Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘net neutrality’

“A couple of milliseconds can roll out to a $20-million difference in [a trader’s] account at the end of the month,” says Nigel Bayliff, the CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, one of the companies laying down superfast fiber-optic lines.

Companies like Bayliff’s are looking for ways to shave time, and the easiest method is to build a more direct route. Last year, Mississippi-based Spread Networks opened a shorter connection between New York and Chicago that saved about three milliseconds and was estimated to have cost $300 million to develop. Huawei is working with another company, Hibernia Atlantic, to lay the first transatlantic fiber-optic submarine cable in a decade, a $400-million-plus project that will save traders five milliseconds.

To do this, Hibernia is laying nearly 3,000 miles of cable across the Grand Banks off Canada and the North Atlantic, a shorter route that most companies have avoided because it traverses relatively shallow waters. Undersea-cable companies prefer to work at greater depths; they can just drop naked cable down to the ocean floor. At less than a mile deep, though, they must bury armored cable to protect it from ship anchors, fishing trawls, dredging gear, and attacks from sharks, which are drawn to the line’s electricity.

For all the money Hibernia and its clients will make from a 60-millisecond trip across the Atlantic, the installation will be slow. Crews on two ships, the Sovereign and the Cable Innovator, will deploy 24-ton ploughs to cut a trench up to six feet into the seabed, into which they will lay the cable. The top speed is about one mile an hour.

Each ship is outfitted with a dynamic positioning system that keeps it in place while laying cable, regardless of currents or winds. If something gets in the way, such as another submarine cable, the crews will use a remotely operated vehicle equipped with a pair of high-pressure water “swords” to break apart sediment. The ROV then uses a mechanical arm to bury the new cable underneath the obstacle and into the temporarily softened earth. “The seabed always throws up something unexpected,” says Stuart Wilson, the manager of cable-route engineering for Global Marine Systems, the company installing the Hibernia line.

Hibernia says its cable will go live next year, connecting it to Hibernia’s Global Financial Network, which has fiber optics running 15,000 miles between financial centers from Chicago to Frankfurt. But the New York-to-London line could be the company’s biggest draw, providing a competitive advantage of just five milliseconds—about the amount of time it takes a bee to flap its wings.

The Federal Communications Commission voted today to lay down a number of basic rules that ban Internet service providers from blocking specific content and help keep the web open.

The new rules keep ISPs from blocking specific websites and other content. The rules also allow ISPs to throttle web connections if they believe their customers are using too much bandwidth, but require the ISPs to be “reasonable” when doing so. Internet providers also have to have a greater level of transparency.

But wireless telecommunications companies were exempt from the packet discrimination rules — which is a bit of a head scratcher. Mobile web use is growing rapidly and some actually rely on wireless networks for their Internet usage through mobile hot-spot devices. Without those rules in place, wireless companies are free to stop some smartphone users from taking advantage of their data plans by throttling download and upload speeds.

Both Google and Verizon agreed that wireless web access requires a different set of tools and technology. The chief executives for both companies said too many rules would hamper a provider’s ability to optimize its network, a suggestion FCC chairman Julius Genachowski (pictured left) was less than thrilled with. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that both companies had been in discussions for over a year, and that they already had discussions with the FCC.

Government officials have been arguing about net neutrality for some time now. The idea first came up when the FCC ordered Comcast to halt plans to slow Internet traffic for peer-to-peer file sharers. A federal appeals court said that the FCC had overstepped its authority. The vote happened right down party lines, with both Republicans on the committee voting against the new net neutrality rules.

Back when President Barack Obama was campaigning for office, he made net neutrality a big part of his tech policy platform. But as wireless Internet use continues to grow, it’s unclear whether the FCC will step in and begin regulating that space and lay out a new set of net neutrality rules for wireless providers.

