Industry Perspective

7 Suggestions for Limiting Internet Competition

As reported in the Toronto Star, a large percentage of Canadian Internet users are about to be sent back to the primitive and restrictive usage-based billing models of the early Internet. Rogers is about to introduce consumption / usage billing to its Internet service.

The effect of this change is just as serious as the anti-competitive, anti-choice, anti-innovative tactics of traffic shaping already being employed by Rogers and Bell. Traffic shaping and usage based billing models allow the service providers to inhibit services that are competitive to their own. And make no mistake, if unhindered they will do just that!

Once the mechanism are in place it will be easy for them to protect themselves from competing and innovative new services. If one was to advise service providers on how to limit competition, the following would be great suggestions:

1. Are consumers choosing Internet Telephony services such as Vonage and Skype instead of your own? Randomly drop some of the competitors’ packets. Problem solved!
2. Are consumers listening to online radio broadcasts instead of your radio stations? No problem, just interfere with the audio stream. Problem solved!
3. Are consumers dropping your TV service in favour of watching custom Internet video, based on their content and schedule preferences? We can’t have that, now can we? Just introduce usage based billing. After the consumer gets a few $1,000 invoices the problem will be solved!
4. Consumers complaining about your practices? Just tell them that it’s for their own good. After all there is an “evil” 5% of Internet users that want to use the Internet for more than casual Web browsing and email. So you’re real and noble intention, is that you want to protect the 95% of “good” Internet users. Problem solved!
5. Don’t mention the fact that for years, you’ve been reaping the profits of selling your services based on bandwidth that the vast majority of subscribers never used.
6. Don’t mention either that you realized that the demand for bandwidth was increasing but you chose to maximize profits instead of reinvesting in infrastructure.
7. And finally, start inserting your own content into other unrelated Internet content and display it to your remaining “good” users to reinforce the message that you are in control of the Internet.

Here’s a bonus suggestion:

If a consumer calls to complain about your anti-competitive tactics do the following:

Immediately place the caller on hold while you laugh uncontrollably. After 30 minutes have passed and you have regained your composure, tell the caller that you will transfer the call to the complaints department and “accidentally” disconnect the call. Once the silly consumer calls back in, inform the complainer that in Canada, consumers have few if any alternative providers to choose from and that Bell and Rogers ensure that the same anti-competitive practices are imposed onto their competitors. Then sarcastically ask if you should transfer the call to the cancellation department.

If you care about the future of the Internet, your freedom to choose, innovation, competitiveness and affordability, I urge you to act now:

Contact the CRTC

Find and contact your Member of Parliament

Amber Mac on Net Neutrality

Here’s a quick tutorial by Amber Mac on the subject of Net Neutrality. She accurately describes the important aspects of the subject.

Canadians must keep up the pressure on service providers and government. I am cautious on regulatory interference but the lack of Net Neutrality has the potential of seriously limiting innovation, competitiveness, consumer choice and Canada’s ability to effectively compete in the global marketplace. If consumer pressure and impending lawsuits are not successfull, then government must step in and force service providers to treat all traffic equally.

VoIP 911 Call May Have Been Factor in Child’s Death

The Calgary Herald is reporting that a toddler has died, and that delays in the response to a 911 call (initially made using a VoIP service) may have been a contributing factor in the child’s death. The Herald is reporting that 40 minutes passed from the time the original call was placed until emergency crews arrived. A 911 call was later placed from a neighbour’s home and emergency crews arrived within six minutes of that call.

My thoughts and condolences go out to the child’s family. What a tragic and sad event!

I will attempt to follow the story as investigators work to discover what may have gone wrong in the process. In the meantime I will not speculate on the circumstances surrounding this tragedy but I would like to make a few comments on residential VoIP based services in general.

What follows in an excerpt from an article I wrote previously on the risks associated with residential VoIP services:

Emergencies

Yes, it’s true that most VoIP providers have E911 capabilities. However, in many instances, unlike your POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) service, your call does not terminate directly in the E911 PSAP. Instead, it is directed to a call centre first, which in my
view, could potentially compromise the efficacy of the response. In addition, as others have pointed out, unless your ATA has, or is plugged into, a backup power supply, your VoIP service will be non-functional in a power outage. Even, with ATA backup power, a power interruption might bring down the network through which your VoIP service is delivered. Sure, most cable companies do
have UPS to protect their trunk and distribution amplifiers but the capacity may be very limited which means that an extended and widespread outage will almost certainly result in your VoIP service going down. In addition, the reliability of the backup power is dependent on diligent maintenance, which is a non-trivial and expensive challenge. My Bell Canada phone service, I am confident, would continue to work even if a power outage lasted for weeks.

