Okay, wait a minute. The airlines? I had to read that twice to make sure Lyons was actually recommending that companies like Comcast and Time Warner –  you know, two of the lowest-ranked U.S. companies in terms of customer satisfaction – ought to be taking marketing tips from the industry that rivals them for most-hated status. (Interestingly, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the airlines are third from the bottom, followed by… the cable industry!)

Opaque pricing models are opaque for a reason

This seems to me to be just awful advice (Disclosure: see below). One of the primary reasons consumers hate the airline industry as a whole is precisely because of standards of pricing that make no sense, are unnecessarily opaque and completely unpredictable. Certainly, there are other issues consumers gripe about, like on-time arrival (something they also share with cablecos, who sometimes, maybe show up between 8 and never), but at best, their pricing model simply makes no sense to the consumer, and at worst seems suspect and predatory.

Consider the confounding and inconsistent factors consumers have to wrestle with when trying to figure out how they can “use” a gigabyte (or, for many consumers, trying to figure out what one even is).  How do you know when you’ve used one?  Or are close to using one?  If some things are “under the cap” and other things “count,” how can you tell?  And why is that so?  Will the number of gigabytes of, say, a streamed movie, be listed along with movie ratings and reviews when searching for one – and if not, how will you know if you’re “allowed” to watch it?  Do security updates count?  Skype or Facetime?  The home Wi-Fi network that your neighbor’s kid set up for you?  And what happens when you go over the cap?  Will my TV suddenly turn off?

Make up your mind: Is it costs or capacity?

In January 2013, National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) president Michael Powell clarified in a speech that cable’s interest in data caps was no longer (or never was) about network congestion but instead about pricing fairness.

I had to read that one twice, too. So what of the angst over bandwidth hogs and bytes and bits and network management and capacity constraints? That’s not actually true? Well, okay, if the new argument is about how companies recover their investments and fairly allocate those costs then we can all agree that is quite reasonable. But if that is the case, then changes the debate to one about pricing (costs) and not about capacity (caps).

There are plenty of ways to address pricing that fairly charges customers without requiring them to pursue an engineering degree or a private investigator to figure it out. Let’s be clear: Broadband is not like electricity, where utilities must first generate the power they deliver to customers, requiring them to charge heavy users more because it costs the utilities more to serve them. Even the ISPs themselves allow that marginal costs for additional bandwidth are negligible between light and heavy broadband users.

A pricing model that works: the current one

Indeed, ISPs already have a way to offer consumers different price options for internet access – it’s called speed. If you are a comparatively light internet user who goes online primarily to send email and surf the web, you can buy a lower-speed tier and save yourself some cash. If you don’t see daylight much, and use your connection to watch a ton of online video, you’ll probably need to upgrade to (and yes, pay for) something faster.

Virtually all ISPs use this pricing model already which, it turns out, works pretty well. Most consumers don’t know a gigabyte from a hole in the ground, but they do know when their internet connection is slow. Pricing by speed offers consumers predictability on their monthly bills and an understanding of what they’re paying for. With data cap-based “penalty” fees there’s a big chance they’ll instead get a nasty bill shock at the end of the month and then wonder what on God’s green earth they did to deserve it.

Disclosure: The author’s company, Glen Echo Group, has a number clients involved in the broadband field representing a spectrum of interests: from the Alliance for Broadband Competition, to Gig U,. to Google, to Sprint, among others. See a full list here: glenechogroup.com.

Maura Corbett is the president and founder of the Glen Echo Group, in Washington, D.C.

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Photo courtesy  Suzanne Tucker/Shutterstock.com.

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As we described in a post earlier this year, the controversy stems from a meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union or ITU — a body that is made up of representatives from all the countries that belong to the United Nations. The core mandate of the group, as its name implies, is to get national governments and regulators to agree on rules that govern the way telecommunications networks operate between different jurisdictions. Now, the ITU wants to extend its oversight to the internet, and it is asking members to vote on new rules that would govern the global computer network.

“Our protocols were designed to make the networks of the Internet non-proprietary and interoperable. They avoided ‘lock-in,’ and allowed for contributions from many sources. This openness is why the Internet creates so much value today. Because it is borderless and belongs to everyone, it has brought unprecedented freedoms to billions of people worldwide.” — Vint Cerf

One of the things that makes this issue so difficult to pin down — which in turn has caused a lot of fear-mongering and hyperbole about the outcome — is that the ITU doesn’t make its meetings public, nor does it release much specific information about the proposals that are going to be considered by the group during its meetings over the next couple of weeks. As a result, most of the information we have comes from leaked documents and second-hand or third-hand reports about the discussions. The internet’s current governing body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been accused of being secretive in the past, but it is an open book compared to the ITU.

