In the latest expression of network operator angst at being relegated to a bit pipe for VOIP traffic, Washington-based ISP Clearwire Inc. has “port blocked” traffic to at least one Vonage Holdings Corp. customer, Vonage believes.
No one was hurt, nobody lost any customers, and Vonage has not cried foul; but the event, first reported here, may be an early dust-up in a conflict of interest that will only grow with the popularity of consumer VOIP.
Consumer VOIP providers such as Vonage make money by delivering their service over the last-mile networks of ISPs. ISPs do not share in that wealth. On the contrary, operators complain that VOIP service demands large amounts of bandwidth and can slow down the overall performance of their networks.
“As much as I want to see VOIP survive and thrive, I also don't want to bear the additional cost of my customers choosing to use a competitor's VOIP service over my own,” says Greg Boehnlein, who operates Cleveland, Ohio-based ISP N2Net.
“Without control of the last mile, we're screwed,” Boehnlein says, “which is why I can identify with Clearwire's decision and say ‘more power to them’.”
Meanwhile, VOIP providers like Vonage have insisted that voice services should be allowed to move over host networks untaxed and unencumbered.
Vonage CEO Jeffery Citron tells Light Reading that port blocking VOIP service is tantamount to censorship. "If they can examine the packets and tell that its VOIP traffic, then what are they going to do next?" Citron asks. "How long will it be before they are looking at the actual content and blocking what they don’t like?"
And so far the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been sympathetic to Citron’s case. The agency took only three weeks to stop regional carrier Madison River Communications from blocking Vonage’s traffic, as well as making it pay a $15,000 fine and agree to play nice from now on.
But some ISPs see Vonage’s refuge-seeking at the FCC and in the courts as anti-competitive. “Oh, yes, we should run screaming to nanny government and get permission to stop Clearwire if we don’t like what they do,” says David McClure, president and CEO of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, mocking Vonage.
McClure believes that operators have the right to dictate what types of traffic flow in and out of their networks. “Some people have the idea that if you go out and invest and build technology somehow you should just give it away to anybody who wants it,” McClure says.
ISPs can easily block VOIP at the edges of their networks by defining an access list that denies such traffic. It is the same method used to block inbound MS-SQL attacks.
“We are still under investigation with Clearwire,” says Vonage VP of corporate communications Brooke Shulz. “We are aware of a couple things that happened, but they suddenly went away, so we are still trying to figure out what happened.”
In those cases, Vonage engineers simply changed the customer’s VOIP port number and the service was restored, Shulz says. The Clearwire case is just one of several run-ins Vonage has had with ISPs around the country, she said.
Clearwire and its lawyers seem to have anticipated problems with consumer VOIP traffic long before the Vonage incident. The ISP’s Terms of Use page reads: “You acknowledge and agree that the Service is not a telephone service . . . the Service is subject to different regulatory treatment than telephone service.”
In its Acceptable Use Policy, Clearwire states: “To protect its customers and its network Clearwire may, without limitation, block and allow traffic types as we see fit at any time.” This, the policy reads, can be applied to customers who “continuously” use high bandwidth applications such as file sharing and audio/video streaming.
These terms were probably written to give Clearwire the right to cap the amount of peer-to-peer traffic generated by its customers when using file-sharing services to download movies and music. Many P2P protocols dynamically shift port numbers to make it difficult for ISPs to identify and thus control this type of traffic.
Clearwire’s argument that VOIP traffic uses too much bandwidth is only half the picture. Clearwire’s own voice service, which is now being built for it by Bell Canada, is likely to consume just as much bandwidth as Vonage and its ilk. The difference of course is that Clearwire will feel a lot better about expending bandwidth on a VOIP service that will drive revenue.
“No matter how the press may spin it, it's Clearwire's investment money that built their network. What they allow people to do with it is their business,” N2Net’s Boehnlein says.
“If they decide to block VOIP, so be it; consumers will vote with their feet.”
Clearwire did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
This is a nice observation that is thought provoking and contains much truth. However, you must excuse this "realist/pessimist" for making a few observations. First, logic tells us that generalizations don't always apply to individual situations. (I am not a purely logical individual, but I do value logic). Second, a balance is almost always neccesary. While the good of society has been and is being sacrificed too often, an individual cannot ONLY optimize the greater good.
As an example, I may believe strongly in supporting public education. If, however, I am in a school district that has a violent school with horrible academics, I may choose not to support that system with the attendance of my own child. This is optimizing my own situation versus society in general. Is it wrong? (IMO, the answer is most often no, sometimes yes..it's complicated based on the specifics).
The flip side of this, One cannot simply pull a child out of a bad school and think that the problem is solved. The local school system will have a huge impact on the world that a privately educated child will live in. Everyone still has a vested interest in making the system better.
There is a balance that every person must seek based on their responsibilities to self, family, friends, God, and society.
