Dan Warne27 July 2006, 6:41 AM
Once upon a time there was a big fat telco called Telstra. King Solomon ruled the villagers with an iron fist. Then, one day, the villagers heard about VoIP and were set free of the tyranny of long distance. Calls were cheap and all was well, until one day ...
Most of the below is fiction for the sake of illustrating a point. Don't read it as a hard-news report. Serving suggestion only; may contain traces of nuts.
Once upon a time there was a huge Australian telco called Telstra. It launched its own Voice over IP service which was lauded far and wide for its excellent sound quality, but users said it was overpriced compared to other VoIP providers.
It then emerged that people were having major problems with glitching and dropouts on Engin and MyNetFone.
Telstra admitted that it had 'rebalanced its network' to give priority to Telstra VoIP calls, while other providers' data would have to to wait in line with all the BitTorrent data packets.
A month or so later, a Voice over IP industry body announced that ongoing analysis had shown that VoIP calls from all providers except Telstra had dropped in quality significantly. Telstra was forced to admit that it had been actively deprioritising other VoIP providers' data.
"This is another case of our competitors trying to piggyback on our network and steal Telstra shareholders' profits," a Telstra spokesman said.
"If they want to run VoIP calls over broadband, why don't they factor in the true costs of providing a high quality network and build their own? Could it be because they realise they are getting a fantastic deal on Telstra's network?"
"The Telstra ADSL network is for Telstra use. I don't know how I can be any clearer than that," said a senior Telstra executive.
Telstra then offered other VoIP providers the opportunity to have their data prioritised on the Telstra network too, at a cost of $19.50 per user per month (coincidentally, the same price as the basic Telstra landline line rental.)
Suddenly, Telstra's VoIP and landline pricing seemed like a much better deal and Telstra announced record sales growth. Other VoIP providers were outraged and demanded an ACCC investigation.
The competition regulator determined that while current legislation didn't cover the priority of data packets transmitted on networks, Telstra had used its monopoly position to disadvantage other players.
After two years of legal battles, it settled with Telstra, charging them a $450,000 fine; a small fraction of the profit Telstra had generated from its VoIP service.
And King Solomon ruled again.
The end.
We're lucky that's merely a mid-afternoon daydream about what could happen if Telstra takes an aggressive stance on
net neutrality. But does any of it sound familiar? Fortunately, Telstra doesn't seem to have yet plumbed the same sort of deplorable depths it reached with its ADSL wholesale (and later, fibre-to-the-node) rhetoric.But it is already preparing its case around net neutrality.
The message from Telstra's Chief Technologist, Hugh Bradlow, is that there really is no change; users need not worry.
Bradlow wrote about the topic on Telstra's corporate propaganda site, nowwearetalking.
Across two articles, Bradlow repeatedly says the technical aspects of Telstra's possible implementation are "too complicated to explain here", but a close read of both articles suggests that Telstra is considering using reserved bandwidth on top of what's already available for broadband internet for delivery of its broadband voice and video offerings.
"Why the fuss?" writes Bradlow.
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.
Telstra appears to be gearing up to offer broadband internet at a fraction of the possible maximum speed offered by whatever broadband network they ultimately deploy, while reserving bandwidth for their own proprietary services on top of that.
Now that does sound familiar... hence why most ADSL users are still stuck on a top speed of 1.5Mbit/s via Telstra wholesale despite the 8Mbit/s maximum speed.
And do you think other VoIP or IP-video operators will be able to access any of that reserved bandwidth? I'd say not bloody likely!
Telstra's plans for a new high speed broadband network are still under negotiation with the ACCC. There's been no agreement that we know about, so none of the details about what competitors will be able to access have come out yet.
But we do know Telstra made ADSL1 available at a fraction of the full speed that it is capable, and now Telstra's chief technologist is hinting that Telstra might offer part of the network link for internet (which may be available at wholesale) and reserve the rest for its own use (which almost certainly will not be available at wholesale).
Hoping for access to high speed broadband over Telstra's national network, through an ISP of your choice, with free choice of VoIP and video provider at high sound/video quality?
I'd say that'll be the real fairytale if Telstra gets its way.