Wi-Fi Offloading, Specialized Services, Get Attention at FCC Open Internet Advisory Meeting

There has been a longterm trend to Wi-Fi offloading, mobile working group members said. As unloading becomes more ubiquitous, the definition of “mobile” becomes more “ambiguous,” said Marcus Weldon, Alcatel Lucent chief technology officer. As the mobile broadband working group examines the space, it would be “logical” to include Wi-Fi in its case studies, Weldon said. It’s particularly important because a consumer could be satisfied by the combination of mobile and Wi-Fi offloading, and looking at only the mobile side might not give the full picture, he said.

The mobile group has spent the last several months looking broadly at the wireless ecosystem, which differs a lot from the wireline space, said Jennifer Rexford, a Princeton professor of computer science and chair of the working group. There’s “interesting tension at play” between app developers and operating system (OS) designers, between OS designers and device makers, and between users and their carriers, she said. Each of those tensions might implicate net neutrality concerns, she said: For instance, app store curators might adopt policies ultimately affecting Internet openness if they choose to promote or classify apps in a certain way. One potential concern is the use of “zero-rating,” where a carrier doesn’t count certain bandwidth usage against a subscriber’s monthly quota. This is an international trend that could cause net neutrality implications if it comes to the U.S., she said.

The working group wanted to paint a broad picture of the mobile space, even if its findings don’t always affect the FCC’s direct use of regulatory power, Rexford said. “If you make decisions purely from the lens of the consumer’s interactions with the carrier, you may be missing factors,” she said. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, appreciated the idea of giving the FCC a broad overview of the space. Cooper is concerned about “regulatory creep” into things like app stores, she said. “But you can’t ignore it, even if you don’t have jurisdiction about it."

The specialized services working group continued attempting to determine what exactly a specialized service is. Specialized services are generally exempt from the Open Internet rules, but the FCC cautioned that they “may present risks to the open Internet” and the commission would “closely monitor” them. The FCC’s Open Internet order was “not as well drafted as it could have been, so this was a bit of a challenge,” said David Clark, senior research scientist at MIT and vice chair of the advisory committee. Most of the working group’s discussion focused on “reachability,” said Chuck Kalmanek, AT&T Labs vice president-research: If a service doesn’t let a user access all or most of the Internet, then it might be a specialized service. Other factors the group considered were separate pricing for a service, and “capacity isolation": Whether bandwidth usage in one service had any impact on the user’s general Internet bandwidth.

If a service provider provided access to an application service as a special add-on through some other portion of the access network that ensured capacity isolation, “in general that doesn’t impact the openness and general nature of the user’s Internet access,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society. On the other side is whether an access provider offers some level of priority to improve access to an application, and does so over the main Internet service. That’s a “traditional network neutrality question,” which “seems fairly clearly not in line with the Open Internet report and order,” Daigle said. But if the choice isn’t being made by the ISP, but rather the ISP gives its customers the ability to choose the extra services they might want to purchase, it’s less clear whether that counts as a specialized service, she said. A question that came up in the working group was, “Are we in fact saying that you can offer any other service with prioritized access as long as what you do is ... call it something ’specialized?'” That deserves further discussion, Daigle said.

The transparency working group, which had been working on a “logo” program that would display ISP speeds and prices (CD Jan 18 p8), is considering trying to measure the “quality of experience” that a user receives, Clark said. It ultimately comes down to whether an Internet service is “good enough” for the user, he said. “When you ask when is the Internet service good enough, there’s no obvious way to relate a particular bandwidth to good enough. So what we started to look at was the consumer experience."

There’s also no real consensus on what speed measurement would be the most useful to consumers. It may be that in some rooms of the house, a user gets better coverage, and wants a mobile provider that offers coverage in a certain room, said Weldon. “The average number will be so meaningless as to be misleading,” he said. “The reality of a mobile experience means that that number is very hard to make meaningful.”