[governance] Draft statement on Nairobi meeting programme

[Roland Perry]

In message 
<AANLkTikH-sUMqdbapwROCNPcjvmCPbrdFBQZwNkFG9-t at mail.gmail.com>, at 
20:24:50 on Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Marilia Maciel <mariliamaciel at gmail.com> 
writes
>"If your network delivers content mainly to mobile users, it makes 
>sense to try to gather some of the necessary extra revenue at the 
>inbound edge (and leave the publisher to offset that by the income 
>generation in his own business plan), rather than handing out an 
>indefinite "free lunch".
>
>One of the panelists in the recent A2K GA argued that there is no 
>technical reason to treat cable and wireless differently.

I'm a very great supporter of the concept of @technogy neutrality@ in 
regulation: do as much as you can to ignore the transport, when 
discussing the content.

One example would be that in a hypothetical regime where Internet 
content was entirely unregulated, a TV company could claim that it could 
transmit 'anything' if the feed between the studio and the transmitter 
happened to be over the Internet.

>In fact, the traffic that circulates in regular "wired" connection is 
>partly transmitted in a wireless manner already.

Which is very like my example above. Yes, there may well be 'Microwave 
links' in an otherwise wired network, and it's true to say that many GSM 
mobile networks have a feed to their cell-site delivered by microwave. 
But the [high] cost of that microwave link is shared amongst many users, 
and very few will be direct recipients of microwave Internet 
connectivity.

And despite that microwave link to the outside world, a GSM base station 
(looking towards the handsets) still has a very real limit to the amount 
of bandwidth at its disposal, because of the way that radio frequency 
spectrum is allocated.

>From what I have seen on previous NN debates in IGF, the industry tends 
>to focus on technical design

The design of GSM base cellsites is a fascinating topic, not just 
sharing the bandwidth but also parameters such as 'how far away' a 
handset can be from the base station (this is a speed-of-light, not a 
transmitter power, issue) and how fast a handset can be travelling to 
stay locked in (some High Speed Trains will exceed this).

But as Scotty used to say "Ye cannae change the laws of physics!" and 
that's where you find the bandwidth limits on GSM/3G 'local loops'.

Of course, 3.5G and 4G have higher capacities, but they aren't keeping 
up with the proliferation in streaming video content. And wifi is also a 
"wireless network", one which trades off distance against bandwidth, and 
if you are in an environment where you can use only wifi (and not GSM) 
then you'll get better value for money. But I'm assuming that when 
people complain about NN and "mobile", they mean GSM.

>while CS tends to focus on rights and no real dialogue comes out of the 
>session. It would be very good to invite people to the debate that 
>could question the premises used by the industry. That would help to 
>"force" a dialogue and to bridge the technical and the rights approach

Delighted to take part, I'm very familiar with both sides of this 
particular coin.
-- 
Roland Perry
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