U.S., ALLIES TRY TO BAR PRESCRIPTIVE ITU ACTION ON IP TELEPHONY
U.S., along with allies such as Canada and U.K., called on ITU policy forum in Geneva this week not to take prescriptive action on development of IP telephony networks to protect revenue from older, circuit-switched systems. At World Telecom Policy Forum on IP telephony Thurs., representatives of Arab states, some African countries and parts of Latin America and Asia continued to question costs and potentially lost revenue from shifting telephony traffic to IP networks. U.S. raised concerns about proposal circulated by Syria this week that would stipulate backward compatibility for new IP telephony networks and existing public switched telephone networks (PSTN), so neither would make other obsolete. At our deadline, drafting groups still were working on details of opinions that would be up for approval at closing session of forum today (Fri.). It was unclear whether or how Syrian proposal might change, U.S. officials said. “The meeting has conformed to what we expected, which is to say that there is a great deal of caution among many national delegations about the impact of this new kind of service… on their existing telephone systems,” said U.S. official in conference call from Geneva.
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Syria’s proposal, which has support of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, calls for ITU to produce clearer definition of IP telephony, U.S. official said. Once definition is set, proposal clears way for discussion of service characteristics and regulations. Proposal also would ensure there’s way to measure traffic across IP telephony networks “while maintaining government control over country codes and numbering that would route the traffic,” U.S. official said. Proposal also would call for studies related to those subjects.
“This is a document which has posed quite a bit of controversy in the room and it is a document that the U.S. has raised questions about,” U.S. official said. “It’s prescriptive. It’s reached conclusions without the studies first being done and it seems to be out of context to the forum that we are at.” Document provides glimpse of concerns that some developing countries have raised during conference on how to balance lost revenue from formerly monopoly circuit-switched systems to broader services that packet-switched networks bring (CD March 7 p1).
Representative of Poland said in floor discussion Thurs. that one driver of concerns over IP network operations that “is not spelled out too clearly in my opinion is the settlement rates, the accounting rates.” He said: “Some of the developing countries are afraid they might be losing revenue from settlements.” While PSTN infrastructure has clearly established settlement rate regime, nascent IP telephony systems don’t have such system in place, he said. “Clearly, we shouldn’t be hiding that this is one of the problems and probably one of the major problems here,” he said.
“In my mind, the single most important role for the ITU is to help developing countries through this period of transition from circuit-switched voice networks into more sophisticated networks,” another U.S. official said in Thurs. background briefing. That shift is potentially destabilizing for companies, some of which have govt. ownership, he said. “The world we see evolving, not just in the U.S., is one that is much more competitive, based on new technologies.”
ITU forums don’t produce regulatory measures but generate “opinions” for member countries to consider. Some of issues raised on IP telephony may emerge in 2002 at next ITU plenipotentiary meeting during which treaty-level decisions are made, U.S. official said. How that could emerge during plenipotentiary still was unclear, he said. “A lot of it rests on the contributions of member states,” he said. “We are taking it [the forum] very seriously as a kind of preview of what could come.”
Proposed requirements for backward compatibility and criteria for IP telephony go “far beyond what the forum is intended to do,” U.S. delegation leader Richard Beaird said in Thurs. debate that ITU streamed over Internet. “It seems to reach conclusions,” he said of Syria’s proposal. “We would think the study itself would first need to occur before conclusions could be reached. There needs to be some redrafting that would eliminate the prescriptive tone of this.” Canadian representative echoed U.S. concerns, saying his country’s delegation would prefer to “see a more broadbased, more balanced way” of directing work of different sectors of ITU.
Syrian representative Nabil Kisrawi stressed challenges of pinning down comparative costs of IP-based networks vs. circuit- switching. Some developing countries have taken issue this week with cost estimates that IP telephony could be up to 8 times cheaper than voice traffic over legacy systems. Kisrawi criticized one analyst’s estimate that voice service could be as cheap as $40 per month for DSL system providing speeds of 640 kbps. “To have the Internet, you need a computer at 2 ends. Who is going to pay for it?” Kisrawi said telephones could cost as cheap as $10. “Can you give me a computer for $10?” Representative of Tanzania also questioned whether IP telephony cost estimates took full account of extent to which developing countries had lower PC penetration. “For Third World countries, we are not paying $40 per month for 640 kbps. We are using circuit compression for international circuits,” he said. “The argument of saying that IP telephony, for me, goes away and in fact it’s going to be more expensive in my case.”
Representatives of several telecom companies, including Genuity and Concert, said it was extremely difficult to provide generalized cost comparisons between IP telephony and circuit- switched systems because each network operation was different. “It’s important for an operator to look at future traffic,” Concert representative said. “Planning for data networks or IP networks is based on a projection that data traffic will far exceed plain voice traffic. Therefore one would construct IP on an expectation that data will exceed voice,” she said.