In addition to the potential risks in the above excerpt, with many Internet Telephony Services, it is essential that the customer completes an address form so that the correct relationship between the assigned telephone number and the customer’s address is on record at the service provider. It should also be pointed out that with many free Internet Telephony services, that there is no mechanism for associating the origin of a 911 call with an address.

Since writing the article on the risks of residential VoIP services, I have discontinued my POTS line. However, I have done so with a full understanding of the risks.

In my view, residential VoIP providers do not provide sufficient information to consumers regarding the risks associated with depending on a VoIP service as a primary line. In fact, many of the VoIP providers promote the service in a way that would lead consumers to believe that when it comes to service reliability and E911, that their services is equivalent to POTS, which they are not.

Whether you are currently a VoIP subscriber or are considering discontinuing your POTS line and replacing it with a VoIP service, I urge you to read my article on the potential risks before you make your decision.

If you need help to assess the risks, please leave a comment here and I will do my best to provide you with factual information.

OCS Does Not Signal the Death of the PBX

As part of a continuing series on Office Communications Server 2007, this article will discuss the product’s native telephony
capabilities.

As I’ve asserted many times, Unified Communications (UC) is an architecture that may include many functional components, enablers and features. Presence, Unified Messaging, Click-to-Dial, Simultaneous Ring, and mobility are just some of the attributes that are often associated with UC. All of those play an important role in UC but the core functional component of UC remains telephony. In the context of this article, telephony refers to all of the features and functionality associated with an enterprise-class business voice service. Modern telephony services are now IP-based, either in the form of a premise-based IP-PBX, a hosted IP Telephony service or various hybrid models.

When Microsoft announced the release of OCS in the fall of 2007 there were many who claimed that it signaled the end of the PBX and that IP-PBX vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, NEC, Siemens, Mitel and others would be seriously impacted by Microsoft’s entry into the VoIP market. OCS does have VoIP capabilities, but for most medium to large enterprise, the product’s native telephony features and functionally is inadequate. OCS can integrate with IP-PBXs to provide the telephony requirements necessary for business. However, the integration is not elegant (in most cases it must be done via media gateways) and other than basic telephony features such as call origination and transfer, the bulk of the enterprise telephony functionality will be provided by the PBX; not OCS.

What follows is a partial list of telephony features and functionality required (or expected) by most medium and large enterprise that are not available from a standalone OCS solution:

E911

E911(as a telephony feature) refers to the ability of a telephony system to accurately identify the location of the 911 caller and to accurately deliver that information to the correct emergency dispatch location. That can be tricky in the world of IP Telephony since IP Phones can easily be moved from one location to another. However, there are proven and reliable ways to address the challenge. While
there are a variety of approaches, all major IP Telephony vendors have E911 functionality natively or have integrated 3rd party products into their solutions.

In some cases, it is acceptable to have one or more analogue circuits to provide E911 functionality. Also, an IP-PBX system installed in a small office may not require E911 functionality if it is connected to the PSTN directly since the telephone company would take care of the 911 location and routing functionality.

However, in any large enterprise environment, E911 functionality is mandatory. I’ve heard the argument that whether E911 functionality is required or not is based on regulatory requirements for the location in question: nonsense! A telephony architect or implementer has a moral responsibility to ensure that a caller can place an emergency call when needed and that the call will be routed
to the correct location with the correct information.

SIP Trunking

IP Trunking, commonly referred to as SIP Trunking (since SIP has become the de facto signaling protocol), is a relatively new method of connecting IP Telephony systems to the PSTN. Traditionally, and still the most common approach, IP Telephony systems are connected to the PSTN via Media Gateways. These devices also known as IP Gateways, PSTN Gateways or VoIP Gateways, convert VoIP from the IP Telephony system to ISDN or analogue circuits from the PSTN.

IP Trunking has many advantages, over the gateway approach including the fact that it can improve the quality of voice calls by reducing, or eliminating, conversions from one audio encapsulation method to another. Other advantages are cost, eliminating points of failure, maintenance and other advantages which I have listed in one of my previous articles on the subject.

