Does VoLTE conflict with net neutrality?

Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) had a small-scale launch in Canada recently, with Rogers Communications Inc. making the service that allows carriers to transmit voice calls on the same networks as data available to a portion of its customers. As the technology grows and becomes more widely available around the world, questions about how it will coexist — or conflict — with net-neutrality laws and principles are on the radar for both net-neutrality advocates and wireless carriers. According to Jeremy Gillula, a technologist with the U.S.-based advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, VoLTE has the potential to violate net neutrality if carriers prioritize their own traffic. For instance, if carriers prioritized VoLTE to the extent that it slowed down other types of data and caused “consumers to not have the bandwidth they were promised,” that would be a net-neutrality violation, he said. A carrier could prioritize VoLTE traffic by using a dedicated channel, or by giving priority to the IP packets carrying VoLTE by transmitting them before other types of data, Gillula explained. “That, I would say, is the most dangerous type of prioritization, because it really is that data for other applications is being treated differently than the carrier’s own applications,” he said in a phone interview. That net neutrality rules would prohibit carriers from treating VoLTE traffic differently has been a concern for wireless carriers in the U.S. During the recent debate over net neutrality in that country, the industry group known as CTIA-The Wireless Association was concerned that neutrality rules would affect carriers' ability to manage VoLTE traffic. Jot Carpenter, CTIA’s vice-president of government affairs, said the issue “has been a big concern for us,” though he noted the FCC did appear to have acknowledged those worries in its decision. “If VoLTE were subject to strict net-neutrality rules, our fear had been that there’d be a real threat of jitter and packet loss that would affect the quality of the end user’s calling experience. Nobody wants to make a call that has the same sound quality as the microphone at the drive-in window,” he argued. “The good news is the commission recognized that and has created a carve-out in its rules to recognize that there’ll need to be active management of VoLTE offerings to ensure high-quality service, low latency, low packet loss.” If that had gone another way, or should another regulator take a stance that means neutrality rules conflict with a carrier’s ability to prioritize VoLTE, it would be difficult for carriers to ensure quality of calls if they can’t manage the traffic, he said. “If you’ve ever had the experience of getting a series of text messages where you got the second in a series before you got the first in a series … if that experience were replicated in a voice context, it wouldn’t be a very pleasing experience, would it? And that’s exactly what we’re trying to guard against,” he added. “Voice and other real-time services are very susceptible to packet loss and jitter. If you can’t provide them with a very low degree of latency, then the packets bump into each other, they get out of order, and the result is a garbled, unpleasant conversation,” Carpenter said. If that were to happen, then customers would be likely to question why they should pay for a voice service that’s no better than an app like Microsoft Corp.’s Skype or Apple Inc.’s FaceTime, he said. “I think that would be a fair reaction from consumers,” Carpenter said. In Canada, some Rogers customers have had a chance to test out VoLTE service since March 31, when Rogers announced that VoLTE service would be available for customers who own LG Corp.'s G3 Vigor smartphone. It said at the time that “more VoLTE-ready devices are expected this year.” Outside of that launch, Canadian carriers route phone calls through their older CDMA or HSPA networks, and use LTE networks for data used for email, web browsing, video streaming and other Internet-based functions. The Wire Report reported last year that it seemed Canadian carriers were more likely to start rolling out VoLTE than they had been in previous years. Rogers spokesman Andrew Garas said in a series of emails that the company does not have a dedicated channel on the network for VoLTE, though he did not respond to questions about whether Rogers prioritized VoLTE traffic in other ways. VoLTE voice calls are “billed like regular, non-VoLTE calls,” Garas said. VoLTE voice calls are included in Rogers’ Share Everything plans, while video calls will be billed by the minute after a promotional period ends, he said. Telecom researcher Ben Klass, who was successful in getting the CRTC to rule against BCE Inc. treating its mobile-TV traffic differently than other data — in a case Bell is currently appealing at the Federal Court of Appeal — said in an email when asked about VoLTE's relationship with net neutrality that “these are nascent issues from a regulatory perspective. I should think that this is on the CRTC’s radar.” Applying prioritization to “a carrier’s voice and video chat services over LTE could potentially raise issues of preference or discrimination,” he said. When it comes to pricing, while “on the face of it, a carrier giving differential treatment to its own proprietary voice and video chat service appears to violate the principle of network neutrality,” he said the case is more complicated than that. Because VoLTE can only be used by some customers in some situations, such as when they’re next to a VoLTE-equipped tower, it would “be difficult, if not impossible, for a customer to know how they would be billed for a voice call if VoLTE were billed differently than existing voice service plans.” Josh Tabish, campaigns manager with advocacy group OpenMedia, said in an email that having carriers' VoLTE services priced differently than other data “in the competitive sense … could very easily be seen as a violation of net neutrality,” similar to the mobile-TV case brought forward by Klass. Should a carrier, theoretically, slow down traffic for competing services, such as Skype, that would be throttling traffic and would violate the CRTC's Internet traffic management practices (ITMPs), Tabish added. “Under ITMP rules, carriers are allowed to manage their network traffic within reasonable limits. But prioritizing content for competitive advantage is not one of them.” Arisa Siong, a Singapore-based economic consultant with a specialization in telecom, said in an email that she’s “not aware of any real-world cases where regulatory authorities have judged that VoLTE violates net neutrality rules.” While under a strict interpretation of net neutrality, an argument could be made that “that prioritizing traffic for VoLTE is not strictly speaking net neutral,” she said such an interpretation would not have much merit, especially as “we migrate to a world where VoLTE is the primary voice service on offer and minimum quality of service standards are required to ensure decent service standards.” If net-neutrality rules were to disallow carriers from prioritizing VoLTE traffic, Siong noted “this could hamper the developments of VoLTE and by the same argument other IP-based services provided by telcos that require minimum quality-of-service requirements.” Matt Wood, a policy director with U.S. advocacy group Free Press, said a problem would arise if the carriers were to disadvantage services like Skype. “We have to keep … making sure that that they’re not disadvantaging the over-the-top alternatives in some way,” he said in a phone interview. “The mere fact of them offering a voice-over-LTE service is probably not a net-neutrality violation, even if there’s a higher quality of service assurance or some other way that traffic is kind of segmented off and offered separately.” The issue of pricing is more significant when it comes to video calls, because they use so much more data than voice calls. “Charging video by the megabyte, or having a cap that applied to one service and not another … there I can see some concerns,” he argued. “The data usage of voice is such a small channel and such a small amount of bandwidth that I can’t imagine it would be material enough to be discriminatory.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Does VoLTE conflict with net neutrality?

Broadcast | April 10, 2015

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