telco_telco 24/04/2014 12:17 Page 1
Bandwidth bottlenecks
Steve Gold tackles the knotty problem
of Net Neutrality and its implications
for Europe’s cellcos.
epending on who
you talk to, Netflix
accounts for
somewhere between 15%
and 25% of peak time
capacity on the Tier 1 ISP
networks on both sides of
the Atlantic - causing
bandwidth and bottleneck
headaches with a growing
number of ISPs.
Some users – notably on
AT&T and Verizon’s networks in
the US – have even reported
stuttering of their streamed
IPTV transmissions as their
ISPs have struggled to cope with
the bandwidth usage issues.
This perhaps explains why,
earlier this year, Netflix struck a
direct-peering deal with
Comcast, the US carrier – and
other deals are considered likely
across Europe later this year.
This direct peering has
profound implications for Net
Neutrality – the right for all
Internet traffic to be treated
equally, no matter what its
origins.
And it doesn’t take a genius
to understand that these
bandwidth issues also have the
capacity to cause severe
problems for the cellular
industry - which is already
grappling with the issues caused
by a massive surge in mobile
data volumes triggered by the
arrival of 4G services.
Just to make life interesting,
D
26 EUROMEDIA
AT&T in the US has been testing
what it calls its ‘Sponsored Data’
programme, under which the
data originator pays AT&T to
carry the data. This allows
certain mobile applications to
avoid being counted toward a
subscriber’s data cap. AT&T has
compared the product to its tollfree 1-800 services.
Here in Europe, meanwhile,
Telenor does not count
Facebook usage towards its
subscriber’s data cap, whilst
Telia takes the same approach
to Spotify. These are just two
examples of discount content
tariffing.
The danger with toll-free
data services, as I’ve started to
call them, is that mobile users
will be incentivised to access
services provided by those firms
with the means to cover the data
costs, rather than the company
offering the best service.
This distorts the free market
in favour of larger companies,
and effectively prevents startups from entering the business.
It also has the potential to
severely undermine the Internet
advertising market – the
premise on which entire
swathes of free-to-access
content is made available to end
users.
AT&T has also been busy in
other areas, developing an
application-aware system
designed to restrict users from
engaging in what it
calls ‘non-permissible’
Steve Gold bandwidth-intensive
From his base in
activities such as file
Sheffield, England,
Steve has been a sharing or movie
telecommunications downloading. It has
journ