Remote Survivability

Remote Survivability refers to the ability of a site, geographically separated from centralized call control or PSTN connectivity or both, to remain functional even if the site becomes isolated from the rest of the telephony system. For example, if the network link between a branch office and the IP-PBX, located at a company’s head office is severed, the branch office may have a requirement for telephony services to remain functional. The level of required functionality will be dictated by the business requirements. IP-PBX vendors use a variety of methods to provide remote survivability to their IP Telephony solutions which involves distributing some, or all call processing functionality and PSTN connectivity.

Music on Hold

Most enterprises expect their telephony systems to play music, or some other source of audio, to callers when placed on hold or when a call is transferred. It is a basic functional component of any legacy or IP-PBX. In fact, most enterprise systems support Music on Hold from a variety of sources and in some cases, custom audio announcements whose content may be based on geographic location or other criteria.

Hunt Groups

A common feature of a PBX is the ability to have incoming calls directed to a queue where calls will be answered by agents based on a variety of criteria including but not limited to first available agent, least busy agent, round robin and others.

Attendant Console

While becoming less popular, many organizations still require that a live person process all incoming calls for an organization or an enterprise department. An Attendant Console will usually support many incoming calls and will provide the attendant with visual and audio prompts and queues to aid in the efficient processing of calls.

Admission Control

Admission Control allows a telephony system to refuse call attempts or to redirect calls when it detects that insufficient network resources are available to provide a quality voice path. I’ve heard Microsoft representatives make claims that Call Admission Control is not required, but for the reasons discussed in this previous article, I disagree.

Standards

One of the benefits IP Telephony systems is that many vendors support industry standards such as SIP for signaling, and CODECS such as G.711 and G.729. While not perfect, interoperability among vendors has been steadily improving for the last several years. As a result it is now possible, for example to install an IP-PBX from one vendor and select lower cost IP Phones from a different vendor. Not so with Microsoft since they have chosen to implement their own spin on SIP and have chosen their own proprietary CODEC called RTAudio. To date, the only supported OCS phones are a model by Nortel/LG and a model by Polycom. Neither phone supports LLDP-MED, a link discovery protocol that can play an important role with respect to VLAN, DHCP and Power over Ethernet configuration. The proprietary nature of the product also excludes the possibility of using 3rd party softphones such as the very popular X-Lite.

Geographic Diversity

A benefit for many large organizations deploying IP Telephony is that the any-to-any nature of IP networks allows IP Telephony systems to be designed with a high degree of redundancy by separating the call control functions geographically. The business continuity benefits of such architecture can be very compelling. OCS does not support geographic diversity.

Conclusion

I remember when Cisco first got into the telephony market approximately 10 years ago. Relative to the features and functionality available from TDM-based PBXs (not to mention service quality and reliability), their product had minimal functionality. As a result, it took many years of product development for their IP Telephony product to move beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream
marketplace we see today.

Microsoft will, I am confident, continually improve their telephony capabilities, but like Cisco, it won’t happen overnight. Meanwhile, the IP-PBX will remain alive and well for quite some time. And while Microsoft adds telephony features to OCS, the PBX vendors will continue to evolve and improve their own products; both from a telephony and an overall UC perspective.

The PBX is alive and well. And while it will continue to evolve, the PBX and its leading vendors won’t be disappearing any time soon.

Rick McCharles
Unified Communications Practice Principal
RIC Services,Toronto,OntarioCanada

Definition of Unified Communications, Its Features and Benefits

What is Unified Communications? Ask that question to 50 different people and without a doubt you will get 50 different and diverging replies. Even among industry professionals, hardware and software vendors, and industry analysts there is no consensus on definition. When asked, many in the business will begin to discuss UC’s features and its benefits as opposed to defining what UC actually is.

In my continuing attempts to provide some clarity for my clients and to hopefully achieve some level of industry consensus, I offer the following:

Let’s start with dispelling some misconceptions. Unified Communications is NOT:

• VoIP
• SIP or SIP Trunking
• Unified Messaging
• Presence
• Click-to-Dial
• Mobility
• Fixed to Mobile Convergence
• IP Telephony
• IP-PBX
• IP Phones
• Softphones
• Analogue phones
• Instant Messaging
• An Icon That Display Availability Status

Some, or all of the items in the list, might be part of a unified communications architecture, but none of them define UC. To say for example, that Unified Messaging defines UC would be as silly as defining IT Architecture as storage, or computers, or a network. Information Technology is not so easily defined, and neither is Unified Communications. Which brings me to my definition for UC. I entered this definition in Wikipedia several months ago and so far it’s holding (the rest of the Wikipedia entry on the subject needs a makeover).

