Posted by: Dave Passmore
Back in the days of the Cold War when the United States and Soviet Union each had thousands of ballistic nuclear warheads aimed at each other, neither side was anxious to launch a “first strike,” since this would undoubtedly cause the other country to launch a counter-attack that would wipe out cities of the original aggressor. Since both countries realized that launching a first strike was suicidal, it actually managed to keep the peace. This situation of either side having the ability to wipe out the other, but both being afraid to attack due to unacceptable consequences became known as “mutually assured destruction,” – with the delightful acronym of “MAD.”
We’ve now reached a similar situation with telecom network operators and the issue of “net neutrality” (i.e., that network operators aren’t allowed to discriminate against traffic they find objectionable on their networks). For the past few years the major operators have all asserted their right to “manage” traffic on their network, for example blocking or resetting BitTorrent sessions, charging more for higher priority packet transmission, or forwarding the voice or video packets of competitors at a lower priority so that customers would prefer the better performance of an operator’s own voice or video services.
Various legislative and regulatory approaches have been proposed to force operators to maintain net neutrality, but none of them have been entirely successful, mostly due to the difficulty of proving or distinguishing between poor network performance vs. an operator purposely degrading the performance of particular traffic types.
But now there’s a development that may force operators to respect net neutrality without the need for additional legislation or regulation. It instead relies of the Cold War concept of MAD.
Mobile operators are introducing femtocells, very small customer-owned cellular radio base stations that residential mobile phone users install within their homes. Femtocells are designed to improve indoor cellular phone coverage for those customers that have poor in-house reception. Notably femotocells are designed to use the customer’s residential broadband connection to the Internet for backhaul, i.e., cellphone calls handled by a femtocell are redirected over an Internet VPN to the mobile operator’s backbone.
The introduction of femtocells will make network operators more dependent on net neutrality being applied and maintained. Why? Because a typical residential femtocell customer will obtain mobile operator/femtocell service from one network operator, while backhaul traffic from that femtocell will have to traverse a residential broadband connection to the Internet from a different network operator. Only occasionally will customers live somewhere where the mobile operator is also the wireline local broadband provider. With femtocells, mobile operators will therefore increasingly be dependent on competitor wireline operators for acceptable network performance. This increases dependence on wireline operator net neutrality.
Mobile operators that rely on other wireline carriers for femtocell traffic backhaul out-of-region are vulnerable to net neutrality violations. For example, if AT&T were to degrade the performance of Verizon Wireless femtocell backhaul traffic across AT&T’s DSL residential broadband networks in Texas, Verizon could retaliate by degrading the performance of AT&T wireless femtocell backhaul traffic across Verizon’s FiOS residential broadband networks in New Jersey. In either case, such “attacks” of one network operator on the traffic of the other would likely result in unacceptable retaliation -- the principle of MAD applied to networks.
Will telecom MAD be sufficient to rein in the natural propensity of network operators to violate net neutrality? For the largest operators who offer both wireless and wireline services, probably. But what will incent cable operators without any wireless services or femtocells to respect net neutrality? Perhaps as cable operators are forced to launch their own mobile services (sometimes with the help of other mobile operators), they too will be subject to MAD.
Think of voice femotcell service as just another network application that rides “on top of” an IP transport network. As long as network operators insist on also being content or application service providers to customers that rely on another network operator for transport, the potential for MAD exists. Perhaps such MADness will provide network users’ best hope for net neutrality.
- Dave Passmore
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