Tags: free web, net neutrality

Companies: FCC, Federal Communications Commission, Google, Verizon

People: Eric Schmidt

For those who haven’t been following the debate, what’s at stake here is unfettered access to everything – everything that’s legal anyhow – on the web without interference from internet service providers. Net neutrality, as the notion is called, aims to prevent ISPs from showing favoritism to one web service (say, Netflix streaming over Amazon streaming) or to sell better bandwidth to one company over another. It also aims to keep ISPs from charging entities that consume a lot of bandwidth – again, Netflix streaming is a good example – higher service fees (thus driving up the cost to consumers). Keeping the web open and undiscriminating, the net neutrality argument goes, ensures that online innovation continues unhindered.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski – a proponent of the new net neutrality regulations – describes the as-yet-unseen rule set being voted on as a compromise, a word we’re hearing a lot lately from Washington. They would require neutrality for wireline web providers, ensuring that the wired web remains open.

Unfortunately, the wired web is the web of the last century. The mobile, wireless web is where the internet is going, and providers like AT&T and Verizon will not be beholden to the same regulations as their wireline counterparts. Under the new rules, wireless providers will have to allow unbiased access to web sites, but not necessarily to applications or services. incidentally, this line of thinking is very similar to a vision for net neutrality recently put forth by Verizon and Google.

It essentially means that while the FCC is stepping in on behalf of net neutrality as it pertains to our home and office computers, our smartphones and tablets and the apps thereon – increasingly the way many of us consume bandwidth and information these days – are still subject to the whims and discriminations of service providers.

The wireless web is the future, and if the proposed regulations are passed today, as they are expected to be, advocates of neutrality will get a watered down version of what they wanted: free access to everything for everyone, anywhere the web reaches. So long as you're not using your smartphone.

[NYT]

Tell us what you really think, Verizon. The company yesterday issued a press release titled “Congress Needs to Update the Nation’s Antiquated and Anti-Competitive Telecom Rules” — which, as you can guess, isn’t exactly a love letter to the FCC.

Verizon executive vice president of public affairs Tom Tauke is quoted as saying in the release: “The grinding you hear are the gears churning as policymakers try to fit fast-changing technologies and competitive markets into regulatory boxes built for analog technologies and monopoly markets.”

The company’s frustration isn’t unwarranted. The FCC is still fighting for authority when it comes to regulating the internet, mainly because current telecom rules aren’t suited to the issues we’re facing today like net neutrality. The agency tried to reclassify internet communications in a “third way” that gave it more authority earlier this year — after a US court declared that the FCC didn’t have the authority to impose net neutrality on providers.

Verizon’s position now is even more extreme than its stance earlier this year, when it proposed its policy for an “open internet” together with Google. The company is now proposing four components that it feels are necessary for a new policy to guide the internet: It should be a federal framework; allow for case-by-case rulings; government intervention should be allowed only to protect consumers from harm or to stop anti-competitive activity; and perhaps most importantly, a single federal agency should be given clear jurisdiction.

As Engadget points out, Congress already started looking into a revamp of the Telecommunications Act earlier this year. Perhaps Verizon’s prodding will move things along even more quickly.

Via Engadget

Tags: Internet, net neutrality, policy

Companies: FCC, Google, Verizon

People: Tom Tauke

As we watch the future of the internet drastically moving toward wireless broadband access, a joint policy proposal by Verizon and Google could spell doom for openness on anything but the traditional wired web

For those that may be unaware of the issue, an exceedingly simplified fifteen-second net neutrality primer: The debate pits network providers (like Verizon) against companies and individuals who use said networks to deliver products and services to customers (like Google). As web applications become more central in nearly every aspect of public and private life, the network providers have grown increasingly interested in recouping the massive amounts of money they spend on building and maintaining network infrastructure by charging those companies who use an inordinate amount of bandwidth (like Google) for privileged access and delivery to customers. The internet has never worked this way, so the idea is obviously upsetting to many people, who cite the web's inherent openness as a key, if not the key detail that has allowed it to fundamentally change all of our lives in such a powerful way, and will allow it to continue to do so at the same breakneck pace in the future.