As a number of sources have pointed out, there are a wide range of proposals from dozens of different countries who belong to the UN, and most of them will never see the light of day or become international law. But the proposals that should be of concern to users — and have drawn criticism from Vint Cerf, now a Google evangelist, as well as a multi-party group of U.S. legislators and other agencies — fall into two large buckets:

Limits to free speech and the free flow of information

One of the reasons to be afraid of what the ITU might do is that some UN member states — including Russia, Turkey, Iran and others — would like the power to restrict speech and information, and their proposals to the UN body are aimed at making it easier for them to do that. Obviously, China and other countries have shown that they are capable of creating national-level firewalls and systems that can monitor and block whatever forms of communication they wish, so the ITU’s approval isn’t necessary for this to happen.

If regulations were changed, however, the fear is that it could become even easier for countries like Egypt or Syria to filter and block specific online content, rather than having to use brute force to shut off the internet altogether — something that is much more obvious than a secretive filtering or controlled-access scheme, and therefore easier to criticize or defend against.

“Governments are trying to use a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union that opens on December 3 in Dubai to further their repressive agendas. Accustomed to media control, these governments fear losing it to the open internet.” — Vint Cerf

Changing who pays for the internet, and when

The second major reason to be concerned about the ITU’s plans is less philosophical and more technical: since one of the core functions of the group is to set policy around how telecommunication networks connect to each other — and the terms on which those connections occur — many of the proposals before the committee involve extending the same kind of approach to the internet. If you’ve ever experienced the nightmare of international roaming charges for a cellphone (which one estimate says can be more expensive than getting information from Mars), you probably have a sense of why this could be a bad thing.

As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained recently, the internet is in many ways a loose collective of national and trans-national networks — all of which connect to each other and share information based on what are called “peering” arrangements. These relationships are based on mutual advantage, and therefore they don’t usually involve money changing hands. In a very real sense, the internet is the first peer-to-peer network, and that has had a tangible impact on everything from telecom competition to the startup ecosystem, since it keeps the costs of cloud computing low.

The internet works, it doesn't need to be regulated by ITR treaty. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. #WCIT12 #EU on.ft.com/WvBFgV

—
Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) November 29, 2012

The threat that the ITU poses is that a number of member states want to move to a system called “sender pays,” which is more like how telecom networks operate. The main reason they want to do this is that it would mean a significant new source of revenue for some countries — countries that believe they are currently helping to subsidize the growth of the internet for others, without getting much from it themselves. As a recent report from the OECD argues, making this change could derail many of the benefits that the global economy gets from the internet.

Among other things, this could jeopardize the principle of “net neutrality,” which is designed to ensure that data flows without consideration for who produced it or how much they paid a specific network to carry their bits. As MIT’s Technology Review has pointed out, the Internet Society — a non-profit co-founded by Cerf — has called the proposal an attempt to continue the “scams and arbitrage” that plague the traditional communications model, and says that the model the ITU is considering runs the “serious risk of fragmenting the internet.”

Whether the UN body accepts any of the recommendations or proposals that have been submitted to it remains to be seen, but unfortunately — given the secrecy with which the negotiations are being conducted — we may not know the answer until it is too late.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jason Parks and Ryan Franklin

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Clearwire may not have the most ideal spectrum in the world for a nationwide launch – its higher frequency 2.5 GHz airwaves don’t propagate as far as the low-frequency licenses everyone else owns – but it is certainly blessed with a lot of it. Consequently, Clearwire can string those frequencies together to build some enormously fat pipes, Saw said.

Saw said Clearwire plans to use the LTE-Advanced technique know as carrier aggregation to deploy an LTE pipe — which in wireless speak is called a carrier — 40 MHz in width. Verizon and AT&T’s largest carrier size is 20 MHz. (Clearwire’s TD-LTE is a different technology than its competitors, but in terms of speed and data capacity those differences come out in the wash).

Theoretically at least, Clearwire’s network will support peak speeds of 168 Mbps, twice as fast as anything Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile can throw at us, Saw said. Still, Clearwire has to wait for the technology to be ready. While carrier aggregation is already being used widely in HSPA+ — and is, in fact, the secret sauce in T-Mobile’s dual-carrier 42 Mbps service – it will take a few years for the technology to percolate into commercial LTE gear. Saw says he expects it to be ready for Clearwire’s network by 2014.