Definition of Unified Communications

An evolving communications technology architecture which automates and unifies all forms of human and device communications in context, and with a common experience. Its purpose is to optimize business processes and enhance human communications by reducing latency, managing flows, and eliminating device and media dependencies.

I appreciate that a five word definition would be easier to remember but it would not be accurate nor would it do UC justice with respect to its features and benefits. So while the definition is a little wordy,  it conveys the complexity and tremendous benefits of UC which I hope to articulate as I dissect the definition in what follows:

Evolving

UC didn’t begin with the emergence of the term a couple of years ago. UC has been evolving for many years. In fact, many of the concepts and functionality associated with UC such as simultaneous ring existed even before IP began to impact voice communications. Presence, a core and important component of a UC Architecture was part of some very early IP Telephony systems and has been around even longer in the form of Online / Offline Buddy status of Instant Messaging applications. UC will continue to increase its business value and enhance communications of all forms as it continues to evolve.

Architecture

UC is made up of multiple components. The applications, enablers and functionality listed earlier such as IP Telephony, Unified Messaging and Instant Messaging may all be parts of UC system. It also has an underlying design, purpose and structure; all of which in part, validate the architecture label.

Unifies

At the heart of UC is of course its unifying characteristics. A Unified Communications Architecture has the ability to unify communications of all forms including applications, machines and devices, voice, video, text, languages, as well as the old and the new. More details follow on the unification attributes and benefits.

Context

UC brings context into the world of communications. Context can be in a form that is already familiar to us such as “who’s calling” with Caller ID. But UC can also provide context in other forms such as:

- What are you doing now? Communications is tailored according to your activities. For example, you may choose a small specific list of individuals that are allowed to contact you when your scheduling application detects that you are in a meeting.

- The device that you’re using or the device in use by the person you are contacting. For example, the system could convert your text message to a voice message if the person you are calling, is currently using a voice device not capable of accepting text messages.

- Intelligent context-driven menus that provide prompts that are relevant to the device and in context with  the communications event. For example when placing a voice call, the system could present the user with the option of leaving a text message instead of a voice message if the call is not answered.

Optimize Business Processes

In business, technology’s purpose is to solve business problems. UC’s ability to integrate communications with business applications, processes and workflows has the potential of producing tremendous business value. A well designed UC architecture can:

- Enable communications, in whatever form is appropriate, between different applications, applications and people, and just about any type of device or sensor you can imagine.

- Reduce human latency issues by automatically initiating communications whenever a workflow is stalled as it awaits human intervention or action.

While still in its early stages UC, through the use of standard protocols such as SIP, SIMPLE, SOAP and XML, is slowly being integrated into business applications such as CRM, ERP and HR. A basic integration example would be a supply-chain application that upon detecting an impeding inventory shortage, would automatically schedule and then initiate a conference call with all of the parties required to solve the problem.

For business, these integration capabilities are UC’s most compelling benefits. For that reason, many CIO’s and IT Directors are now incorporating UC into their long term IT strategy.

Enhance Human Communications

Imagine a future where you don’t give a second thought about where the person you are attempting to contact might be, what communication device they are able (or prefer to use), and where phone numbers are irrelevant.

UC is about communications, not technology and devices. And for humans it promises to simplify the way in which we communicate. While still evolving UC will allow communications to become less device dependent and more people centric.

UC is moving towards a future where people will have a single identify (their name: not a phone number) across all communication devices and applications.

UC can empower users by giving them a great deal of granular control over why, when, and where they choose to communicate and with whom. For example a Doctor could elect to only allow certain individuals to contact her on weekends and perhaps refuse all calls while in the operating room.

UC can also bridge demographic gaps based on age, culture and language. One of many examples is where an interpreting application converts from one language to another in real time. That may sound like the stuff of Star Trek, but that kind of functionality is being built into systems today.

Reduce Latency & Manage Flows

Latency reduction was discussed earlier in the context of business processes. But UC can reduce latency in other ways. For example, First Contact Resolution refers to the ability of a UC system to establish a communications session with the first available person based on role or expertise.

