Ok, I promised to talk about Net Neutrality and I know a number of people (Nic being one of them – thanks for the comment – you got it right!) are waiting for this, I suspect mostly with their knives out.

What is net neutrality? For those who are not aware of it, it is a discussion in the Internet space which is drawing a lot of attention. Where it started was with the announcement by US telcos that in order to provide TV, telephony and Internet services over the broadband pipe into the home, they will need to provide Qualtiy of Service (QoS) for services such as telephony and TV. Without QoS, users will experience the phenomenon I talked about in my last blog (on 29 June), where your TV signal or telephone call can be interrupted by someone else in your house (or in the street) doing some bandwidth intensive application (ok, so I got the bit about Australia in the world cup final wrong, but the rest still stands!).

This seemingly sensible announcement has drawn howls of outrage from a range of people (some of whom have vested interests) that this will create a ‘tiered Internet’ where some content providers would get denied access to their audience.

However, this proposal by the US telcos does not in any way change the Internet. No one will lose anything relative to what they have today when they sign up for an Internet service, and may well gain some extra bandwidth (the latter is too complicated to explain here). What the telcos are proposing is absolutely nothing new. Today, when you sign up for an ADSL service, the copper line between your home and exchange is electronically divided into 2 – one part is kept for your phone service and the other is used for your high speed Internet service. The only difference in the future is that maybe, instead of dividing up the copper in the frequency domain, it will be divided in the IP domain (the technology used by the Internet – not the Internet itself, which is an important distinction) using QoS. This is necessary to maintain the voice quality that we have all grown used to from our fixed phone service, or to prevent your TV signal being interrupted by the antics of others in your neighbourhood.

So why the fuss? Well there are 2 common misconceptions that fuel this debate. The first is that people buy a ‘broadband service’ which is a fallacy. They buy an Internet service, and a TV service, and a telephone service, which are distinctly different things. Today there is no debate because they are delivered over different networks but in the future they will come through one broadband pipe into the home. The second misconception is the illogical conclusion that offering QoS on the broadband pipe to those services that need it, is the same as ‘throttling’ other services. That makes no sense because, as I have said, the high speed Internet service is not changed by this proposal.

This is a complicated topic not easily explained in a few paragraphs, so no doubt there will need to be more on this in the future.