“We’re going to start with 20 MHz carriers,” he said. “When carrier aggregation comes along we will go to 40 MHz, which will essentially leave the competition in the dust.”

Clearwire doesn’t have to stop there. Technically it can keep stacking carriers on top of one another to create 60 MHz and even 80 MHz pipes. It certainly doesn’t lack the spectrum. At CTIA, Nokia Siemens Networks had rigged up a demo that squeezed 1 Gbps out of Clearwire’s spectrum by not only piling on the carriers but using multiple antennas and several other technologies in LTE-Advanced’s bag of tricks. Saw said Huawei has accomplished similar feats using Clearwire’s airwaves, but he also acknowledged that such outsized throughput demos are really intended to be proofs of concept. Sixty MHz or 80 MHz carriers “would be overkill,” he said — at least in the near term.

Why don’t Verizon and AT&T do carrier aggregation as well? They have the technical capability, and they have unused spectrum to play with. The problem is their spectrum isn’t in the right places. For carrier aggregation to work initially all of the frequencies involved need to be contiguous, but most of the spectrum holdings of the Big 4 are scattered across the airwaves. Eventually the LTE standards will allow for non-contiguous aggregation – splicing together bands from all over the electromagnetic spectrum – but that’s a few steps further along the LTE roadmap.

At the end of the day, all of this speed talk is a bit silly. It’s great for bragging rights, but at today’s mobile data prices, no one could actually make regular use of such enormous throughputs without going broke. The near-term goal here isn’t to provide 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps to a single customer, but rather a consistent 5-10 Mbps to 100 different customers in the same cell. To hit that goal operators will need lots of spectrum and they’ll need to deploy lots of carriers, but it won’t matter if those carriers are bound together.

Speedometer image courtesy of Shutterstock user Sashkin

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But network equipment maker Ericsson wants to even the score. It can’t reach parity between uplink and downlink capacity, but new network technology it plans to show off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week will boost uplink capacity on HSPA networks by a factor of three, helping to shrink the ever-widening gap between downstream and upstream speeds.

Ericsson achieves this in two ways. First, through receive diversity, which is a fancy way of saying a butt-load of antennas on the tower (in this case four)  gathering up the weak signals transmitted by the device. The second is a technology Ericsson calls Interference Suppression, which basically involves throwing a lot of complex math at those signals when they reach the base station. Out of the other side pops an uplink connection with a theoretical ceiling of 12 Mbps, which puts the 1-2 Mbps we’re seeing over today’s HSPA+ networks to shame.

Unlike other “We’re the fastest!” announcements that vendors like to make at MWC, there is no fine print in Ericsson’s pitch. It’s not throwing additional frequencies into the mix or loading up your phone with more antennas than a police-edition Crown Vic. Ericsson is talking the same handsets, using the same spectrum, over the same networks, albeit with some modifications to the base station software and an upgrade to the tower’s antenna mast.

Ericsson has completed lab trials of the technology and plans to do live demos at its booth (really its building – it’s renting a lot of space) at MWC. But there’s still no word on when the technology will be available for commercial deployments. The sooner, the better, though.

Asymmetric networks were fine for the early days of mobile data, when we were passive consumers of content on our phones. But the rise of mobile social networking has turned us into active creators of content. We’re uploading photos and videos from our devices almost as much as we’re viewing them. Download emails used to clog our airwaves, but now uploaded tweets and Facebook updates are doing the same. And new real-time applications like video chat and multi-player mobile gaming require intense upstream connections.

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The headline takeaway is that employees are shifting from being passive observers of social networks while at work to active participants, dramatically increasing their use of these networks (in fact, total social networking traffic more than tripled). But despite BusinessWeek claiming social-mad employees are hogging bandwidth, don’t be too alarmed about the increase in usage. All that posting and game playing only accounts for a total of about one percent of Internet bandwidth, and Palo Alto Networks is stressing that while some people are certainly slacking off, an increasing amount of social networking use is also for legitimate work purposes. File sharing is way up as well but also only accounts for about one percent of total network bandwidth.

“At first glance, the shifts in usage patterns may imply that there is a significant drain on productivity and a strain on the networking infrastructure, possibly jeopardizing other, more business critical, bandwidth sensitive applications. Clearly social networking applications are being used for both business and personal purposes, but the overall impact to the bandwidth infrastructure is small,” says the report. A more serious risk than wasting time or bandwidth may be threats to data security. The report suggests networks are harder to secure than many IT pros imagine.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Franco Bouly.

