The CRTC’s public hearing looking at internet traffic management practices wraps up today.
There are many who seem to believe that the internet needs specific regulations to accommodate its unique nature – many failing to acknowledge that the general protections of S.27 and S.36 of the Telecom Act provide sufficient legislative authority to the CRTC. On the other side of the argument are those who argue that additional specific regulations could restrict innovation in the continued evolution of the network.
The catalyst for this debate in Canada has been application specific network management. It seems to me that we have seen such management before.
Telephone companies have always developed network management techniques to deal with usage and applications that cause congestion. I’m talking about more than just peak load events, such as snow storms, political crises, etc.
The economics of the telecom industry has always been predicated on sharing a network. As an industry, we do our best to make people think that the network is always there waiting for them, but there are times that traditional phone networks run out of circuits. Not just Mother’s Day.
Think back to radio station contest lines – we had special “choke networks” set up that helped to prevent contests from jamming up the rest of the network.
This wasn’t discriminating against radio station applications – it was managing the finite resources to benefit the maximum number of customers. Could the industry have built more infrastructure to accommodate these contests? Not always – some contests were ill-behaved and consumed as much network as was made available.
Generally, when a radio station said that they would give away tickets to the 5th or 6th caller, when you get a busy signal and assume that it is too late, so you wouldn’t bother to try again. Every so often, a disc jockey would get creative. There was an AM station that had the number 8 figure into its branding. Their DJ offered tickets to every eighth caller, dinner and tickets to every eightieth caller and backstage passes to the 800th caller.
Talk about an ill-behaved application of the voice network. Callers who heard a busy signal tried over and over and over again causing massive congestion of the local network.
The mass calling network pushed these calls into a throttled portion of the telephone network. How is this any different from the treatment of file sharing applications in terms of application discrimination?
Most importantly, it is the responsibility of network engineering to balance the economics and performance of the network to give everyone a satisfactory experience.
Sidebar
I have been following the National Post live blog coverage of the proceedings and there was an interesting poll taken on Friday, asking readers to identify their ISP. more than half the respondents claimed to be served by independents, with is about 15 times the market share of these companies. The poll result is no longer posted, but there is a reference to the results in the comment at 9:17am.
Although the survey is not scientific, it is interesting that concern about the issue is so much more pronounced among the independent sector. Does this gives credence to the claims that network management is not a concern for most internet users?
I would say no, it isn't just prevalent among the independents. You have to remember that many customers of the independents didn't start out there – they were Bell and Rogers customers who moved because of a distaste for those providers. An interesting measure would be to see how many customers have moved from the big guys to the little guys since the whole throttling issue became public.
But Peter, did you see the poll that showed that only 20% of Canadians had even heard of the issue and once explained, 60% supported ISPs managing internet traffic?