Tag Archives: fast lane

FCC Clarifies the Fast Lane Prohibition

The FCC made some changes to the recent Net Neutrality Order between the version that got approved on April 25 and the final version that was released to the Congressional record. One of the most interesting changes was to clarify rules pertaining to carriers creating fast lanes.

The original order included language that prohibited paid prioritization, which is generically referred to as fast lanes. The original rules largely prohibited ISPs from slowing Internet traffic for some customers but not others, which is the same language that was included in the original net neutrality order first passed by the Commission in 2015.

But there were numerous comments made in the docket expressing concern about ISPs offering fast service to some customers for an additional fee, which is basically the definition of a fast lane. The final FCC rules prohibit fast lanes where some customers selectively get a better broadband connection than somebody else, even if the faster connection is made at no charge.

The draft FCC language did not specifically prohibit fast lanes but instead reserved the right for the FCC to judge each case that arose in the market. The revised final language pivoted to a straight prohibition against throttling some customers to slower speeds or boosting others to faster speeds.

This is one of the aspects of net neutrality that have been controversial with the public since the topic was first raised years ago. For example, gamers who hear this discussion assume it means they can’t get a faster connection. The fact is that they can if their ISP does it in a way that doesn’t create a fast lane. It is not a violation of fast lane rules for an ISP to offer a faster broadband connection. ISPs already do that today, and offering gigabit or faster broadband speeds is not a violation of the fast lane principle as long as the faster products are available to everybody.

The fast lane prohibition stops ISPs from giving a customer a priority or a benefit that comes at the cost of degraded service for others. For example, the fast lane rules would stop an ISP from making a deal to give Netflix customers a more reliable video stream than Amazon Prime customers.

One of the concerns that might have convinced the FCC to tighten the fast lanes language was a lot of comments made about network slicing. This is a technology that allocates different amounts of bandwidth on a 5G network according to the needs of the customer. A customer who is only making a voice call needs a small amount of bandwidth, and in a network equipped with fully functional 5G network slicing, a voice customer would only be provided a small portion of one channel. However, somebody playing a video game on the cellular network might be given the bandwidth from several channels. Using network slicing would not automatically create a fast lane for gamers, but it can be construed to do so if a cellular carrier promises that gamers will get a higher priority than everybody else – a claim that’s not hard to imagine. Ericsson was quoted by the FCC saying that it is not hard to imagine a cellular carrier charging $10.99 more per month to gamers for a guaranteed priority connection.

The FCC warned ISPs not to disguise regulated broadband products to look like enterprise or wholesale services in an attempt to avoid the fast lane prohibition. I have to imagine that the latest FCC language is causing some consternation in ISP departments working on new products.

The flip side of prohibiting fast lanes is that ISPs can’t purposefully throttle or slow some customers in a way to favor others. It’s not hard to imagine an AI-controlled network that could give higher priority to subscribers who pay the highest price for broadband. It’s almost inevitable that somebody will bring such a complaint within the next decade.

Net Neutrality Enters the Twilight Zone

tzIn the telecom world we are not very used to our issues getting a lot of notice from the public. But it’s obvious that net neutrality has become a political issue as much as it is an industry issue. Compared to the normal way we do business as an industry the debate has entered the twilight zone. This all got started when new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said that he was proposing new rules that would allow for the creation of an Internet ‘fast lane’, By that he meant that the FCC is going to allow the large ISPs to charge large content providers for premium access to their networks.

Of course, Chairman Wheeler is not himself neutral in this decision having spent years as the head lobbyist for the cable industry and opposing net neutrality. It’s somewhat ironic that he made this new announcement at the annual cable show with his cable company peers. The headlines that day made it sound like the FCC was going to take a legitimate shot at maintaining net neutrality, but within days it became understood that the fast lane idea was just the opposite and that he was handing the cable companies exactly what they wanted.

What I don’t think that Wheeler expected was that the public would jump all over his idea. And so, before the proposal was even released the Internet companies like Google and NetFlix weighed in against it. A huge number of consumer groups and many citizens weighed in against it.

And so, quite unexpectedly, the Chairman announced yesterday that he is changing the proposed rule, one that hasn’t even been released yet. He said that the revised rules would allow for ISPs to charge companies like NetFlix and Amazon for faster access to customers, but that non-paying companies would not be put into the slow lane. This makes no sense and is political double-speak. From a network engineering perspective you either give priority to bits or you don’t. If some companies get priority routing, then all other traffic gets degraded. That is the only way it can work on a network and no amount of regulatory talks can change the way that bits operate.

The idea gets even more bizarre if you think it through. What happens if 20 companies pay Comcast for priority access? Does the one who pays the most get slightly more priority than number two, and so on? The fact is that networks can’t do that. Bits are either prioritized or they are not, and so if a lot of companies pay for priority access we end up back where we are today for those companies, while the rest of the Internet would get degraded service.

One thing that pushes this into the Twilight Zone is that Rasmussen did a push poll on the topic and concluded that only 21% of Americans are in favor of net neutrality. Push polls are generally only used for hot button political topics where somebody wants to prove the opposite of what’s true. In this case, the main question of the poll was, “Should the FCC regulate the Internet like it does radio and television”. None of the questions asked had anything to do with net neutrality and instead were designed to elicit a specific negative response. Obviously there are dozens of better ways to have asked the public about net neutrality, including actually asking about it.

I have not conducted a poll, but I traveled all last week and in conversation I asked a number of people what they thought about the idea that the ISPs could give some companies priority access, which implies that others would get something less. Nobody thought that was a good idea and the general consensus was to leave things working the way they are. I believe there will be a huge amount of public discontent should the ISPs be allowed to break the Internet.

I don’t think Chairman Wheeler has any comprehension how important the Internet is to most people. He is skirting with making a huge blunder if he allows the Internet to get screwed up. He is making himself the public face of how the Internet functions, and if he breaks it people will blame him personally. He has the chance to become the next infamous political appointee to get compared to Michael Brown who was running FEMA during Hurricane Katrina. But perhaps he won’t mind being vilified since he is handing the cable companies a billion dollar opportunity to charge more to Internet companies.