat
McDowell Statement: Word | Acrobat
Clyburn Statement: Word | Acrobat
Baker Statement: Word | Acrobat

The NPRM itself is a hefty document, 107 pages long; if you just want the bottom line, the Summary Presentation is short and a little more readable than the press release. The comment period closes in mid-January, and the FCC will respond to the comments in March. I hesitate to guess when the rules will actually be released - this is hugely controversial: 40,000 comments filed to date. Here is a link to a pro-neutrality advocate. Here is a link to a pro-competition advocate. I believe that the FCC is doing a necessary thing here, and that the proposals properly address the legitimate concerns of the ISPs.

Here is the story from Reuters, and from AP.

Posted in FCC, network, neutrality | No Comments »

Femtocell pricing chutzpah

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

It’s like buying an airplane ticket then getting charged extra to get on the plane.

The cellular companies want you to buy cellular service then pay extra to get signal coverage. Gizmodo has a coolly reasoned analysis.

AT&T Wireless is doing the standard telco thing here, conflating pricing for different services. It is sweetening the monthly charge option for femtocells by offering unlimited calling. A more honest pricing scheme would be to provide femtocells free to anybody who has coverage problem, and to offer the femtocell/unlimited calling option as a separate product. Come to think of it, this is probably how AT&T really plans for it to work: if a customer calls to cancel service because of poor coverage, I expect AT&T will offer a free femtocell as a retention incentive.

It is ironic that this issue is coming up at the same time as the wireless carriers are up in arms about the FCC’s new network neutrality initiative. Now that smartphones all have Wi-Fi, if the handsets were truly open we could use our home Wi-Fi signal to get data and voice services from alternative providers when we were at home. No need for femtocells. (T-Mobile@Home is a closed-network version of this.)

Presumably something like this is on the roadmap for Google Voice, which is one of the scenarios that causes the MNOs to fight network neutrality tooth and nail.

Posted in AT&T, FCC, FMC, Google, Policy, VoIP, Wi-Fi, dual-mode, femtocells, network, neutrality | No Comments »

FCC to issue Net Neutrality rules

Monday, September 21st, 2009

In a speech to the Brookings Institution today, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the FCC is initiating a public process to formulate net neutrality rules for broadband network operators based on six principles:

  1. Open access to Content
  2. Open access to Applications
  3. Open access to Services
  4. Freedom for users to attach devices to the network
  5. Non-discrimination for content and applications
  6. Transparency of network management practices

The first four of these principles were initially articulated by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell in 2004 as the “Four Freedoms.” Numbers 5 and 6 are new. The forthcoming rules will apply these six principles to all broadband access technologies, including wireless.

Genachowski made the case that Internet openness is essential and that it is threatened. He acknowledged that network providers need to manage their networks, and said that they can control spam and help to maintain intellectual property integrity without compromising these principles.

The threats to Internet openness come from reduced competition among ISPs and conflicts of interest within the ISPs, because they are also trying to be content providers.

Genachowski rightly sees these threats as serious:

This is not about protecting the internet against imaginary dangers. We’re seeing the breaks and cracks emerge, and they threaten to change the Internet’s fundamental architecture of openness. This would shrink opportunities for innovators, content creators and small businesses around the country, and limit the full and free expression the internet promises. This is about preserving and maintaining something profoundly successful and ensuring that it’s not distorted or undermined.

These rules will be very tough to enforce. The fundamental structure of the business works against them. A more effective approach may be to break up the ISPs into multiple independent companies, for example: Internet access operations, wide area network operations, and service/content/application operations. The neutrality problem is in the access networks - the WANs and the services are healthier. With only the telcos (DSL and fiber) and the MSOs (cable) there is not enough competition for a free market to develop. This is why Intel pushed so hard for WiMAX as a third mode of broadband access, though it hasn’t panned out that way. It is also why municipal dark fiber makes sense, following the model of roads, water and sewers.

Posted in FCC, network, neutrality | No Comments »

Sharing Wi-Fi 2 - Atheros turns a cellphone into an access point

Monday, February 9th, 2009

There are several smartphone applications that allow a cell phone to act as a wireless WAN router and Wi-Fi access point, creating a wireless LAN with Internet access. For the (jailbroken) iPhone there’s PDAnet, for Windows Mobile there’s WM Wi-Fi Router and for Symbian there’s Walking HotSpot and JoikuSpot. Now Atheros has proposed to bake this functionality into their low power Wi-Fi chipset.

An idea that is as patent jargon goes “obvious to one skilled in the art,” can sometimes have obvious handicaps to one experienced in the industry. While exposing a broadband wireless data connection through a smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio is massively useful to consumers, it is unlikely to appeal to network service providers, who would prefer you to buy a wireless data card (and an additional service subscription) for your laptop rather than to simply use the wireless data connection that you are already paying for on your phone.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. I will be stunned if Atheros’ implementation appears on any phone subsidized by (or even distributed by) a wireless carrier, until they can figure out a way to charge extra for it. As Tim Wu says in his Wireless Carterfone paper (the Wireless Carterfone concept was promoted by Skype, and rejected by the FCC last April):

carriers are in a position to exercise strong control over the design of mobile equipment. They have used that power to force equipment developers to omit or cripple many consumer-friendly features.

