Thursday, June 17, 2010

AT&T Escalates Net Neutrality Political Fight

 
So far carriers claim that traffic management (or DPI) was implemented on their networks in the order to manage network congestion, while the public (and FCC) concerns was that certain OTT services will be discriminated in order to maintain carriers revenues, mainly from voice and video.


Now AT&T is telling the Wall Street Journal (here) that if FCC's Net Neutrality will go through, it will downgrade investment in its U-verse (IPTV over broadband) service offering.

Half a year ago, AT&T announced that the service has 2M subscribers  (see - "AT&T U-verse TV Marks 2 Million Customer Milestone" - here).

Earlier this month we heard from Skype, that their iPhone 3G Skype-to-Skype service will no longer be free so "it [Skype] can fund the investments needed to ensure that the quality of 3G Skype calls stays high" (here).

I was wondering where the money will go to - now I understand that AT&T maybe considering the use of traffic management policies that will prioritize certain services - either their own (U-verse has VoIP as well) or any OTT provider paying it to get reasonable QoS. This creates a conflict with the Net Neutrality no-discrimination principle.

No comments:

Post a Comment