Solving the wireless Net neutrality conflict

The Net neutrality debate often descends into the kind of partisan dementia found on Fox News and MSNBC. It doesn’t have to.

In the debate today, carriers claim they need to regulate what users do on their networks (including the Internet, whose traffic moves through carrier networks for part of the journey) because data usage is growing 10 times as fast as the revenue from data, causing bandwidth shortages and threatening their economic viability.

Users freak out at the regulated-usage idea, saying that no one should play Big Brother with their information consumpution. They also note how obscenely profitable the carriers are despite their protestations of economic doom, and they suspect the carriers are trying to lock them into proprietary services and favored partners, as has been the pattern for years.

Users are right to distrust the carriers, who are infamous for offering unlimited plans that are secretly limited (you find out only when your account is blocked), for their walled garden of tacky apps, for their high roaming fees and other surprise surcharges, and for uneven service quality.

But the carriers have a point: As more and more people use mobile devices to access the increasing number of cloud services and to watch videos and perform other high-bandwidth activities, something has to give — especially in light of the crazies who block the deployment of additional cell towers to ease bandwdith congestion in the name of irrational radiation fears.

I spoke recently to Chris Hoover, vice president of product management at Openet, an Irish firm that provides carriers with technology to manage usage policies, such as allocating family plan minutes and managing cell tower access during periods of congestion. His description of what is possible — as well as what is not — got me to thinking that the kind of policy management tools his firm offers could be used to solve the wireless Net neutrality problem. Alternatively, this could also give carriers the tools with which to screw us all over. (Blame me for the policy ideas here, not Hoover or Openet.)

It could also help businesses effectively deal with the increasing reality of smartphones and iPads being used as dual-purpose work/personal devices — or find a new way to exert control over bring-your-own smartphones and slates. (If you don’t care about the Net neutrality issues, but are concerned about how business can better manage dual-use mobile devices, skip ahead.)

The congestion problem Carriers face two real congestion problems in data usage, especially in cellular networks.

One is high simultaneous usage, such as when people congregate at a ballpark during a game or at a train station during rush hour. Although the individual usage per person may not be that much, there are often too many connections for the local cell towers to handle, resulting in dropped calls, stuttered streaming, and slow uploads and downloads.

The other problem is extreme usage, such as the bandwidth consumed to watch an HD video on a broadband-equipped laptop or iPad. In this case, a handful of users can block data access by everyone else, particularly because streaming services use lots of bandwidth constantly, not in periodic bursts as is the case for email, Web access, and the like. With streaming services, there aren’t many gaps in traffic for others to jump into for their data access.

Step 1: Move to tiered pricing The obvious, simple answer to these problems seems to be to switch from unlimited data pricing to tiered pricing, as has long been the case for voice usage and for basic utilities such as water, electricity, and gas. If coupled with a subsidized price for the poor (who often have only limited access to broadband-connected PCs and, thus, use smartphones more than rich people), such pricing would charge heavy users more, discouraging the kind of senseless consumption that unlimited access encourages of a limited resource.

With tiered pricing, heavy users would fund the infrastructure whose demand they are largely creating. It would also discourage some usage as people become more cautious about when they go online with their mobile devices to, say, watching dancing-cat video clips, freeing up bandwidth for everyone else.

Step 2: Introduce congestion policies Tiered pricing should be the first step, but it won’t solve the congestion issue alone. Hoover notes that outside the United States, tiered pricing has tempered some access but has not addressed the simultaneous use problem.

What can help are policies on the carrier side to limit access to streaming applications — video, radio, some gaming, and some data feeds — in congestion zones. Thus, email, Web, and other bursty traffic would be favored over those that latch onto bandwdith and don’t let go.

I know that for some people this smacks of violating the principles of Net neutrality, and the carriers could certainly abuse such policies, so strong regulation is needed to restrict their use. I think it’s fine to pop up a message to a user trying to watch video saying that the network is too congested to display video reliably, so try later or elsewhere. But it’s not fine to use such policies to block or throttle certain types of video or certain video providers — it has to be all or none.

Those who really need to access high-bandwidth services at peak times or locations could pay for the privilege, getting an assured connection even in congestion zones. Hoover suspects that if carriers offered such add-ons, few people would actually get them. However, it would help change their behavior by making the link between poor service in congested areas and the activities that worsen the congestion.

Step 3: Bundle delivery cost with services and applications When you subscribe to a service such as Netflix or to a magazine such as CIO, part of the cost includes the delivery via postal mail. Part of your fee also covers the streaming costs paid for by a service such as Netflix or Amazon.com’s Kindle to its network provider and to companies such as Akamai that manage the broadband distribution.

Apps and services need to include the delivery costs of what they provide, not push that cost to the carriers or to all users (in the form of higher data charges on wireless and wired broadband plans). This ties in with the concept of paying for what you use, rather than spreading the cost to everyone.

It’s already common for providers to pay for the transport costs of the content and services they deliver over broadband, and wireless should work the same way. But again, it has to be neutral — carriers must not be allowed to favor certain partners, services, or content. If the government wants to subsidize the news media or nonprofit data distribution, as it long has for printed materials with special postal rates, that’s a political decision that government should make, not carriers.

