Obama Proposes Overriding the Tenth Amendment

Obama’s speech at Cedar Falls, Iowa was like most of his speeches; much to do about nothing. He is proposing nothing short of allowing municipal governments to use taxpayer funds to compete against private enterprise, and he is encouraging the FCC to override 20 state laws in contradiction to the Tenth Amendment. I make no bones that I am a free market capitalist and I am strongly against the government taking over or competing against private enterprise. What Obama is proposing is not only anti-capitalism but also illegal.

I have written here that our current duopolies are not optimal for consumers, but replacing them with a subsidized government bureaucracy is a move in the wrong direction. I support municipal governments determining their own broadband destiny as much as I support removing restrictions allowing new entrants into the market by removing obstacles that municipalities and states have created. Twenty states have created laws to protect taxpayers from having to pay for cities failed attempts into the broadband services markets. These states realized that the communications market is competitive and fast moving. They have seen how over 50% of all municipal broadband efforts have failed leaving taxpayers to pay off creditors and bondholders (link, link). Proponents of government broadband, including the press, are quick to point out the few successes like EBP in Chattanooga and Cedar Falls, but they don’t bring up UTOPIA or Longmont, Colorado that is going for its forth attempt to provide residential broadband services. There are a variety of reasons that municipal broadband efforts fail which is why it is better to leave the risk to private enterprise.

Obama cannot instruct the FCC to just override the 20 state laws enacted to protect taxpayers. The Tenth Amendment gives states the ability to make its own laws without the federal government overriding them except for powers expressly granted by the Constitution and states. The Supreme Court has already upheld the authority of the states to prevent municipalities from providing telecommunications services in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League by a 8 to 1 decision. He can say what he wants but case law is already pretty clear on states’ authority granted by the Telecommunications Act of 1986.

There is no question to the value of broadband services to a community, but it should be delivered in a competitive environment to enjoy all of the value that it brings. Either industry partnerships or cities should be allowed to come together to build open-access broadband fiber infrastructure as done in many cities and countries outside the United States. Sharing a common infrastructure will reduce the barrier to developing a profitable business model for a service provider; therefore, promoting competition that will benefit everyone in the community. This is the direction that Obama should be encouraging states to go.

Technorati Tags: broadband,municipal broadband,open access,telecom,FTTH,broadband penetration,FCC,Obama

Why Do We Need the F.C.C. Involved in the Internet?

Apparently my last article hit a nerve with a few people which is strange because it was only meant to enlighten people as to the real issues concerning traffic management and peering to stimulate competition for over-the-top (OTT) providers.  I have to say that at stake here is the exact issue that I have personally encountered.  My lowly blog isn’t backed by any major media outlets or elite-funded NGO, but it reached the world and struck a nerve.  I have over 25 years experience as an engineer in the telecommunications industry developing and selling network elements.  I am not a lawyer, politician, or lobbyist who want to call the shots in the industry, but through the power of the Internet my voice has been heard.  The Internet gives those of us with real knowledge a way to be heard (and those without knowledge too). 

There are people our society who don’t want those voices to be heard or at least controlled.  They purport to champion freedom and equality yet their agenda is just the opposite.  I have no agenda other than supporting the free market and everyone’s ability to be successful on their own terms.  So what does this all have to do with Net Neutrality?  The ability for all of us with a voice to be heard are under attack by people purporting supporting net neutrality.  Let me elaborate.

In my last article, I applauded the common sense rules proposed by the F.C.C. because they allow OTT providers to compete against incumbents effectively.  I do not have anything against the incumbent carriers; I use to be part of a couple of them.  I believe that competition benefits not only the consumers, but the entrepreneurs and incumbents as well.  It is a win-win for everyone except for those that end up losing control and power due to free-markets.  I believe that the F.C.C. are proposing rules that support the free-market and entrepreneurship.  To me this is a technical argument with business implications; not a political discussion.  That is where I got it wrong.

Being an engineer by trade, I always believe that a sound technical solution and logic will prevail.  Also, I believe that people understand that competition and freedom benefit all.  It appears that with even though I have age, I am still a bit naive.  My article received some negative comments by people and even NGO that supposedly support an open Internet.  They didn’t like the fact that I was supporting these proposed rules.  There is a huge public misinformation campaign going on across the Internet under the guise that the F.C.C.’s proposed rules will kill the Internet and free-speech.  At first I believed that this effort was based on a lack of knowledge of the issues at hand, but now I realize that the people behind this campaign know exactly what is going on.  They are using the general lack of knowledge by the general public on the topic to scare them into believing that these rules will benefit the incumbents and kill the Internet, and the tech media in all in on it with them.  Their real motivation is to gain greater governmental control of the Internet so they can determine who says and does what.  These groups are disingenuous in their motivations.

