Euromedia March | Page 26

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