Tag Archives: Skype

ISPs Are Violating the Old Net Neutrality Rules

It’s been just over a year since the FCC repealed net neutrality. The FCC’s case is being appealed and oral arguments are underway in the appeal as I write this blog. One would have to assume that until that appeal is finished that the big ISPs will be on their best behavior. Even so, the press has covered a number of ISP actions during the last year that would have violated net neutrality if the old rules were still in place.

It’s not surprising that the cellular carriers were the first ones to violate the old net neutrality rules. This is the most competitive part of the industry and the cellular carriers are not going to miss any opportunity to gain a marketing edge.

AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps – and video can quickly kill a monthly data plan download allotment. AT&T’s behavior is almost a pure textbook example of why net neutrality rules were put into place – to stop ISPs from putting competitor’s products at an automatic disadvantage. AT&T is the biggest cellular provider in the country and this creates a huge advantage for DirecTV Now. All of the major cellular carriers are doing something similar in allowing some video to not count against the monthly data cap, but AT&T is the only one pushing their own video product.

In November a large study of 100,000 cellphone users by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts showed that Sprint was throttling Skype. This is not something that the carrier announced, but it’s a clear case of pushing web traffic to the ‘Internet slow lane’. We can only speculate why Sprint would do this, but regardless of their motivation this is clearly a violation of net neutrality.

This same study showed numerous incidents where all of the major cellular carriers throttled video services at times. YouTube was the number one target of throttling, followed by Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the NBC Sports app. This throttling wasn’t as widespread as Sprint’s throttling of Skype, but the carriers must have algorithms in their network that throttles specific video traffic when cell sites get busy. In contrast to the big carriers, the smaller independent cellular carrier C.Spire had almost no instances of differentiation among video streams.

Practices that might violate net neutrality were not limited to cellular carriers. For example, Verizon FiOS recently began giving free Netflix for a year to new broadband customers. AT&T also started giving out free HBO to new customers last year. This practice is more subtle than the cellular carrier practice of blocking or throttling content. One of the purposes of net neutrality was for ISPs to not discriminate against web traffic. By giving away free video services the landline broadband companies are promoting specific web services over competitors.

This doesn’t sound harmful, but the discussions in the net neutrality order warned about a future where the biggest ISPs would partner with a handful of big web services like Facebook or Netflix to the detriment of all smaller and start-up web services. A new video service will have a much harder time gaining customers if the biggest ISPs are giving away their competitors for free.

There are probably more bad practices going on that we don’t know about. We wouldn’t have known about the cellular throttling of services without the big study. A lot of discrimination can be done through the network routing practices of the ISPs, which are hard to prove. For example, I’ve been seeing a growing number of complaints from consumers recently who are having trouble with streaming video services. If you recall, net neutrality first gained traction when it became known that the big ISPs like Comcast were blatantly interfering with Netflix streaming. There is nothing today to stop the big ISPs from implementing network practices that degrade certain kinds of traffic. There is also nothing stopping them from demanding payments from web services like Netflix so that their product is delivered cleanly.

Interestingly, most of the big ISPs made a public pledge to not violate the spirit of net neutrality even if the rules were abolished. That seems to be a hollow promise that was to soothe the public that worried about the end if net neutrality. The FCC implemented net neutrality to protect the open Internet. The biggest ISPs have virtual monopolies in most markets and public opinion is rarely going to change an ISP behavior if the ISP decides that the monetary gain is worth the public unhappiness. Broadband customers don’t have a lot of options to change providers and Cable broadband is becoming a near-monopoly in urban areas. There is no way for a consumer to avoid the bad practices of the cellular companies if they all engage in the same bad practices.

There is at least some chance that the courts will overturn the FCC repeal of net neutrality, but that seems unlikely to me. If the ISPs win in court and start blocking traffic and discriminating against web traffic it does seem likely that some future FCC or Congress will reinstitute net neutrality and starts the fight all over again. Regardless of the court’s decision, I think we are a long way from hearing the last about net neutrality.

Will There Be a Tipping Point in the Cable Industry?

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make ...

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is not a book review, but a few years ago I read a book called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell. This booked looked at examples of tipping points – when minor events reach a level which triggers a more significant change. In the book he looked at a number of popular culture events such as how Hush Puppy shoes went from being something worn by New York hipsters to being in every mall in America in a short period of time. It was a thought-provoking book that looked in particular at how certain types of people are able to effect much bigger changes in the world than ought to be expected.

What made me think back on this book is that I have been thinking a lot lately about the cable TV industry. There are a ton of those ‘minor’ events happening in the industry and I have talked about some of them in my blog before. And I have been thinking about whether these small trends can accumulate together to fundamentally change the industry or if it will just change more slowly over time. I’ve been trying to think about what it might take for the whole industry to reach a tipping point.

