[governance] Draft statement on Nairobi meeting programme
Roland Perry
roland at internetpolicyagency.com
Sun Jan 23 08:40:29 EST 2011
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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