Net Neutrality Rules Will Need to Accommodate Differences Between Fixed, Mobile Networks, Roundtable Panelists Say
The FCC took a deep dive Friday into what has emerged as a key net neutrality issue: what constitutes a reasonable network management practice. Chairman Tom Wheeler opened a roundtable session by recognizing that engineers will have a huge role to play as the FCC develops net neutrality rules. Panelists agreed that, at least in part, wireless networks are fundamentally different (CD Sept 19 p1).
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Wheeler quoted from remarks by a panelist from an earlier roundtable: “The more you empower engineers the better things will be,” he said. “There are serious technical issues” that need to be addressed, he said.
Engineers “are what’s going to keep us safe,” said Don Bowman, Sandvine chief technology officer.
The panel, the last of the week, was moderated by Scott Jordan, the commission’s new CTO, and Henning Schulzrinne, former FCC CTO, now a technology adviser to the commission. The stated topic was the “Technological Aspects of an Open Internet.” The panel did not have a representative from any of the telecom or cable companies that provide the backbone of the networks used by most Americans.
When the discussion turned late in the day to wireless versus wireline, Schulzrinne led the questioning. He acknowledged differences between the two but asked whether there aren’t also many similarities. For example, on scheduling, the tools for mobile and fixed aren’t “all that different,” he said. Jordan asked about network management and unique problems faced by wireless carriers and whether the management tools need to be different. But Jordan gave few hints on what policy calls he will urge the commission to make as it finalizes net neutrality rules.
One key difference is the extremely quick rollout of mobile apps, Bowman said. It can be very difficult to predict that an app will prove “buggy” or popular and cause “immense problems” or a “sudden influx of new behavior.” He cited what happened when Facebook turned on automatic streaming. “There was a huge impact on the network.” In wireless “you go from zero to 100 million users extremely rapidly,” he said. “We've never seen that before."
The networks are 80-90 percent the same, but “in that last hop” wireless clearly is different, said Al Jette, head-North American industry environment at Nokia Networks. Jette said his company supports transparency and blocking rules for wireless. “The mobile broadband industry wants to keep customers satisfied with their mobile broadband experience,” he said. But wireless has to be held to a different standard in other areas, Jette said. “Some aspects of net neutrality, such as requiring a minimum data rate for users, are not practical or even possible to achieve in a mobile environment."
Everyone has experienced dropped calls, Jette said. “These are mostly due to radio coverage issues that do not exist for the wireline system.” Carriers “have a limited amount of spectrum” and it must be shared “among all active users in that cell,” he said. “A wireless operator is limited by spectrum, technology and cell sites."
Variability is the biggest problem for wireless carriers, said Jim Kurose, professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Both fixed and mobile face variability in demand but in wireless there is also “variability in the physical environment,” he said.
Panelists warned that the growth of the Internet and what it’s expected to do will only accelerate. They discussed massive changes since the FCC approved initial net neutrality rules in 2010.
Five years ago, the capacity of the largest router in existence was one terabyte, said Hans-Juergen Schmidtke, vice president- product management at. Juniper Networks. “Now we're talking about routers of the magnitude of hundreds of terabytes,” he said. “The capacity in core networks did not even follow Moore’s law, it actually exceeded it, with innovation in routing and routing protocols."
Some of the new applications coming will focus on transmitting more than just audio and video, said Klara Nahrstedt, computer science professor at the University of Illinois-Champaign. “It might be smell. It might be pressure,” she said. “There is going to be very diverse sensory information that will need to be somehow transmitted, encoded.”
"Things always go faster,” Kurose said. More than that, there has been a “fundamental restructuring of what end-to-end applications mean,” with a “convergence of computation, communication and storage,” Kurose said.
The biggest single change of the past five years is that consumers now demand “real-time entertainment,” Bowman said. Five years ago, it was not clear a majority of Americans would watch movies and other programs online, he said. “That’s driven a lot of investment; It’s driven a lot of consolidation in how things interconnect,” he said. “Some would argue it’s made the networks less efficient because you build a network for its peak, not its average utilization.” Wireless also has changed since 2009 and smartphones are now “supercomputers in your pocket,” he said.
Wheeler said the FCC has gotten input from across America, including cities large and small, during the roundtables. “It’s really terrific,” he said. By the end of Friday’s roundtables, “we will have had 12 hours of in-depth discussions,” he said. “It’s fabulous that people are watching.”