This is why the F.C.C. or any governmental organization does not need to be involved in the Internet.  Government involvement always leads to manipulation by special interests and loss of freedom.  The groups purporting to protect the Internet actually will do the opposite.  There are FCC staff members that are founders of groups that are campaigning against these rules under the guise of supporting net neutrality.  Unfortunately their disinformation campaign is very effective.  We do not need the F.C.C. to further regulate and interfere in the Internet although these rules do make sense.  The Internet should remain open for all to speak freely and compete effectively whether an incumbent or OTT service provider.  Please do not be fooled into supporting a cause because it sounds like the right thing to support.  Read and fully understand both sides of the argument, and draw your own conclusion.  Things aren’t always what they seem.

Technorati Tags: ISP,Internet,FCC,No Agenda,Silicon Flatirons,censor,net neutrality,telecommunications

Qwest’s Request for Statewide Video Franchise Has a Weakness

The proposal by Qwest for statewide franchising for video services is not necessarily a good move for consumers unless communities have options to ensure their broadband future.  By simplifying the franchising process, Qwest/CenturyLink and others can easily re-enter the video market in Colorado without negotiating with every city they want to provide service; thereby, allowing competitors to satellite and cable TV companies.  I personally welcome Qwest’s re-entrance into the market.  Local franchise negotiations are often fraught with requests for community TV stations and equipment, free or reduced charges to schools and other institutions, municipal network access, and that pesky universal service requirement.

Elimination of these individual negotiations will reduce the cost of providing services to consumers and speed time to market.  Wireline providers such as Qwest and Frontier Communications will be able to develop successful business cases to deliver video services in communities enabling more competition and choice.  The problem is that there are still a limited number of competitors for video services in the state, and without a universal service requirement new entrants will likely serve only the markets that can be reached for the lowest cost and highest probability of market penetration leaving some suburban and rural areas with limited or no choices.  Additionally it gives new entrants an advantage over current municipal franchise holders like Comcast that are required to provide service to all households in the franchise territory.

I support Qwest’s move to simplify the franchise process with the caveat that allows communities to have control over their broadband destinies.  If a community can no longer guarantee that they will have video (and broadband) services that meet their needs, then they should be able to offer alternatives for their community.  A few years ago the legislature passed SB-152 that prevents communities from building their own broadband networks for public use.  The intent was to keep communications services in the hands of private enterprise and not divert taxpayer money for these purposes.  What is does is prevent many communities from having advanced broadband services that many of their urban counterparts have.

Building broadband networks to every home is a very expensive endeavor.  The economics to build these networks for just a single carrier use is not feasible for public companies except in the densest metro areas which is why you see Verizon’s FiOS in only major metropolitan areas.  A community could build that last mile network and lease access to multiple service providers and see it break even in 5-7 years.  Google is trying to institutionalize this model in their Fiber for Communities project.  These open-access last mile networks have proven to be economically feasible in many cities throughout the world, but in Colorado cities are prevented by law from building them.

Any proposed change in franchising and lessening of the “universal video service” requirement should come with a repeal of SB-152.  This change would allow municipalities to form public/private partnerships to build and operate network infrastructure where private service providers could purchase network to deliver voice, video, and data services.  Communities would then be assured that their citizens would have a choice of service providers and the revenue from the network would replace franchise fees.  Eventually Qwest and Comcast would see the benefits of municipal broadband infrastructure and begin purchasing capacity as well.

Denver Post Article

Technorati Tags: CenturyTel (CTL),Colorado,Comcast (CMCSA),Google Fiber for Communities,Qwest (Q),Verizon (VZ),broadband penetration,rural broadband,telecommunications,video

The FCC Has Recognized the Need for Differentiated Services

Last week the FCC published its’ report on U.S. broadband Internet usage entitled Broadband Performance: OBI Technical Report No. 4.  The press chose to report on the sensational claim in the Executive Summary that actual measured bandwidth was half of the advertised bandwidth.  If they would have taken the time to read past the Executive Summary or not copy the other articles written about the report, they would have noticed that the report supports Quality of Service (QOS);  thereby, implicitly endorsing differentiated services.  They even dedicated Appendix 3 to a cursory discussion of QOS.

In Section I, the concept of QOS is first mentioned when profiling the different types of traffic users download.  In the quote below, The FCC states that high definition video needs bandwidth and QOS.