UC can also seamlessly manage media and communication modes. An IM session that segues into a telephone conversation and then later into a multi party video conference would be one example.

Simultaneous and Sequential Ring is a common feature and significant benefit of UC where the system rings multiple devices and automatically detects which device answers the call and establishes the communications path.

Eliminate Media & Device Dependencies

One of the benefits of UC is that it has the potential of abstracting away the device and technology characteristics of how we communicate. Why should a user be concerned about which device the party being contacted is using? After all, the caller is attempting to call a person, not a device. Let the UC system take care of figuring out the mechanisms by which the called party will be notified of the call request.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that, when describing UC’s features and benefits, that I qualify many of my statements with “potential, may, can, promises, etc”. I temper the potential benefits because while many of the features and benefits are available today, many more are still evolving. More importantly, business requirements must be well understood and a Unified Communications Architecture must be intelligently designed and implemented in order to realize and maximize its potential benefits.

There’s a lot of hype and confusion about Unified Communications. I am passionate about the industry, the innovation that will result, its potential to enhance the way we communicate and its business value. However, its important to separate hype from reality and to establish some level of consensus on what defines Unified Communications. I hope this article has helped in that regard.

Rick McCharles
Unified Communications Practice Principal
RIC Services, Toronto, Ontario Canada

QoS and Admission Control are IPT Requirements – Even for OCS

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve spent some time doing some research into Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS 2007) product.

OCS is a Unified Communications (UC) product that integrates with Microsoft applications. It provides voice, presence, web/audio/video conferencing and integration with messaging systems. OCS can also integrate with PBXs, both TDM and IP-PBX. The introduction of OCS in the fall of 2007 created a lot of market hype and in my view, confusion. Microsoft marketing did a great job of capturing media attention and giving the impression that OCS was a revolutionary new communications technology and that enterprise communications, from that point forward, would be transformed forever. So effective was the marketing campaign, that some large organizations halted their VoIP migration planning in order to consider how OCS might alter their strategy.
 
The intent of this article and more that will follow, is to separate hype from reality so that you can make informed decisions about UC and how OCS should fit into your UC strategy. This first in this series of OCS articles discusses the topics of Call Admission Control (CAC) and Quality of Service (QoS).

Call Admission Control and Quality of Service – Short Tutorial

In the context of telephony, CAC refers to a telephony system’s ability to decide whether a call request should be allowed or not. In the world of IP Telephony, VoIP is the common method of transporting voice. Analogue voice is converted to a digital from, encapsulated in IP packets, and then transported across a data network. A data network is made of a series of network links all of which have limits with respect to the amount of data they can carry at any give time. When a network link is oversubscribed, devices responsible for sending the data across the links will randomly drop data, which is what they are designed to do.

Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms can be designed into networks to ensure that during periods of congestion, certain types of data will get priority over others. In IP Telephony implementations, voice and telephony-signaling data packets are marked with a priority label that informs routers that, in the event of congestion, that they should give priority to the telephony packets. However, if the amount of prioritized traffic exceeds a links capacity, then the router has no choice but to randomly drop even this high priority traffic. If the high priority traffic is telephone conversations then the quality of all calls will be affected, not just the call that exceeded the links capacity. This is where CAC steps in to avoid this situation.
 
CAC approaches vary but in all cases it consists of the system not allowing more calls than a resource can support. The most robust method will, in real-time, discover the available bandwidth available across the entire path of a proposed new call, then decide if the call should be allowed, and reserve the resource for the duration of the call. If insufficient resources are available the system can refuse the call or send the call across a backup path (like a PSTN gateway). More basic systems require a human to configure the system in advance with the maximum number of calls that should be allowed across a particular network path regardless of how much of the resource is available at the time of the call request.
 
Some of the arguments that I’ve heard, usually from vendors that don’t support CAC, is that a network can be engineered in advance so that the over subscription problem never occurs (design for worst case). For a number of reasons, that approach is not practical in large enterprise environments. For one thing, bandwidth is not free. Second large IP networks are often designed so that automatic rerouting can occur during failures. In many instances the backup links will have less bandwidth than the primary links. So, a system designed to allow a certain number of calls based on a primary link’s bandwidth could over subscribe a backup link.
 