The pros and cons of other options Carriers could reduce their data provisioning costs by 80 percent if they moved from 3G to LTE 4G technology, estimates Openet’s Hoover. That savings is not enough to fix the gap netween data usage and data revenues, but it would be a big help. Of course, it will cost billions of dollars to make the switch, so any savings are far in the future. It’s the right move, but not one that solves the problem today.

Some carriers are offering or selling femtocells, which basically create mini cell towers in your building to carry your cellular calls and data over a broadband network, whether cable, fiber, or DSL. To me, it’s unfair to charge people for this equipment, especially because it helps the carriers reduce their data carriage costs. Plus, many carriers still count that usage against your cellular tally, in essence double-charging you — after all, you’re paying for the broadband service that handles the local cellular communication. This is an area the FCC should be looking into.

Some carriers are also nudging people to use Wi-Fi hotspots to offload cellular traffic to the wired broadband network; many include Wi-Fi hotspot access as part of their broadand and/or cellular service plans. This makes some sense, but can run into the same billing issues as for femtocells when it comes to the data usage itself. Some of Wi-Fi’s technical issues, including its weaker data security, make this an imperfect approach. Still, it should be in the mix.

Managing dual-use mobile devices Outside the Net neutrality debate, an intriguing use of the technology that Openet offers the carriers is the ability to manage dual-use business/personal devices. More than half of all smartphones used by employees are already owned by those workers, so the era of the tightly managed corporate smartphone is over. Some organizations have legitmate needs for this model and will continue to use it, but what can everyone else do?

The simple, obvious answer is to establish basic security requirements, let employees use any compatible device, and reimburse employees a flat amount of money per month for the corporate portion of their usage. That gives users legitimate choice but insulates businesses from security and spending risks.

New management tools for BlackBerry OS 6 and Apple’s iOS 4 let IT control corporate data and apps independently of consumer data and apps, so you can wipe business information without affecting the employees’ personal information. I’m not sure how much more management businesses need over employees’ smartphones and iPads.

But if you need more control, the same policy technology that Openet offers for plan and congestion management could be used to manage employees’ devices, if carriers were to provide IT a front-end management console. As Hoover described it, whether a device is owned by the company or the user, IT could register it with the carrier and set up policies for it.

For example, the company might pay for usage during business hours and restrict app and Web access only to specified business services. I’m not sure any empoyee would accept that — my reaction would be, “Fine, you pay the full freight and give me a locked-down device that I’ll use just for business, and only duirng business hoirs. I’ll use my own device for everything else.”

More sensible would be an approach that Hoover described: At an app store, customers can buy business apps that are charged to the company, while personal apps can be charged to themselves, with regulatory policies to aid them. You can envision policies that have video usage accrue to the individual’s account, but not be covered by the business plan. Or perhaps SMS usage is counted as personal and thus not paid by the company, but tweeting on behalf of the company is covered. In other words, your device has both a business plan and a personal plan attached to it, and services are allocated between them based on policies.

Carriers’ desire for exclusivity won’t work in the new world Of course, what the carriers really want is a deeper relationship with the enterprise, and they hope that offering such control tools will help achieve that. Thus, they can get more money from the relationship both by capturing more users and by charging for management services and extra levels of service quality.

They’re being naive. I do expect data costs to go up as employees use more and more wireless broadband, but I’m not convinced there’s much room for premium charges beyond usage. Inherent to the carrier approach is carrier exclusivity — they want companies to standardize on their network by offering a combination of discounts and services that nonetheless increase their total revenue. But Hoover admits that there’s no way in the foreseeable future to let IT manage users across carriers, and it’s not in carriers’ individual self-interest to do so.

Ironically, that exclusivity-in-business conflicts with other carrier arrangements. Many people, for example, belong to family plans, which lowers the total cost of cellular voice service. If that network is different than the one the employer favors, the employer won’t get the employee to switch if the employee is providing the device. Likewise, carriers love to get exclusive deals with device makers for specific smartphones. But if an employee wants to use an iPhone (available only through AT&T) and the employer has chosen Sprint, the employee won’t — and can’t — switch. In other words, the carriers’ exclusivity zones are now conflicting with each other.

IT is likely going to have to manage multiple clusters of users based on the carrier they’ve chosen — and I believe that for most companies, doing so is not worthwhile. It’s easier to reimburse a flat fee and use consolidated mobile management tools to handle the various devices, regardless of network.

That’s why Hoover is increasingly hearing — though tentatively — discussions about divorcing carriers from their devices. A device could have multiple carrier accounts, such as business and personal. If that were to occur, Hoover expects some carriers would specialize, such as for high-availability, fast premium networks or for no-shocking-fees international roaming networks.

In the meantime, the idea of policy management could be helpful in some “bring your own device” businesses and could be used to solve the wireless Net neutrality conflict. Of course, it could also be yielded to increase carrier and business control over hapless users. Given the current winds, I’m betting on the former.

This article, “Solving the wireless Net neutrality conflict,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com.