At the high end of the range, an application such as enhanced high definition (HD) video teleconferencing could require 5–10 Mbps, or more along with significant quality of service (QOS) performance (see Exhibit 9, where “Symm.”—short for symmetrical—indicates that the download speed is also required for upstream traffic).

In the next paragraph they reveal the other parameters that are required for HD video conferencing.

Download speeds are only one measure of broadband performance.
For example, HD quality videoconferencing requires very fast upload speeds to allow a person to transmit her image and voice while simultaneously receiving the image and voice of another person. In addition to upload and download speeds, measures of QOS such as availability, latency and jitter (variation in latency among different packets) may be important. Some applications, like e-mail or text-based Web surfing, are generally insensitive to these other measures of network performance, but for other applications, such as videoconferencing, these measures may be important (see Exhibit 10).

These statements introduce the reader to the concept that bandwidth alone may not be sufficient for certain types of services.  Later in Exhibits 9 and 10, services are classified by their need to be experienced immediately along with the need for QOS to determine user experience.  The FCC is unequivocally stating that all bits are not created equal.  They identify real-time and near-real-time traffic as needing lower packet loss, latency, and jitter from typical web browsing or e-mail reading.  The FCC’s quiet endorsement of differentiated services came in the beginning of Section III by stating:

The NBP therefore relies on a National Broadband Availability Target defined in terms of quantified download and upload speeds, with qualitative reference to a QOS consistent with the delivery of voice and video applications.

Perhaps the reason why the FCC was dragging their feet on net neutrality regulation was that internally they actually support differentiated services.They realize that it can improve overall user Internet experience and provide real competition to the incumbents.  By letting Google and Verizon publish their principles of net neutrality, they let those two take the flack for supporting differentiated services instead of staff having to deal with the political fallout.  Whatever the reason, I am glad that the bureaucrats recognize how the application of QOS will benefit the Internet.  Too bad the press missed it. 

Technorati Tags: broadband,differentiated services,FCC,Google,Internet,ISP,telecommunications,Verizon (VZ),QOS

True Progress on Net Neutrality from Verizon and Google

Monday Google and Verizon released their joint framework for an open Internet.  While the press and digiratti expressed their outrage that two leaders in the industry too the initiative to make a proposal, it was a major step forward in reaching consensus by the largest access and content providers.  Condemnation was generally universal from expected sources like Wired, This Week in Tech, the George Soros funded MoveOn.org, the technical press in general, FCC, and even the Wall Street Journal.  Other carriers, such as AT&T and  Level 3, were generally timid in their acceptance of the progress.  The reasons for the condemnation were varied and often overstated.  Most of the denunciation resulted from a lack of knowledge in how the Internet and telecommunications networks work.  This ignorance causes fear that results in calls for government intervention even though there is yet to be a problem.

Presently all Internet traffic is classified as a “best-effort” service.  That means that all packets travel independently through the Internet with no preferences given to them.  The packets are not even guaranteed to arrive at their destination if there is congestion at network nodes which is why TCP was invented to tell the sender to resend lost packets.  The truth is that most non-business Internet traffic uses the same equipment and bandwidth as business services that are already prioritized.  Carriers may already be slightly delaying best-effort Internet when their router becomes congested with business services.  Therefore, the concept of “all packets being equal” is already a misnomer.  Even content providers like Google prioritize their internal traffic over Gmail sessions or search queries when they may be comingled. Carriers have been selling “differentiated” services to businesses for several years to ensure the quality of video and voice traffic over e-mail, web browsing, and other applications that are tolerant to a few hundreds of milliseconds delay.  It is about time that residential users have access to those same capabilities if innovative services like Over-the-Top Video (Hulu Plus, Netflix, etc.) and VoIP are going to compete with Cable TV and “digital phone services."

Several articles prophesized that the introduction of differentiated services would create two Internets because carriers would dedicate almost all of their bandwidth to the more profitable differentiated services or split networks.  This statement is false because operating parallel networks is not an economically viable solution.  Duplicating equipment would drive the costs up of all services.  In reality network operators are always trying to converge their networks to a single network for economies of scale.  We are reaching the 1950’s goal of the Bell System that all services will ride over a single network.  The Internet Protocol (IP) and inexpensive Ethernet has made that goal possible.  Carriers are increasingly migrating their network to IP to yield both capital and operational cost savings.  As these networks merge, Internet access will ride right along with the voice and video services also offered by the carriers.  Services like FiOS, U-Verse, and Xfinity are based on this shared network concept.  Carriers of these services dedicate bandwidth to each service.  If a competitor like Netflix wanted to offer a service to you they could not purchase bandwidth from Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon.  They have to do it over the Internet where their movies are subject to potential degradation through the normal course of transit.