Google and Verizon's plan lays out specific rules to ensure that wireline internet services can not be used for any such tiered or paid access, and that all applications and services delivered over them (as long as they're legal) can be given no preference over any other traffic. That means established bandwidth hogs like YouTube and brand new bandwidth hogs built by Russian teenagers in their bedrooms like Chat Roulette will all get equal access to your eyeballs. This will also theoretically prevent broadband providers from intentionally limiting the speed of all BitTorrent traffic, something they've shown interest in doing in the past to avoid clogging their network with copyrighted materials; the protocol can just as easily be used legally.

But what has net neutrality activists worried--in my opinion, rightly so--is that in the new plan, almost none of these protections apply to wireless networks. Nor do they apply to a more ambiguously defined category of "additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV)" using current wireline networks.

But it's the wireless exemption that strikes the most worry in the hearts of free-internet proponents. As anyone watching the future of telecommunications and the internet will tell you, wireless web access will almost certainly one day overtake traditional wired networks as most people's primary means of getting online. With the last five years' explosion of smartphone usage, we're already watching this happen. Heck, if your home is in a good coverage area, it's entirely feasible today to scrap your monthly cable or DSL broadband services for something like a wireless MiFi hotspot from Verizon or Sprint for all but the most intensive surfing.

Should Google and Verizon's suggested plan be implemented, whoever beams the signal to your MiFi hotspot can shape the traffic of the web however they choose. This means blocking high-bandwidth sites like YouTube, giving preference to one streaming service over another (like only allowing Netflix's Watch Instantly vs. any other movie-streaming service), or blocking certain protocols like BitTorrent altogether.

Their reasoning for this proviso is that current-generation wireless networks are exceedingly fragile to maintain and expensive to build. No one's debating that--just ask anyone who uses an iPhone on AT&T in San Francisco or New York City. But why many see this as shortsighted is because as technology marches on, wireless broadband bandwidth will become a less precious commodity. Remember when we all exclusively used our phone lines to access the internet? It's pretty easy to see that if we were all still connecting with 28.8 modems, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. And the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world wouldn't have to be fighting nearly as hard to maintain control of their networks at the expense of good old fashioned voice telephone calls.

But what happened was, DSL and fiber optic cable technologies sprung up. That shifted the burden and changed the issue from one of maintaining century-old copper wiring to building and maintaining satellite links and fiber optic cables with exponentially more capacity. Still a burden, yes, but a completely new and different one. The wireless space could change just as quickly. We could, one day, be swimming in more wireless bandwidth than we currently know what to do with.

The plan does acknowledges the industry's potential for rapid change, calling for the Government Accountability office to "report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers."

Which is all well and good. But this isn't 2005. Some predict wireless access to significantly overtake wired networks in as little as five years. And if that happens, and the core philosophies of Google and Verizon's policy proposal make it into whatever net neutrality legislation we may soon see, the internet could be a very different place.

You can read Google and Verizon's own take on the plan on Google's Public Policy blog here, which also links to the official two-page policy proposal.

Google and Verizon have denied a New York Times report, published yesterday, that claimed the companies are nearing an agreement for Google to pay Verizon to speed up internet access to its services.

The agreement, if true, would have run counter to Google’s long-standing support for network neutrality — the idea that all web traffic should be treated equally by internet service providers. Many were incensed by the news, since it was clearly out of character for Google.

While the news of the agreement is suspect, we do know that the two companies have been discussing net neutrality for some time, according to a statement earlier this week by Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured above with Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam at a press conference).

Google’s first official response came from its Public Policy Twitter account: “@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.”

A Google spokesperson later made a similar statement to the Guardian.

Verizon’s denial came from David Fish, Executive Direct of Media Relations, on its Policy Blog:

The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect.

At this point, it seems like the New York Times may have misunderstood some information it received about a potential Google and Verizon deal. Bloomberg published a similar report today, which states that the companies have reached a deal that would bar Verizon from slowing down certain web content on its FiOS fiber internet service, but would leave it free to limit traffic on mobile devices.

With so much rumor and speculation swirling about, I expect we’ll hear a lengthier response from Google on the matter soon.

Tags: Android, isp, net neutrality

Companies: Google, Verizon

People: Eric Schmidt, Lowell McAdam