Net Neutrality - Is it that simple?
- In Mathematics, Science & Technology
- 08:18 PM, Apr 17, 2015
- Bhanu Gouda
Imagine that you are living in a small colony in a small neighborhood in the 60s and the 70s. The roads around your neighborhood were rather narrow.A cycle or a two wheeler was used for personal transportation. You could have ridden your bike through your mohalla on to the road with no traffic. Once you were on the road. There was some traffic which was manageable. You could go to your college or bakery, market, office, shop or wherever you wanted to go with minimal interruption. Fast forward to the 80s and 90s, the cycles were gone and replaced by two wheelers. The Auto rickshaws took over the rickshaws. While the number of buses increased, few cars joined the crowd. If you could fast forward to the 2000s, the car took over the roads. Many of us upgraded from cycle to moped to motorcycle to a car. The roads inside our mohalla did not change in many places. Did that 15 ft. road inside our mohalla change to a 30 ft. road? With increased cars on the road, do we need a 60 feet road in every city and town? What happens if some company starts selling a car for 1 lakh, do we buy it? Do our neighbors buy it or should we just buy it because it is a cheap car? What about the roads? Do we think about the quality of roads when buying the car?
Let us pay attention to the roads. There are roads inside your mohalla, and there are ones that connects your mohalla to the roads in the city. Further, there are highways that connect the city to another city. While the automobile market exploded, we did not reform our economic policies to support big highway network. Our existing roads are maintained by town/city, state and central government. They used to maintain them to the best of their abilities. They are riddled with potholes and erosion. In many places they are narrower. In major cities it is tough to commute with a predictable schedule. The highways connecting major cities were narrow compared to the best roads in other countries. How sane was it for us to buy more vehicles when we have arguably some of the narrow, congested roads infested with public with an ad-hoc traffic sense? It is like chess game for vehicles which sit in traffic jams. One car moves and the other car takes its spot. Then the next one moves. Without expanding the road network, both on quantity and quality, buying more and more cars will clog the roads from mohalla to the main road to the highways. Those who are sitting in traffic will get used to the slow moving vehicles. Except when the VIP convoy crosses us with their entourage, that is when our collective blood pressure goes up. We get mad at the policy of giving preferential treatment to few people.
Replace the roads with the internet and vehicles with the data. What we have is an info highway that connects the big networks of service providers and content providers. The consumers use the network provided by cable operators, mobile broadband providers purchased according to a predefined package with a specific speed limit and a data cap. The content providers which include the social media (YouTube, Netflix, Facebook …) have their own network between their data centers (or use content providers such as Akamai). They are connected with the service providers based on their agreements which are formed on the basis of demand or revenue sharing. In other words the consumers pay for a guaranteed speed on their data and the content providers also pay to the service providers (Cable providers, fiber optic internet providers and mobile broadband). So for a moment it looks as if the service providers are really milking money from both the consumers of internet and providers of the internet content. Is it true? Yes. Imagine that they are given powers to throttle our data or block us on their info highway. It will start mayhem. We do not want them to have that power. We want them to treat us all equal. But the real world is not equal. The real world traffic goes unpredictable. A cricket match in a nearby stadium will cause the city to a crawl. So what is the solution? We need bigger roads. In the similar analogy, we need faster internet connectivity on both wired and wireless modes.
