The most heated battles over FCC chairman Julius Genachowski's new network neutrality proposal will involve its impact on wireless providers. Network neutrality attempts to ensure that Internet providers treat all traffic equally. Traditional landline-based providers have done so from the start, and the chairman's proposal merely aims to make sure they continue to do so. But wireless Internet providers have done just the opposite from the start. Thus the proposal, if enacted, would force them to change their businesses completely. And the biggest reason they will oppose that change is mobile VoIP.
The rationale of the network neutrality principle is to help Internet providers avoid certain sins, such as the temptation to block or degrade the traffic of services that compete with their own. Mobile carriers, though, consider that not a sin but a virtue. And when it's mobile VoIP they're blocking, they see it as a necessity. Letting VoIP run rampant over their networks, they believe, will severely damage or even destroy their business of selling cellular minutes.
It's understandable that they might think so. Mobile VoIP would deliver voice calls by sending them over the cellular data network. It would likely be cheaper than traditional voice calls, at least at their current prices, so customers would probably flock to it. The carriers would thus lose voice revenues while gaining data revenues. But the loss would likely be larger than the gain, because VoIP calls require only tens of kilobits per second of bandwidth.
At the same time, the presence of a lot of VoIP callers would significantly increase the load on the wireless networks. That would force the carriers to beef up their infrastructure to support higher data traffic, at the same time that VoIP was causing steep drops in their voice revenues. That in turn would force highly paid wireless executives to scramble to find ways to make up the difference.
For such reasons, it's unsurprising that Genachowski acknowledged that mobile network neutrality was different from its landline counterpart: "Of course, how the principles apply may differ depending on the access platform or technology," he stated. He also showed he was willing to let all concerned parties have their say. He intended to address the issue, he said, via a notice of proposed rulemaking, an exhaustive process of public comment and counter-comment. "The rulemaking process will enable the Commission to analyze fully the implications of the principles for mobile network architectures and practices -- and how, as a practical matter, they can be fairly and appropriately implemented," he explained.
Even those concessions, however, didn't satisfy the mobile carriers and their allies. AT&T quickly put out an announcement claiming that it didn't think network neutrality should cover wireless services. And CTIA, the wireless industry's trade association, stated that competition within the wireless industry had already brought about innovation, investment and economic growth. Two Republican Senators also attached to a spending bill currently under debate an amendment to prohibit the FCC from using Federal funds to promote network neutrality.
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