In spite of my "pragmatism", however, I do understand the point. The radical exceptions in society have the greatest impact (both good and bad). They are exremely important to our progress.
Most CEO's, excluding start-ups, fall into the reasonable man camp (though they were unreasonable once). Make the most of your current surroundings while expending the minimal effort ............................................................................
That was an amazing piece of literature. Was that original?
This isn't the rjmcmahon socialist model for the broadband access network but it gives us all access to a much bigger pipe.
A incrementally bigger pipe without structural separation is no good. Cable already provides hundreds of digital channels. Today, youth choose the internet, even with the fraudband links, over those hundreds of channels. Why is that?
Also, I propose the access networks to be customer-owned so those interests are aligned with the interests of progress. I don't see that as a socialist model.
Regulatory and commercial issues apart - what would be your definition of real broadband?
Sigint; Oh boy. I've learned much of late. I know I'm not very good at definitions. My young son asks me what a word means and I stumble along every time, either giving him a definition which contains the word itself or coming up with a poor example of how to use it in a sentence. The end result almost always leaves him even more confused, though he'll tell me he understood.
A post from Hemmingway1 gives much insight about the challenges we face in realizing real broadband. That might also give us some guidance towards a definition.
How would I define real broadband? Something nearly impossible to achieve. Something that would benefit mankind. A communications network that enabled and facilitated the development of human virtues. A best effort that one generation could leave for future generations. Those are some things that come to mind.
Rather than realistic, I think you are instead being 'reasonable.' There is a big difference. I am reminded of a quote:
"A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Most CEO's, excluding start-ups, fall into the reasonable man camp (though they were unreasonable once). Make the most of your current surroundings while expending the minimal effort. It's good business sense for short term results, but ignores the long term. It dictates a forward strategy of incrementalism. It ignores the cumulative costs of the incremental improvements and the diminishing returns of each successive increment. Therefore each new increment has to be spaced farther out in time, which is not desirable from a long-term business point of view. That business case deteriorates longer term, but is easier to see shorter term. Short-term thinking, driven by Wall Street, seems to be the only mode corporate America can operate in.
This incrementalism mentality with 18 month upgrade cycles is fine for consumer gadgets where the consumer knows they will have an accounting loss on the gadget from the day they buy it. The purchaser of the gadget never expects to make money on it. That's why they are called "consumers." That’s one of the only environments where 18 month upgrade cycles can persist.
Network infrastructure deployment is an entirely different food chain. Under the current models, the purchaser of equipment (e.g. a service provider) is not a consumer. It is a business that has to make a net profit off selling services enabled by the equipment. This defies 18 month upgrade cycles of "consumer" goods. A couple thousand bucks per subscriber takes a long time for a network operator to recover, when you rely on a couple percent of that, in NET income not revenue, per month. It is not conducive to Wall Street driven companies. Thus, the next step has to be a 10-year step.
Yet, consumers spend thousands every couple years on “consumables” they will lose money on (essentially a 100% loss). Many even “finance” these purchases at the ridiculous rates of credit cards, adding further to their accounting loss. The value of these goods and services to the consumer is justified/rationalized in non-accounting-based ways. In that light, customer-owned networks are not such a stretch. In fact they would be an asset that can be written off for tax purposes. The main difference is it isn’t in your physical possession, in your home, so you can’t show people your new gadget. Not directly anyway.
The "realistic" view of network infrastructure deployment (as opposed to the reasonable view) is that today's access network infrastructure is the wrong platform to grow from, and the wrong business model to operate under. It can’t grow like a consumer product (CD players, DVD players, PC’s, etc) because it is not a consumer product and the consumer does not have the freedom of choice in content and applications providers (which was an important part of the growth of those consumer markets).
Piling new money into the old infrastructure and its operating model failure is not a realistic approach, because of diminishing returns. It was never intended to provide real broadband connectivity, to each user, and the operating costs are way too high. Besides, real broadband undermines the legacy businesses of the monopoly owners.
A 100x increase in the base platform is needed in order to have a platform that accommodates future growth in services and applications. That way it doesn’t require yet another infrastructure incremental upgrade each step of the way. This “connectivity” platform also must be decoupled from the content and services.
Access network growth cannot progress in small increments or on 18 month upgrade cycles. It can’t be small increments because these increments enable nothing new and add little if any tangible value. They simply make the present-day excuses for applications less annoying to use. This approach will never make it through the next increment, and is arguably the chasm where we sit today. It can’t be 18 month cycles because the equipment’s accounting life is much longer than that. It will be neither paid off nor written off after 18 months.