OCS Support for QoS and CAC
 
While OCS does support marking voice payload packets for priority network treatment (DiffServ through DSCP) that functionality is not enabled by default. OCS has no Call Admission Control functionality. Microsoft claims that QoS and CAC are not required to ensure voice quality in an OCS environment. Microsoft uses a proprietary CODEC called RTAudio. The RTAudio codec is designed to detect network congestion or quality issues and to modify its bandwidth requirement accordingly. Also, the CODEC has an algorithm that allows it to send multiple duplicate packets to increase the probability that packets will arrive at their destination when network problems are encountered. As a result Microsoft argues that QoS and CAC are not required.
 
In my view, that logic is fine for Internet Telephony solutions. That is, if you’re transporting voice traffic across the Internet, then a CODEC that modifies its data usage and sends multiple copies of packets, makes sense. When transporting VoIP across the Internet, QoS markings will be ignored. In addition, there is no practical way of detecting in advance of call setup whether sufficient bandwidth is available along the entire call path. Even if one could determine that in advance, there is no way of ensuring that the desirable network conditions will persist for the duration of the call. And, if the fact that your throwing more packets at the problem, adversely affects other Internet traffic, who cares? One has little or no control of network conditions of random source and destination paths across the Internet. So it makes sense to use whatever means are at your disposal to ensure that your traffic gets through, and there is no point in employing mechanisms that won’t make any difference.
 
But that logic does not fly in enterprise class telephony environments. First, while it is true that the RTAudio CODEC adjusts its bandwidth usage based on network conditions, it does not accomplish this instantaneously and therefore voice quality may be affected during the transition period since the algorithm starts with the assumption that there are no network issues. Secondly, while the CODEC can reduce its bandwidth usage, it does not reduce it to zero. When not using redundancy, the CODEC can reduce its consumption from 45Kb/s to 15Kb/s. Additionally, redundancy (sending multiple packet copies) may exacerbate a network congestion issue and potentially adversely affect competing enterprise traffic.

Additionally, what if WAN link is heavily congested? Should the system continue to process all requests across that link, even if the RTAudio CODEC is not able to compensate sufficiently to ensure adequate quality? With no CAC capability, this is exactly what OCS would do in that situation. Also, what if the business requirements dictate that a high fidelity CODEC is mandatory? The OCS approach would not be able to meet this requirement under congested network conditions. A properly engineered QoS solution with associated CAC however, could.
 
Conclusion
 
An IP Telephony solution, including OCS, when deployed in a typical large enterprise environment, cannot practically guarantee consistent voice quality without incorporating QoS and CAC mechanisms, end of story.
 
Notice, I did qualify the above statement with the word “practically”. It’s possible to engineer almost any technology deployment, no matter how deficient the technology may be, if one is free to ignore practical constraints such as business requirements, cost, manageability and scalability.

Rick McCharles
Unified Communications Practice Principal
RIC Services, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Net Neutrality Still in the News

I’m pleased to see that the subject of Net Neutrality in Canada is continuing to stimulate discussion and that the media is paying attention.

The CTV evening news had a segment on the subject this evening they called “Point, Click and Wait”. The report described how Bell and Rogers have been shaping Internet traffic. A Bell spokesman indicated that left unchecked that the heavier users of the Internet would adversely affect the performance of all their customers and that they believe that would be unfair.

In my view, it has nothing at all to do with a concern for fairness. The real issue is that Service Providers have been raking in big profits for years from Internet users who were not using anywhere near the bandwidth capacity that they had been sold. The growth of bandwidth intensive applications did not happen overnight. Had the service providers been conducting proper capacity planning and reinvesting in the infrastructure there would be no concerns about congestion.

Let’s hope that Canadians keep up the pressure on regulators and service providers to change their tactics. If allowed to continue its just a matter of time before service providers give preferential treatment to traffic that is in competition with their own services. If that happens, it will stifle innovation and competition (Bell’s shaping of their ISP customers’ traffic has already, in effect, negatively impacted competition) and will put Canadians at a disadvantage relative to other countries.

NOTE:

Net Neutrality is a term that describes the concept that all network traffic traveling over the Internet is treated equally. A lack of neutrality indicates that some traffic may be expedited or given other preferential treatment relative to other types of traffic. Another form of lack of Net Neutrality would be when a service provider does not hinder the routing of a particular traffic-type for an additional cost (Shaw has already used that tactic).

