Posted by: Joan Marsh on October 25, 2010 at 9:56 pm
Anyone who believes that FCC-mandated net neutrality could or should be applied to wireless networks ought to read Mike Dano’s recent article at FierceWireless. Dano’s focus is an FCC filing earlier this year by T-Mobile which described in detail the damage caused by a poorly designed instant messaging app that pinged the network with substantial frequency creating signaling problems:
“These signaling problems not only caused network overload problems that affected all [local] broadband users; it also ended up forcing [a reengineering of the radio architecture] to address this never-before-seen signaling issue.”
According to the filing, this one application caused an increase in data use of as much as 1,200 percent on a single device.
To be clear, I am not casting stones. We have been on the frontlines of the mobile broadband data and app revolution, working and investing furiously to keep pace with the exploding demand for wireless data services. But this experience shows once again how the advocated “all apps are created equal” regulatory straightjacket, which doesn’t even make sense for the wired web, is spectacularly ill-suited for wireless networks.
Even pro-Net neutrality advocate Robert Cringley has acknowledged that a handful of Slingbox streams are enough to overtake the capacity of a cell tower.
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Posted by: Hank Hultquist on October 19, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Day three of “House” Held Hostage.
While many (ok, just a few) folks are focused on the fate of “House,” the medical TV drama on Fox, we here in Tech/Telecom Policy Land are watching a sea change in what the Fox/Cablevision drama is telling us about the net neutrality debate.
Earlier this year, we filed comments in the FCC’s Open Internet proceeding, explaining, at great length, exactly why the “terminating monopoly” theory of net neutrality regulation (one of the policy justifications used for imposing rules on ISPs), just didn’t make sense in the Internet ecosystem.
Well, in a semi-controlled experiment still underway, Fox and Cablevision are doing a pretty good job proving that point. Some would even say the (ISP) King is dead. Long live the (Content) King. Fox and Cablevision are embroiled in a dispute over retransmission consent that has resulted in Cablevision customers losing access to Fox channels. Over the weekend, the dispute briefly escalated to the point where Fox was allegedly blocking Cablevision’s Internet customers from accessing Fox content on Hulu and Fox.com.
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Posted by: Hank Hultquist on October 13, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Kudos to Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld for sharpening his lawyer pencil and addressing some of the legal issues around the (apparently) fascinating issue of “paid prioritization.” In a recent blog post, Harold explained how, under Title II, the FCC might approach various business models that include payment for prioritization.
Harold’s basic point was that the FCC might either permit or prohibit particular instances of “paid prioritization” based at least in part on decisions the FCC has made in the past. I agree completely on this point. Contrary to the title of Harold’s blog, I don’t think anyone at AT&T has said that Title II would “require” the FCC to permit any and all practices that include both payment and prioritization. But, if someone has, then he or she should go back to common carrier school.
What I and others have said is that under Title II the FCC could not a priori (for some reason lawyers like Latin) ban all practices that may combine payment and prioritization, since in the past they have allowed some practices that do so. Under Title II, carriers would be free in the first instance to offer such services and concerned parties would be free to challenge them. At which point, the process Harold describes would kick in and the FCC would have to decide whether the service in question is “unreasonable,” or “unjustly and unreasonably discriminatory,” yadda, yadda, yadda (or blah, blah, blah, as Harold prefers).
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