VoIP Industry Newsletter: Focus on Topics in SIP Trunking

Jan 2009

VoIP Logic's Vice President, Software Engineering,
Colin Jacobs Addresses Net Neutrality and VoIP

In 2006, AT&T CEO, Ed Whitacre, kicked up a major storm by suggesting that Internet content providers such as Google and Yahoo were getting a "free ride" by having their content delivered at no cost to customers over their network.

The suggestion that content providers should pay broadband service providers to deliver their content is controversial, and brings light to the concept of "net neutrality," the idea that ISPs should be required to treat all packets equally.

Proponents of net neutrality worry that ISPs (who are already being paid for bandwidth used by their customers) will ultimately use their control of the networks to squeeze additional revenue out of the big content players, and to put the squeeze on competitors.

VoIP service providers have perhaps the most to gain should net neutrality be enforced, as they have the most to lose from aggressive Quality of Service management by ISPs. For example, if a Comcast cable customer has two choices for VoIP service, Comcast or a third-party provider, the third-party will have a harder time marketing its offering if people know the ISP's own offering will have lower latency (by virtue of priority given to those VoIP packets). Currently, there is no legal obstacle to prevent an ISP from doing this, nor are there major obstacles preventing them from performing other traffic shaping that might affect competitors' services.

Several attempts have been made within the United States to legislate the concept of network neutrality and restrict the introduction of tiered service models by the ISPs. Since 2006, seven pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress, five of which have been defeated, and two are still in committee. One of these bills, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, would introduce a ban on the blocking of lawful content and prevent QoS deals between network operators and specific content providers.

Of course, legislating how a network operator should handle IP packets is far from an ideal solution. Dropping spam or preventing denial of service attacks, for instance, violates the principles of network neutrality. There may be new and legitimate reasons to shape traffic in the future to provide reliable services such as IPTV or deal with security issues. Therefore, it remains to be seen how net neutrality will play out in the long-term.

Food for thought... Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has said "while the market would sort it out if we had healthy competition among broadband providers, we usually don't."


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