The billing issue may not be that intractable. Closely related models already exist. You can get routers from Cisco and other vendors that have a slot for a wireless WAN card, and the service providers have subscription plans for them. More similarly, this could be viewed as a kind of “tethering” But tethering only lets one PC at a time access the wireless WAN connection - unless that PC happens to support My Wi-Fi.

Update: Marvell has announced a similar capability for its 88W8688 chip.

Posted in Wi-Fi, dual-mode, network, neutrality, smartphone | 1 Comment »

Transparency and neutrality

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Google and the New America Foundation have been working together for some time on White Spaces. Now they have (with PlanetLab and some academic researchers) come up with an initiative to inject some hard facts into the network neutrality debate.

The idea is that if users can easily measure their network bandwidth and quality of service, they will be able to hold their ISPs to the claims in their advertisements and “plans.” As things stand, businesses buying data links from network providers normally have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which specifies minimum performance characteristics for their connections. For consumers, things are different. ISPs do not issue SLAs to their consumer customers. When they advertise uplink and downlink speeds, these speeds are “typical” or “maximum,” but they don’t specify a minimum speed, and they don’t offer any guarantees of latency, jitter, packet loss or even integrity of the packet contents. For example, here’s an excerpt from the Verizon Online Terms of Service:

VERIZON DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE OR EQUIPMENT PROVIDED BY VERIZON WILL PERFORM AT A PARTICULAR SPEED, BANDWIDTH OR DATA THROUGHPUT RATE, OR WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, SECURE…

Businesses pay more than consumers for their bandwidth, and providing SLAs is one of the reasons. Consumers would probably not be willing to pay more for SLAs, but they can still legitimately expect to know what they are paying for. The Measurement Lab data will be able to confirm or disprove accusations that ISPs are intentionally impairing traffic of some types.

This is a complicated issue, because one man’s traffic blocking is another man’s network management, and what a consumer might consider acceptable use (like BitTorrent) may violate an ISP’s Acceptable Use Policy (Verizon:”…it is a violation of… this AUP to… generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic;”). The arguments can go round in circles until terms like “excessive” and “unlimited” are defined numerically and measurements are made. So Measurement Lab is a great step forward in the Network Neutrality debate, and should be applauded by consumers and service providers alike.

Posted in Google, Policy, QoS, network, neutrality | No Comments »

White Spaces Videos

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

I found this “grass roots” video on Google’s Public Policy Blog. That blog also has some interesting posts on related issues by Richard Whitt and Vint Cerf.

Looking at this provoked me to go to YouTube and search for other White Spaces related videos. I was interested to find a coordinated (by Google) effort by the proponents of White Spaces, and on the other side basically nothing - just this incredibly lame video that takes 7 minutes to tell us that microphones are used in sports broadcasting (don’t waste your time watching more than a few seconds - it’s the same all the way through).

It’s odd that the main opponents of Whitespaces (NAB and MSTV) haven’t put rebuttal videos on YouTube yet, and even odder that they haven’t found a need to present any more thoughtful analyses of the issue, equivalent (but presumably opposite) to those of Chris Sacca or Tim Wu. Instead, I have the impression that their strategy rests on the two prongs of public fear-mongering and bare-knuckled political lobbying.

Posted in Google, Policy, White Spaces, controversies, interference, neutrality | No Comments »

White Space update

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The forthcoming transition to digital TV transmissions will free up about half the spectrum currently allocated to TV broadcasters. This freed-up spectrum was the subject of the FCC’s just-concluded 700MHz Auction, which yielded about $20 billion in license fees to the government. The fate of the other half of the TV spectrum, the part that will remain assigned to TV broadcasts after the digital transition, remains in contention.

This spectrum will be shared by licensed TV broadcast channels and wireless microphones, but even so much of it will remain mostly unused. These chunks of spectrum left idle by their licensees are called “White Spaces.” The advent of “spectrum sensing” radio technology means that it is now theoretically possible for transmitters to identify and use White Spaces without interfering with the licensed use of the spectrum.

The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and a First Report and Order to explore whether this is a good idea, and if so, how to handle it.

The potential users of the White Spaces have formed roughly two camps, those who see it best suited for fixed broadband access (similar to the first version of WiMAX), and those who see it as also suited for “personal/portable” applications (similar to Wi-Fi).

Google, along with Microsoft and some other computer industry companies, advocates the personal/portable use. The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) is currently lab-testing some devices from Microsoft and others to see if their spectrum-sensing capabilities are adequate to address the concerns of the broadcast industry, which fears that personal/portable use will cause interference.