The AIB video and many social media posts are not shedding the light on the most important information, the speed of the internet aka the bandwidth. Ever since that paper from the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) was published, just about anyone using internet preached about the quality of service .None of them actually paid attention to the pathetic speeds one gets on mobile broadband in India. The country exploded from having a minimal telecom network to completely connect in a decade. Thanks to the mobile phones, we are repeating the same with internet connectivity. We did not have to go through the cable modem route for getting internet; we can leapfrog to using mobile broadband. The western world painfully upgraded their internet connectivity from dial-up modems to DSL to cable modems to Fiber optic network. We do not need to go in that path as our providers are setting 4G connectivity. The mobile broadband is the way to use internet across the world. It evolved in United States and Europe in the last 10 years. In the early 2000s the cellular carriers offered 2G data to consumers. However the consumers were not ready to use the data. First it was slow. Then there is no real internet on the mobile network. The early mobile internet was a joke with WAP (wireless application protocol). There was hardly any browser or email solution that we can use on a phone. The SMS was not popular either. An innovative company called Palm and another maverick tech start Blackberry created solutions for browsing the internet and sending emails using phone. All that changed with Apple making the first iPhone and mobile carriers adapting the LTE communication. Now in many parts of the world where LTE is available, we are getting close to 70 mbps speed. The technology is evolving fast. Last year Nokia demonstrated a record speed of 3.7 Gbps. QUALCOMM the quintessential mobile chip maker has a LTE module that can go 450Mbps. So the insatiable appetite of the consumer is pushing the speed of the internet while creating a robust content delivery network that is localized. Coming to India, we are still stuck with 3G network. The 4G LTE is not really spread across the country (both china and the western world have blanketed their network with LTE). India is missing from the list of countries where Apple’s iPhone supports LTE connectivity. So the need for increasing the speed of the network is real. Carriers are going to spend money to get it done. But they have to earn money before they start spending.
This new power given to the telecom operators will definitely result in preferential treatment. They are now going after the VoIP communication. The vast majority of Indians use either chatting or internet based calling such as Skype, VIBER, and LINE to communicate with friends and family. Most of these services are free. Microsoft which owns Skype, will let users to make free skype to skype calls. If we combine the collective user base of WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, line, hangout and all sundry VoIP solutions it will probably exceed the total user base of Airtel, the number one mobile broadband provider in India. Airtel or any other carriers are losing money on the voice calls as more and more users are buying mobile broadband packages for their VoIP calls. The ‘SMS’ which was a ridiculously expensive communication offered by carriers worldwide now lost its edge. So the missing revenues from SMS business will hurt the bottom line of these ISPs. So they decided to work with the content providers and the put restrictions on VoIP providers (e.g. working with Facebook chat) to earn more money, the same money that can be spent on upgrading the bandwidth of the network. If these companies do not make extra money then the country will be seriously behind the world in deploying mobile broadband. It’s like we went a step ahead of everyone in jumping from no phone to mobile phone, and going two steps back on the mobile internet front. It will take years to deploy the country wide 4G. People in the Telco business will tell you how much it costs for them to provide countrywide 4G LTE network. It is a double edged sword, time and money. By letting the companies have free hand the government is helping the build infrastructure.
Everything is not kosher with the proposal. The greed of telecom companies is not new. It is common across the world. They used to charge an arm and leg for making international calls in America. The invention of internet and digitization of voice into bits and bytes changed this traditional model of telephone networking. So they scrambled to make extra money. Thankfully for them the smartphone saved the day. However, the most important use of internet is to communicate with people, either by messaging or with email. The USA mobile internet adoption rate shows that majority of the user’s user their phone for texting followed by sending email. The VoIP business is dominated by the big players like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype and Google. The email is being monetized by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. So at a very high level these big content/email providers are getting preference from the ISPs to provide their service for free. All we are paying is for our mobile internet usage or cable usage. The current provisions specially, (Section 6 onwards) the blocking and throttling should be reevaluated to provide protection for the small and innovative companies with no deep pockets. That is where the monopolistic practices come into market. Back to our personal transportation analogy, we get angry stuck in traffic while the prime minister convoy goes smoothly. At the same time we make way for the ambulance happily. So we should demand the government to make changes protecting the small content providers and VoIP providers. But we should not oppose the big guys getting special treatment because they paid for it. Remember it costs money to build the network, a faster and wider one. Just like the roads.
So more than the equality or neutrality, we need it to expand first, and then talk about the neutrality. Fighting for net neutrality is like fighting for an imaginary winning ticket of a lottery without even purchasing it. We need to create massive info highways. Who will create it? Who will pay for it? The Carriers-How? By letting the carriers earn money, which, will go back into the system for improving the network.
http://www.iith.ac.in/~tbr/teaching/docs/WAP.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjdkOmfbQM8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuUS94mOsnM
https://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/
http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReaddata/ConsultationPaper/Document/OTT-CP-27032015.pdf
By Bhanu Gouda
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