osrin.net

One of the more enlightening panel discussions in Seoul earlier this week was a discussion between a couple of well known telcos on the issue of Net Neutrality.

The arguments against Net Neutrality have never really been clear to me. Microsoft’s position is to support the drive for continued neutrality of services provided on the Internet, which makes sense to me personally as we deal with issues of connecting diverse communities to the network and see the delivery of services here in Asia that may not be quite so relevant in Western Europe or the United States.

I’ll give you examples of two sets of arguments put forwards by different providers which really brought clarity to the issue for me. For the sake of simplicity (or cowardice on my part!) I’ll just call them “TelCo A” and “TelCo B”, you can easily research (or work out) who holds which position on the issue.

TelCo A was against Net Neutrality, instead putting forwards an argument for what they called intelligent networks capable of doing more caching of data and selectively managing services based upon consumer demand and requirements. The rational behind this argument was based upon a rapidly growing amount of data passing through their backbone services, projected to be around 50,000 terabytes a day by 2010, making it essential to manage data flows to ensure that service would be consistent well into the future.

TelCo B was in support of Net Neutrality, their argument was that innovation on the Internet today is very often consumer and user driven, the role of the TelCo was to provide connectivity not to decide what would run across those connections. TelCo B made a strong case for an open and neutral Internet providing a platform for innovation, increased societal connections and economic growth.

The difference between TelCo A and TelCo B? Simple really.

TelCo A has a substantial investment in copper cable to millions of doorsteps delivering limited bandwidth to broadband users. TelCo B has made huge investments in recent years in delivering fibre to those same doorsteps offering comparably infinite bandwidth to the same households.

A notably simplistic view of the issue, but all the same a clarifying one.