January 17, 2006, 5:05 PM — Some U.S. broadband providers may be moving toward giving preferential treatment to certain content and services on their networks, raising alarms from some corners that consumers and nonpreferred players could lose out.
Carriers maintain that they can make deals to give better than average quality of service to some providers of Internet applications, such as VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) or movie downloading companies. But critics say the practice could slow down applications that don't have priority and make the carrier the arbiter of what's most appealing on a consumer's broadband connection. Either way, for business and technology reasons, the idea may not fly at all.
All three major U.S. carriers emphasize that they allow their broadband subscribers access to any legal application they choose. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission spelled that out as a policy last August. But by arranging for some applications (including their own) to work better than others over a finite broadband connection, they could give the favored ones a key advantage, critics say.
BellSouth Corp. has been in talks with providers of content and services for several months, according to spokesman Jeff Battcher. Among the potential customers are online gaming companies and providers of downloadable content, including Movielink LLC and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Entertainment division.
Such an arrangement could benefit consumers by, for example, dramatically cutting down the time it takes to download a movie, Battcher said. The carrier, which has about 2.7 million broadband subscribers in the Southeastern U.S., isn't selling priority to anyone yet, but it could start doing that tomorrow if it chose to, Battcher said.
AT&T Inc., the new company formed by the merger of SBC Communications and AT&T, already has a deal with Movielink in which the company can provide movie downloads at increased quality and speed over the carrier's network, said AT&T spokesman Dave Pacholczyk.
Verizon Communications Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ivan Seidenberg said last week that he might seek to have Verizon make similar deals, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. "Verizon offers open and unfettered access to the Internet on its high-speed DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and fiber networks. To the extent consumers and applications providers require additional speed or security, our networks can provide that too," Verizon spokesman David Fish said in a prepared statement this week.
BellSouth bears the cost of maintaining the network over which other companies, such as VOIP provider Vonage Holdings Corp., deliver services for profit, Battcher said.
"I didn't see Vonage trucks down in New Orleans ... repairing phone lines" after Hurricane Katrina last year, Battcher said. A vendor of services on the Internet will invest in network priority if it wants to provide a better product, he said. Anyone not using that service wouldn't notice a difference in their Internet access, he added.
"We're not limiting anyone's ability to go to any site they want [or] degrading anybody's speed," Battcher said.
However, BellSouth couldn't sell priority to an unlimited number of service providers, he acknowledged. If demand for enhanced quality of service were high enough, the carrier would have to choose which providers got priority, he said. He would not speculate on whether or when that point might be reached, or how BellSouth would then decide which services got priority.
Bruce Kushnick, a founder of the consumer advocacy group Teletruth and a frequent critic of the incumbent carriers, said the concept turns broadband on its head.
"My service shouldn't have a priority system based on what the phone company wants, it should have a priority system based on what I want," Kushnick said. "I should be able to get any service at the speed that [the provider's] servers work," he said. The carriers' real motivation is to give their own VOIP and multimedia services priority while leaving competitive offerings with nothing but best-effort Internet performance, Kushnick believes.
Helping one application or service run better isn't necessarily the benign benefit the carriers say, according to Ovum Ltd. analyst Mark Seery. It could affect end users even if they aren't using the offering that's getting a boost, he said. That's because even though a DSL connection isn't shared among several neighbors as cable Internet service is, the capacity of other parts of the network is shared. A multimedia stream gobbling up bandwidth in the core of a network could slow down other packets, he said.
"When you're using quality of service to implement a priority-based system, someone is always losing," Seery said.