Net-Neutrality – 5 Reasons Canadians Should be Concerned

By now, any Canadian who pays attention to Net-Neutrality issues, has likely heard about the controversy surrounding the fact that Bell Canada has been throttling the traffic of its ISP customers. Worst, they began throttling the traffic without notifying their customers! Arrogance that only a monopoly could get away with.

Don’t be fooled by their rationalization that they only throttle P2P traffic, and that much of that traffic is generated by teenagers involved in illegal activities. They know that this argument will appease many of its subscribers concerns because after all, “why should your bandwidth be negatively affected by some punk downloading illegal movies?”

Here’s five reasons that Canadians should be concerned about the latest Bell revelations and Net-Neutrality:

1. Bell and others have been selling their services with the promise that their customers could utilize all of the available bandwidth on their connection. They knew that most subscribers would only actually use a small percentage of the available bandwidth. Allowing a large percentage of their customers to actually use the bandwidth they purchase, would require substantial infrastructure investments which would negatively impact profit margins. Unless there are intervening factors, Canadians can expect higher Internet access fees and the return to usage-based fees as in the early days of the Internet. Enjoy watching Internet video based on your content and time preferences? Be prepared to pay, big time!

2. There are various ways for applications to try and bypass the traffic-shaping algorithms. One method is to encrypt the traffic. That tactic won’t work for long. A carrier determined to throttle “undesirable” traffic will simply shape all encrypted traffic if they can’t differentiate the desirable from the undesirable. Be prepared to wait a long time for the large file download from the office to your PC over your corporate VPN. Oh, and you can just forget about making a VoIP business call over that corporate VPN. Of course, your company might be allowed to pay an additional fee so that the carrier allows traffic originating or terminating at your office router to flow unimpeded.

3. The world of communications technology is changing at a rapid pace. Internet telephony, video streaming, audio streaming and many others are changing the way people consume the related services. As a result many of the carriers’ services are becoming less relevant. Given the opportunity, its only a matter of time until they make moves to protect their traditional telephone and audio/video broadcast services. Anyone that thinks that Bell and others will, in the interest of fair play, do nothing as their services are eroded away by competitors is living in a fantasy world. They will fight, and the easiest strategy is a defensive one (impeding competing traffic) as opposed to innovating (developing compelling and competitive services).

4. Some might argue that if you’re not happy with Bell’s service then switch to another provider. Once enough customers leave, competitive forces will persuade them to change their tactics. That’s not likely to happen, since for most Canadians there are very few, if any, alternatives. Besides, switching providers won’t help to improve your service if the very few available service providers are using the same tactics. And of course, Bell has just admitted that they are throttling the traffic of their ISP customers; further limiting consumer options.

5. The Internet has benefited society in innumerable ways. It continues to enable innovative new products and services. It empowers the individual to find and consume information in ways that were unimaginable just 15 years ago. If left unchallenged, service providers acting as Internet Traffic Cops and using self-serving criteria will determine on behalf of Canadians which services they should be allowed to get from the Internet without additional payments to the carrier.

6. I know, I know, I said five reasons. But this one is also important. If Bell is allowed to shape traffic in any manner they choose, other Canadian service providers will follow suit. If they don’t, they will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

CRTC Approves BCE Takeover

With the conditions that the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan appoints six of the 13 directors and that the chairman and CEO are Canadian, the CRTC has approved the takeover of BCE.

“I have to make sure that both in law and effect, the company will be controlled by Canadians,” von Finckenstein said in an interview. “I think with the provisions as we conditioned them, it will be.”

With the ruling, it appears that all legal and regulatory hurdles have been cleared. However, the dynamic and deteriorating conditions in the financial markets and the associated credit crunch has cast some doubt as to whether all of the financial participants will follow through with their commitments.

Quebec Judge Rules in Favour of BCE Deal

As expected, Quebec Superior Court Justice Joel Silcoff announced his ruling yesterday on the bondholders request that the court reject the plan or make its approval subject to the consent of the trustee of the bond issues.

In a series of decisions Friday, the judge rejected all court challenges by two Bell bondholder groups opposed to the buyout, led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Martine Turcotte, chief legal officer with BCE stated that “The judgments were quite clear and categorical and supported our longstanding position that the bondholders’ lawsuits were without merit,” an that “We’re extremely happy with the results and are proceeding to the next steps of closing.”

The deal still is still dependent on rulings by the CRTC and Industry Canada, but at this point it appears that the probability that the deal will be completed is high.