Google filed an ex-parte letter with the FCC on March 24th, weighing in on the White Spaces issue. The letter is well worth reading. It concedes that in the introductory phases it makes sense to supplement spectrum sensing with other technologies, like geo-location databases and beacons. The letter asserts that these additional measures render moot the current squabble over a malfunction in the devices in the first round of FCC testing, and that the real-world data gathered in this introductory phase would give the FCC confidence ultimately to repeal the supplemental measures, and perhaps to extend open spectrum-sensing uses to the entire radio spectrum, leading to a nirvana of effectively unlimited bandwidth for everybody.

The kicker is in the penultimate paragraph, where Google recycles an earlier proposal it made for the 700MHz spectrum auction, suggesting a real-time ongoing “dynamic auction” of bandwidth. Google now suggests applying this dynamic auction idea to the white spaces:

For each available spectrum band, the licensee could bestow the right to transmit an amount of power for a unit of time, with the total amount of power in any location being limited to a specified cap. This cap would be enforced by measurements made by the communications devices. For channel capacity efficiency reasons, bands should be allocated in as large chunks as possible. The airwaves auction would be managed via the Internet by a central clearinghouse.

Current expectations are for spectrum-sensing use of the whites spaces to be unlicensed (free, like Wi-Fi). Now Google appears to be proposing “sub-licensed” rather than unlicensed spectrum use. The word “auction” implies that this could be a revenue producer for TV broadcast licensees, who received their licenses free from the government. This is a very different situation than the original context of the dynamic auction proposal, which applied to spectrum for which licensees paid $20 billion. Depending how it is implemented, it could fulfill the telcos’ dream of directly charging content providers for bandwidth on a consumer’s Internet access link, a dream that Google has opposed in the network neutrality wars. Google may ultimately regret opening the door to this one, even though it presumably sees itself cashing in as the ideal candidate to operate the “central clearinghouse.”

Update April 10th: Interesting related posts from Michael Marcus and Sascha Meinrath.

Posted in FCC, Google, Policy, Spectrum, White Spaces, controversies, interference, network, neutrality | No Comments »

Open wireless networks for America?

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

David Hattey, CEO of FirstHand Technologies points out in an opinion piece on CNET that US mobile network operators may be opening up their phones to third party applications. He cites two announcements from last November: Apple’s announcement of an SDK for the iPhone, and Verizon’s “Any Apps, Any device” announcement.

This point was echoed in the New York Times article on the 700MHz spectrum auction that I wrote about earlier today:

The new rules have already begun to reshape the rapidly emerging wireless broadband industry. It prompted Verizon and AT&T to change their policies and open their networks to new applications and devices, just as Google and its allies had hoped.

“The issue has melted away,” Mr. Martin said. “It is no longer as controversial, as the major providers have moved to open up their networks.”

Posted in Apple, cellular, controversies, iPhone, neutrality | No Comments »

WSJ tells it like it is

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

There’s a great lead article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, explaining how cell phone manufacturers and cellular service providers have opposing interests concerning phone features and how they are delivered.

The article pitches the fight as one over which of these two will end up controlling the data services on the phone. The interests of consumers would be best served by neither of these outcomes. The essence of the Internet is its openness. Nobody controls the services. Ideally, the mobile model of Internet access will follow the wireline model, where neither the device manufacturer nor the Internet access provider exerts any control over the content of the network data packets.

Posted in cellular, network, neutrality | 1 Comment »

Brough Turner on Network Neutrality

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

The estimable Brough Turner has written at length on the topic of Net Neutrality.

The first thing to read on this topic is his blog entry “Why there’s no Internet QoS and likely never will be”. In this article he makes the point that the only place where QoS measures make a difference is in the access link, and that the best way to ensure access link QoS is by putting a traffic shaping device behind your broadband modem. So no need for anything from your ISP beyond what you already expect, namely bandwidth and uptime.

In this article, Brough advocates a long view, focusing on increasing last-mile bandwidth, pointing out the danger of unintended consequences of regulation. He makes the point that fiber is not a natural monopoly, in the sense that there is adequate revenue per square mile in moderately densely populated cities to sustain multiple runs of fiber to each home. He identifies rights of way restrictions as the real barrier to last mile competition. In a similar spirit, he advocates opening up spectrum for license-exempt operation for last mile access. This article has similar arguments.

In this later article, Brough backs off a little to what seems to me to be a better position, namely regulating dark fiber, and fostering competition above it.

By 2007, Brough had nailed his colors to the mast. In this review of Susan Crawford’s paper, “The Internet and the Project of Communications Law,” he says:

I’d really like to see a national strategy to get as much of the population on dark fiber as possible.

And just a couple of months ago, he proposed a way to do it:

…unfettered municipal experimentation by any of the 22,000 municipalities in the US and/or interested community groups.

So there you have it. A relatively simple, seemingly doable solution to Net Neutrality, implementable by the grass roots, thought through by a smart guy who knows the subject inside and out.

I’m aboard!

Posted in controversies, network, neutrality | 1 Comment »

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Linley Guide to Connectivity Chips for Cellular Handsets
The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.