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?

Earlier today, a couple of us were talking about things people consider free that aren’t really free at all.

“Free drinks” at your all-inclusive vacation really means pre-paid drinks. “Free evenings and weekends” on your mobile phone means that you paid for those minutes as part of your calling plan.

Free services are a core business model for many internet companies.

Following up on my posting from a little over a week ago, Hal Niedzviecki has a review of Chris Anderson’s book in the Saturday Globe and Mail.

The review points out that there is always a cost to free.

This should be on the curriculum starting in kindergarten: Free isn’t free because, kiddies, in corporate North America there is no such thing as a free lunch. If there’s one flaw in this book, it’s that Anderson spends too little time addressing the social costs of this rapidly emerging free economy.

How do we reconcile the way we are paying for ad-supported services? What kinds of events could trigger a backlash against the willingness of so many to pay with intangible currencies such as personal privacy?

Brad Fox testified on Wednesday in front of the CRTC this week that his Sick Kids Couchathon was throttled by Bell last November.

Various news media have picked up the story, including Tech Media and CBC.

Why is this the first we have heard about it, more than 7 months after the event? What is the real story?

Even on his own blog and the official event blog, immediately following the event, Fox didn’t say anything about throttling or resets.

In fact, on the Couchathon website, he wrote:

In the fog of “the day after” I’m left with nothing but warm feelings, and cool memories

Exhaustion and fat fingers on an untested platform could have also come into play. The opening clip speaks about technical challenges experienced at the beginning.

Fox said that he was losing 2-300 people each time the server (uStream.tv) needed to be reset, representing about 5% of the audience – that puts the audience at about 5-6000 people. CBC says that the losses occurred between 3 and 4am, which means that people going to sleep could also explain the loss of viewers.

The telethon generated $5500.

While it is convenient to blame ISP traffic throttling, there are a lot of other potential points of failure, including the originating PC and the serving application.

As the Chairman stated on Wednesday in respect of other accusations of misdeeds:

If you have specific evidence, why don’t you use the provisions of the law? Why don’t you make a complaint under section 27(2) and say, here there is undue preference, there is predatory conduct, rather than here in a policy hearing?

Why was this week’s policy hearing the first time we have heard of this problem?

I don’t think we have seen enough evidence on this story.

Talk about irony.

CIPPIC’s tweeting of the CRTC’s network management proceeding got throttled. Not by its ISP, but by Twitter itself!

As CIPPIC wrote on the National Post live blog at 11:44:

Heh “Wow, that’s a lot of Twittering! You have reached your limit of updates for the hour. Try again later.” CIPPIC got twitter throttled 😛

Unclear to me where Twitter is transparent in its Terms of Service as to what constitutes limits on updates.

I can’t wait to see the regulatory complaint on this one.

Net neutrality can kill investment in broadband, according to a must-read commentary by Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran.

He says that what we need is more investment in broadband, not more rules that inhibit capital spending.

The CRTC got this right the first time. Moving now to force Bell and the other firms to shape their businesses to meet the demands of people who want a piece of the action or who have fantasy views of the Internet as a public utility can only divert industry attention and resources away from market solutions and efficient development of new broadband services to reduce congestion.

He uses a swimming pool metaphor, perhaps in hopes of more summer-like weather.

Read the full column.