Net Neutrality Speculations and 3UK

 
While we wait for the FCC presentation of its new broadband plan (calendar here), including the Net Neutrality policy, we can speculate that the previously announced guidelines will be there.

I believe that all 3 main parties (customers, operators and OTT content providers) and the hidden party (vendors of traffic management/DPI solutions) can live in piece with most of the guidelines, leaving only two in controversy (non-discrimination and, to a lesser extent, handling of illegal traffic).

The following principles can make all of us happy:

• Accurate disclosure of service terms to customers (and the public so one can compare different plans). Service terms may include the fair-use policies, subject to the other principles.
   
• Allowing operators to manage traffic, during congestion, affecting only traffic and subscribers that are subject to congestion.
   
• Allowing intelligent traffic management, so applications can get proper QoS according to their nature

Of course, the latter is the most sensitive item, as it tackles many problems - the difficulty of identifying applications (hence the need for DPI), discrimination and handling illegal traffic.

One way to ensure fairness to OTT services is to go back to the old “well-known ports” TCP standard (here). If an application uses its pre-registered port (operators will still need DPI to detect disguise) it will be classified to a certain, pre-defined and disclosed class-of-service (such as “real time”, “Interactive” or “off-line”) and will be treated the same way as all other applications defined with the same class. Applications disguised to others could be blocked or get the lowest priority.

The following article (from The Register, here) describes the approach taken by 3UK for broadband mobile traffic control:

".. But already 3UK has moved beyond that model to offer customers on the more expensive tariffs priority access when a cell gets congested. Originally that was going to include limiting YouTube streams to one per (non-premium) customer, but even that got rescinded as the bad publicity built and now it's just BitTorrent users who'll get hit when a cell is congested."

We can see here – disclosure (consistent with the UK policy described in my previous posts), managing traffic at congestion time and place (at the cell level!). Nevertheless, we can see discrimination of a certain applications (they tried YouTube – now they go for BitTorrent).