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Should Internet access be seen as a fundamental human right, in the same category as the right to free speech or clean drinking water? The United Nations says it should, but in a New York Times  op-ed, one of the fathers of the Internet argues it shouldn’t. Vint Cerf is the co-creator of the TCP/IP standard the global computer network is built on, so when he says something about the impact of the Internet, it’s probably worth paying attention to. But is he right? And what are the implications if he’s wrong?

Cerf’s position is somewhat surprising because, as even he acknowledges in his piece for the NYT, the events of the “Arab Spring” in 2011 reinforced just how powerful internet access can be when it comes to enabling dissidents in places like Egypt and Tunisia to co-ordinate their efforts and bring down authoritarian governments — despite attempts by dictators in those countries to shut down their access. Cerf is also the “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, so it seems a little odd he would be downplaying the need for widespread internet access and the benefits that it brings to society.

Cerf: Access is not a right, but it enables other rights

In a nutshell, Cerf’s argument seems to be that if we define Internet access itself as a right, we are placing the focus on the wrong thing. The ‘Net, he says, is just a technological tool that enables us to exercise other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech or access to information — and rights should not be awarded to tools, but to the ends that they enable us to reach. As he puts it:

[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

In the past, says Cerf, we might have seen access to a horse as being a fundamental right in some way, since horses were a requirement for making a living. But the important thing to protect in that equation would be the right to make a living, he says, not necessarily the right to own a horse. Later in his essay, Cerf says a case could be made for seeing access to the Internet as a civil right — that is, a right awarded to us by governments, rather than one that exists inherently in us as human beings — but he shies away from arguing that this should be protected by governments.

One of the arguments against seeing Internet access as a fundamental right is that doing this places all kinds of potential burdens on society — including the potential costs of delivering access to millions or potentially billions of people. Although Cerf doesn’t raise this point, author and former Cato Institute director Adam Thierer makes that case in a post at the Technology Liberation Front, saying anyone who supports Internet access as a right has to answer two important questions: “Who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement? [and] what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move?”

What does seeing access as a right mean?

Thierer argues that not only could ensuring that kind of fundamental right bankrupt governments or societies if followed to its logical conclusion (and should it be just simple access, or is high-speed a right as well?) but that areas where things are determined to be “essential” services often suffer from a lack of competition. In other words, Thierer says, by promoting Internet access for all as a right, governments could actually wind up retarding progress by making it difficult for new entrants to compete:

[C]ompetition often doesn’t develop — or is sometimes prohibited outright — in sectors or for networks that are declared “essential” facilities or technological entitlements. That’s not because they are natural monopolies, rather, it’s because the policies that lawmakers and regulators put in place to ensure universal service ultimately have the counter-productive impact of retarding new entry.

But whether we define Internet access as a fundamental human right or simply a civil right, aren’t we taking a risk by not calling it a right at all? I think we are — and the risk is that it makes it easier for governments to place restrictions on access or even shut it down entirely (a point the United Nations made in its recent report). As JD Rucker notes in a blog post, seeing Internet access as a right is no different from seeing access to medical treatment or clean drinking water as a right. Cars may not be a right, but the ability to move about freely certainly is — and the internet is more like the highway system than it is a car or a horse.

That’s not to say governments have to bankrupt themselves to ensure that everyone has fiber to the curb by their house, only that protections and principles need to be in place that make it available wherever possible — just as we try to make housing and food available to all, not necessarily mansions and high-end restaurants. The Internet is a fundamental method of communication and connection, and is becoming more fundamental all the time, as we’ve seen in the Middle East and elsewhere. Seeing it as a right is an important step towards making it available to as many people as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Ryan Franklin and Ray Dehler

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Verizon is putting fat Cisco CRS-3 routers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. The new gear, which will be deployed in the first half of 2012, can move up to 322 terabits per second — enough to download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in one second. These mammoth machines will be part of Verizon’s upgrade to its core FiOS network and will help deliver more bandwidth to homes, for data centers in the respective cities, to cell towers for mobile backhaul and wherever else Verizon needs it. It will also play a role in Verizon’s network evolution strategy to IPv6, the new Internet addressing system.

This represents an opportunity for players such as Ciena, which is providing equipment for the D.C. network as well as for ADTRAN and private companies such as Zayo and Allied Fiber. Unlike the telecommunications boom of the late ’90s, the investment here seems to be matching up with real demand. Of course, I doubt we would have made it this far without all of that investment and dark fiber to kick things off in terms of building bandwidth-heavy applications.

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