We have a parallel to what might happen with cable TV service by looking back at what happened to home telephone service. Fifteen years ago about 98% of households had a traditional home telephone. But then Vonage and other VoIP carriers came along a little over a decade ago and whittled into the home phone market. But the VoIP carriers collectively did not do that great and after a couple of years in the business had captured only about 3% of the total market. But then other factors began hitting the industry. For instance, companies like Skype arose allowing people to make calls over the Internet without even using a phone. But the number one factor that has killed many home telephones has been the meteoric rise of cell phones. In looking back I think the landline phone industry really started losing lines when the cellular industry introduced family plans and all of the members of a family could have a cell phone.

In a study done in the first half of 2012, the Center for Disease Control asked many questions including ones about telephone usage. They found that the number of households with landline phones has dropped below 65%. In looking at the statistics in that study I conclude that the landline telephone industry never reached a tipping point. The industry certainly declined over a fairly long period of time and will almost certainly continue to do so. But there has been no tipping point such as was seen in the music store business which went mostly bust within just a few years after iTunes got popular. And so I ask myself if there will be a tipping point with the cable TV industry or if it will instead go into a long steady decline like the landline telephone business?

There are a number of factors that are affecting the cable TV industry, and most of them are relatively new. Some of these include:

  • Over-the-top video where programming is available on the web instead of by a traditional cable TV subscription.
  • Cord-cutting. Neilson has estimated that there are now 5 million homes in the US that don’t watch any form of TV and that this number grew by 1 million last year.
  • Cord-nevers. These are young households who get their entertainment from cell phones, pads and other methods and who do not sign-up for traditional cable TV packages when they start a new household.
  • Rate fatigue. The ever climbing cable bills that are pricing cable service out of the range of many households. This leads some customers to leave cable but others to downgrade to smaller packages.
  • Ever increasing programming costs. To a significant degree the cable TV rate increases are being driving by the programmers who charge more each year to cable operators for carrying their content.
  • Tons of companies competing for cable’s customers like NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and many others. And to some degrees the broadcast networks are helping them by making programming available on the web soon after it is aired live.
  • Companies like Aereo making it easier for customers to watch TV on any device.
  • Really simple devices like Roku, Apple TV, Playstation and many others making it easier for the non-technical household to get alternate programming onto the TV.
  • Unique programming being created just for the web. NetFlix and others are now developing programming directly for the web. There is also a movement to pick up popular shows that get cancelled and to continue them on the web.

There are a few experts that believe that the cable industry will be able to hold its own, even with all of these trends going on. But there are a lot more experts who are positive that the industry will decline, but the predictions of how fast vary from a slow decline like telephone service up to predictions of a fiery crash like what happened to CD stores due to iTunes. And there is ample evidence that the decline has begun. I saw a statistic that said that in 2012 the cable industry as a whole added a net of 50,000 new customers, wherein past years that would have been millions. And there is evidence that every one of the above trends is hurting the industry.

And there is more disruption to come. Wireless connections have gotten faster making it easier to watch TV while on the go. John McCain just introduced a bill that would promote (but not guarantee) a la carte programming. Comcast just increased their cable modem speeds nationwide. It just becomes easier and easier for a household to elect something other than the traditional cable TV packages.

Like many I certainly foresee an industry that is going to lose customers at a faster and faster pace over time. But I just don’t know if all of these little factors can somehow produce a tipping point for the whole industry. With that said, I believe that the effect of these changes will differ by market and I expect that there will be companies and markets that reach a tipping point long before the whole industry does.

HD Voice

A spectrogram (0-5000 Hz) of the sentence &quo...

A spectrogram (0-5000 Hz) of the sentence “it’s all Greek to me” spoken by a female voice (Image:en-us-it’s_all_Greek_to_me.ogg). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

HD voice (or wideband audio) is a technology that delivers the full frequency range of the human voice.  Traditional telephony has delivered a narrowband voice transmission and only transmitted sounds between 300 Hz and 3.4 kHz. However, the human voice extends between 80 Hz and 14 kHz, so traditional telephone has chopped off parts of every voice transmission.

The range of frequency was curtailed for traditional telephony based upon the limited bandwidth available for transmitting voice calls over a twisted copper pair. But voice that is sent over an IP path does not have those limitations and can send the full range of the human voice.

There has been an industry standard for wideband voice since 1987. However, until recently the only uses of the standard were in high-end video conferencing systems and for transmitting sports announcers back to the home station for rebroadcast.

But the industry is starting to use the HD voice protocol for calls made over VoIP. For example, Skype and some other PC-to-PC voice providers use the full HD voice bandwidth and the higher quality of the call can be experienced by a caller using a high-quality headset or handset. These same calls don’t sound better when listened to on a standard phone due to limitations in the speakers. There are also a number of vendors offering wideband telephones such as Avaya, Cisco, Grandstream, Gigaset, Polycom and others. These sets are capable of both sending and receiving a wideband voice signal, but the phones at both ends must be wideband capable to engage in an HD quality call.

So what are the business opportunities with HD Voice? Businesses are interested in having high-quality calls, particularly in conference rooms, noisy areas and other places where the quality can make a difference. The business opportunity is to make the phones available to businesses that are served with IP voice paths. HD Voice can then be sold as an add-on feature or as a more expensive voice line. A company that wants the higher quality calling is a great candidate for moving off of traditional TDM services onto VoIP, IP Centrex or other IP voice solution.