Abstraction

Interesting post in Financial Times today.

Personally, I think that net neutrality will force operators to innovate a bit — this isn’t about discriminating against heaviest users, it’s about changing the business model from flat rate all-you-can-eat access to one in which heavy usage isn’t a problem that requires random throttling. Operators should offer access that does NOT include video, VOIP, or P2P unless the user pays an extra fee for access to those services (for example).

Qualcomm, the world’s biggest maker of chips for mobile phones, has entered the net neutrality debate in the US with its chief executive calling for heavy data users to be discriminated against as wireless networks reach capacity.
Paul Jacobs’ call at the CTIA wireless industry conference in San Diego came a day after Julius Genachowski, head of the Federal Communications Commission, warned that there was not enough room available on the airwaves for the “explosion” in wireless data traffic.

Mr Jacobs said he had given the FCC chairman his views on “traffic shaping” as one solution to what the FCC describes as a “looming spectrum crisis”.

He described traffic shaping as “the ability to say: ‘let’s be fair, this person’s moved a lot of data, this person’s used a little’, if they’re paying the same amount, then the person who’s used less will get more access”.
John Donovan, AT&T’s chief technology officer, told the conference that smartphones and the applications they ran had caused a 5,000 per cent increase in data usage over three years.

“We will need to manage our way through data-hungry applications or devices on our network that would degrade the experience for others,” he said.

Supporters of net neutrality say there should be no discrimination on a free and open internet.
Internet providers should not block, speed up or slow down web content based on its source, ownership or destination.

Mr Jacobs said this “more radical notion” of net neutrality was born out of the internet bubble and the notion that bits of data were free, when in fact they had now become very expensive for providers.
“Regulators may not know that, the lawmakers may not know that, and so we need to make that clear, and it’s very obvious that we are pushing the limits of the amount of capacity we have.”

Mr Jacobs said it would perhaps be too intrusive to go down the route of saying one internet service was fine on a network and another was not, but operators needed to be able to manage their networks.
In his speech, Mr Genachowski had said that the FCC had not yet decided what measures to take to preserve an open internet. Proceedings would begin this month to establish “rules of the road”.

He conceded that mobile had unique congestion issues and the last thing the FCC wanted was to impose “heavy-handed and prescriptive regulation”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf650104-b463-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html