Net Neutrality Debate Hinders Move to Managed Services, AT&T Says
The role managed services already play on broadband networks has gotten muddled in the net neutrality debate, panelists said Friday at a discussion hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Forum. Speakers said competition is thriving but quality of service (QoS) issues will continue to get significant attention as the net neutrality debate continues in Congress and at the FCC.
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There are few “black and whites” in the debate over managed service, said ITIF President Robert Atkinson. “We keep learning more as the technology changes,” he said. “The notion that somehow we can come up with a sort of one-size-fits-all 10 commandments that we will live with for 100 years is to me a ludicrous idea.” Atkinson said he uses Skype video to speak with his son and QoS issues often color the experience. “I would like it to work well every weekend,” he said. “I think we need a new movement, which is `I want my QoS.’ I think we need buttons and hats and t-shirts.’
Hank Hultquist, an AT&T vice president, said net neutrality arguments have complicated the move to offer more managed services. “The debate should not be about how fast websites load,” he said. “It should be about applications that need QoS … things that are more interactive, more realtime.” AT&T offers business customers choices, he said. For an extra charge, they can pay to have their packets move in real time.
"One of the big barriers is this whole debate about net neutrality,” Hultquist said. “Every time another backbone comes to AT&T and says `do you want to enable interdomain QoS,’ the question gets forwarded to the regulatory people and the legal people rather than the engineers. If we could get the net neutrality debate in a position where everyone knows it’s okay for networks to talk about interdomain QoS, that would probably be the thing we could do the most that would act to remove the barriers."
University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Christopher Yoo warned that net neutrality rules could tend to freeze technology in place. Rules would also be difficult to enforce, he said. “One thing we have learned from nondiscrimination in antitrust is that when you have services that are not standardized and vary in quality, nondiscrimination rules are very hard to enforce, because it’s hard to figure out what’s discrimination."
Proposals to offer companies like Skype preferential treatment on networks raise red flags for net neutrality advocates, ITIF Senior Fellow Richard Bennett said. “The way the net neutrality advocates hear this is not that you want to make Skype work better, it’s that you want to make somebody’s website load faster than somebody else’s website, so you have to have deep pockets to pay for this service, which has something to do with making somebody’s content more available than other people’s content,” he said. “That’s not really the point. We're talking about means for enabling new applications."
Immersive video conferencing used by many companies for communications between branches requires these companies to rely on private connections because the Internet today can’t handle the connections, Bennett said. Half the traffic on Cisco’s network today is telepresence, he noted. “What we would like to do is enrich the public Internet enough so that that application can run on the public Internet” as a managed service, he said. “The benefit to consumers is that when people are not using telepresence, then that bandwidth and the circuitry that’s there to support telepresence can be used to support the regular Internet and make everything else run faster.”
There’s already lots of competition among backbone providers for companies like Vonage or Skype if they seek managed services, said Charles Jackson, adjunct electrical engineering professor at George Washington University. “Vonage is a big guy and if they don’t like the deal they get from AT&T they go across the street to Level 3,” he said. “If AT&T doesn’t sell it to them Level 3 will and Level has got a real good national network and there are other choices out there as well."
Jackson, ex-House Communications Subcommittee staff engineer, doesn’t see Congress stepping in to offer much guidance on net neutrality. “It’s very hard to move communications legislation,” he said. “Constituents don’t care much about and consequently it’s all Washington interest group politics and many conflicting interests and there’s not much urgency.” Jackson said he expects the FCC will ultimately have to make a decision without guidance from Congress and any decision it makes will be headed to court.