The equipment for 100Mbps FTTH is very nearly the same cost as the equipment used for 256kbps DSL service. It is cheaper than that DSL equipment was 2 years ago, but they are both moving targets. What costs too much money is the deployment labor in the US (but not in many Asian countries), the permits, the right-of-way, and the hassles thereof. Those aren’t getting cheaper with time. Within the next year or two, it will cost more to wait than to deploy now. The equipment cost decreases will be less than the construction cost increases per year. The business case gets harder by waiting. Yes, it requires taking risk that boils down to believing the “build it and they will come” mantra.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not a chicken-or-egg problem. The connectivity has to be there first, before the application development resources will be allocated. Imagine a start-up trying to get funding for an application that requires 100Mbps peak network connections. They’d be laughed out of the VC’s office. Same holds for trying to get resources to develop the same application within a company’s R&D budget. No support for its development because there’s no platform or marketplace to sell it into. There are plenty of startups working on FTTH equipment and infrastructure products though.
Would any of today’s PC applications have had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting funding if they were pitched back in the days when the PC platform was based on CPU speeds in the tens of MHz, 2Meg of RAM, a 50Meg hard drive, and a 16 bit ISA bus? No. Few saw any reason we’d ever need more than that. After the next 10x improvement, people said the same thing: Why do we need more? Only after about 100x improvement did people finally stop saying that, though I’ve noticed it has returned of-late. The cost declines were a vital part of this too, along with the performance increases.
The lack of profitability in today’s consumer data services, and the low subscription percentages even thought there is fairly wide availability does not mean that the “build it and they will come” mantra has failed for broadband. There is no broadband, so the mantra has not even been tested yet. Build it, and operate it under an open access model, with content and connectivity as separate entities, and they will come. Without that second condition, I have serious doubts about the possibility for successful PC-like growth in broadband, even if it is built.
rjmcmahon writes: I believe the US needs to get serious about real broadband. This combination of government and market failure, while promoters push a bunch of hype for Wall Street speculators and traders, doesn't build the necessary foundation for the 21st century.
Personally, I think commercial broadband services offered by MSOs and ILECs will continue to follow Moore's Law. In the MSO case, 10 years from now the head end will be 100% digital. You'll have much higher speed DOCSIS services in that huge block of frequencies where the analog channels live today. The ILECs are already starting to deploy fiber to the home in wealthy parts of the country. 10 years from now, that footprint should be fairly large. The ILECs and MSOs will be so afraid of government regulation that they'll allow parasitic services like Vonage to run on their networks. The equivalent services from the MSO and ILEC will be QoS-enabled and be higher quality for a slightly higher price. You can download a movie from Blockbuster or Walmart. You can download a movie from the MSO or ILEC much faster but you'll pay a little more for the service. The parasitic services and the natural competition between the MSO and ILEC will tend to control end-user costs for value-added services. I think the core broadband internet service for the big pipe will increase in price over time. If you only want the big dumb pipe, you'll have to pay dearly for it. I also think there will probably be a much cheaper product that is bandwidth rate-limited so the parasitic services don't work very well.
This isn't the rjmcmahon socialist model for the broadband access network but it gives us all access to a much bigger pipe. If you can't afford the access charges, you can go with a cheaper-smaller pipe with lower quality and pay as you go when you need to access the high-quality services.
I believe the US needs to get serious about real broadband. This combination of government and market failure, while promoters push a bunch of hype for Wall Street speculators and traders, doesn't build the necessary foundation for the 21st century. __________________________________________________
Rj, Rgulatory and commercial issues apart - what would be your definition of real broadband?
Would you prefer the Korean kind, where internet remains a cheap but best effort service or, something like in Japan, where it does cost more money but ISPs can't hang their customers out to dry and some level of quasi-guaranteed bandwidth has is required (or at least proposed) to be maintained at all times?
Another thing. A wireless billionaire and a leading US technology corporation see this as the way to provide market based facilities competition for the last mile. It's hard to believe that this is the best a world superpower can achieve. It kinda reminds me of the private attempts at space exploration. Those efforts have yet to put a vehicle into low earth orbit not to mention reach the moon or any planets.
I believe the US needs to get serious about real broadband. This combination of government and market failure, while promoters push a bunch of hype for Wall Street speculators and traders, doesn't build the necessary foundation for the 21st century.
America, home of the free, can and must do better.
> Clearwire is using public airwaves. No different than any other broadcaster. True competition would mean let the airwaves be fought out by those with the deepest pockets to "out broadcast" the others.
Well, no. Sure, all airwaves are public, to some extent, but Clearwire's are licensed, and they're not broadcasters. Clearwire leases spectrum from an Educational Broadband Service (formerly called ITFS) licensee under rules that permit over 75% of EBS bandwidth to be leased out for any purpose, so long as the EBS licensee does a minimum of actual "educational" broadcasting. Most EBS licensees get four 6 MHz TV channels, and can freely lease out three.
As a channel lessor, Clearwire has few responsibilities other than to stick within the frequency assignment and geographic boundaries of the license. ISP operations are unregulated.
This spectrum is extremely finite, and rather costly to use, and Clearwire is entirely within its rights to prioritize how traffic uses it.
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