Differentiated services would simply introduce priority bits to the traffic that may be sensitive to delay and jitter like a Netflix movie.  Best-effort traffic would continue to have no priority.  In most cases the end-user would not even know that their traffic was being delayed.  If that same end-user purchased a Hulu Plus Plus service that was differentiated, they would no longer see the excessive buffering, stopping, and block errors that they typically now see.  The result is a better Internet experience for all.  Throwing more bandwidth at an end-user does not necessarily solve the problem as Molly Wood of CBS Interactive (CNET) and others have postulated.  Routers, servers, and other transport equipment can slow down traffic if too much hits it at one time no matter how much bandwidth is available.

Net neutrality is a vague term that means different things to different people so saying someone is for or against net neutrality means nothing.  Most everyone including the carriers will agree that they want an open Internet, but what does that really mean?  Verizon and Google each have some of the Internet’s pioneers working for them, and they have the technical know-how to best evolve the Internet.  Al Gore, Ted Stevens (RIP), George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Jason Calacanis, the FCC, and many others did not invent the Internet nor do they engineer it on a daily basis.  They should leave the engineering of it to the many companies and people that build and manage it.  The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is composed of those individuals which make it a perfect body to decide the tenants of net neutrality.  The Internet is a global phenomenon because it was designed and built by these people, not bureaucrats, politicians, and do-gooders.  By deviating from that formula we risk polluting the Internet with restrictions that will stifle innovation and the entrepreneurs that net neutrality proponents are claiming to represent.  That is why I believe that this shared statement of principles should not serve as a basis for legislation by Congress or regulation by the FCC, but as a request for comment (RFC) by the IETF so the Internet can truly be left free and open globally.

Verizon and Google arrived at a major milestone by agreeing that they will not block or impede traffic/services from any particular lawful source.  Both parties agreed that network management techniques or traffic prioritization was allowed by service type and not service provider.  The implications of this agreement is that YouTube could compete against FiOS on a level playing field.  The small additional charge for a guaranteed quality of experience is well worth it.  Revenue gained would be used to continue to invest in continued Internet improvements and a better user experience.  It is a pity that the technical press does not grasp this fact.  Instead they are intent on listening to governmental organizations trying to expand their control over the Internet or third-parties spreading their socialist agenda.  None of these groups have a true financial interest in the Internet.  The astute observer will notice that true content providers (mainstream media excluded) are absent form the cacophony of descent.  Could it be that they are siding with the largest content provider in the world?  Perhaps they realize that these principles could allow them to compete with the large carriers.

Verizon and Google took the initiative to form an agreement between content provider and carrier.  The media assumes that any time private companies get together that they are doing evil.  They would be wise to keep in mind that private companies, research institutions, and universities built the internet, not the FCC or Congress.  Google and Verizon did what bureaucrats and the politicians could not do: take an initial step at defining net neutrality for wireline networks.  There are some items that could be refined a bit as other content providers and carriers come on board, and they must tackle wireless networks.  Exempting them was their biggest mistake, because they are just as an important Internet access method for many Americans.  The IETF should take this draft proposal and expand it to cover all access methods including wireless.  Global adoption by carriers and content providers is crucial so innovation and competition can continue on the Internet.

Note:  The author does not work for or compensated by Verizon, Google, or any other carrier or content provider.  These opinions and facts are based on my two plus decades of experience in the telecommunications industry.

Technorati Tags: AT&T,broadband,Comcast (CMCSA),Google,net neutrality,politics,telecommunications,YouTube,Verizon (VZ),IETF

ITU-T Recommendations Free On-Line

The International Telecommunications Union Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) has decided to offer over 3,000 of its standards for free in PDF version only.  The ITU came to its senses when it realized that they can better serve their mission when they offer the standards to people for free instead of charging moderate fees.  Beginning in January of this year, they allowed web site visitors to download standards free of charge.  Over 300,000 standards were downloaded during the first three quarters of this year compared to 500 purchased last year.  I guess that they realized that selling standards is not a money making proposition.  It is better to make them freely available to anyone who wants them so they can be widely implemented; otherwise, they are not of much value to the industry.

Let's hope that other standards organizations catch on to this move and begin providing their standards free on-line.  With the exception of IEEE, Telcordia and CableLabs, most standards organizations worldwide are supported by governments, and the standards are created and edited by industry volunteers.  The cost of providing free on-line copies is negligible.  If the purpose of a standard is to promote multi-vendor interoperability and safety, shouldn't they be widely available?  The ITU has made a great step in promoting the use of their standards globally and spurring innovation.

Technorati tags: International Telecommunications Union, ITU, standards, telecommunications