News
Who will blink first in the latest round of operators versus regulators? Probably the operators.
European telcos this week cooked up a frankly hare-brained scheme to force the European Commission to water down its net neutrality rules.
According to a Financial Times report late on Wednesday, a group of 17 operators that includes BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others, presented a manifesto pledging to launch 5G in at least one city in every EU country by 2020.
The catch is that they claim this goal is unattainable unless the Commission relaxes its net neutrality rules, which came into force on 30 April.
The rules prevent unfair blocking and connection-speed throttling, and the paid prioritisation of Web traffic. Telcos are still allowed to provide so-called ‘specialised services’ like Internet TV and critical communications, provided it does not degrade the performance of the public Internet.
Zero-rating –where the data traffic generated by a specific service or category of services does not count towards the customer’s data allowance – is technically allowed, but will effectively be judged on a case-by-case basis to ensure the practice does not harm competition or consumer choice.
"The current net neutrality guidelines create significant uncertainties around 5G return on investment," reads the telcos’ manifesto seen by the FT. "Investments are therefore likely to be delayed unless regulators take a positive stance on innovation and stick to it."
The group also reiterated calls to create a level playing field by subjecting OTT communication services like Skype and WhatsApp to the same rules as telecom operators.
"On the one hand they call for a level playing field, while saying: favour us with your legislation," said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch MEP who worked on the net neutrality rules, in the report.
She insisted that the ever-increasing growth of data is all the certainty that telcos need to make future network investments.
Indeed, in a global industry constantly striving for new and exciting ways to carry as much data as possible, in the most efficient way possible, to as many people and things as possible, it is hard to imagine a group of 17 European telcos not being able to scrape together enough money for a 5G deployment – the most hyped generation of mobile technology there has ever been – because of some net neutrality rules. Each generation of mobile technology makes it more efficient – i.e. cheaper – to deliver a single bit of data. It is in the interest of telcos and their investors to adopt technology that makes carrying traffic more efficient.
There is an argument that because 5G networks enable throughput and latency to be highly-configurable according to the requirements of disparate services, 5G operators could contravene the net neutrality principle that all traffic must be treated equally.
However, there are sufficient nuances in the EU’s net neutrality legislation, plus the provision for offering specialised services and implementing reasonable traffic management, that makes it unlikely that an operator will get in trouble for adapting network parameters according to different end user requirements. The EU is also going to a lot of effort to stimulate 5G development, via programmes like its 5G Public Private Partnership. It would be surprising if the EU let its own net neutrality rules get in the way of that.
In short: the EU’s net neutrality rules, whether or not you agree with them, are probably not going to stop the march of 5G in its tracks.
Furthermore, in one of the most competitive industries going, it will only take one operator to blink and launch a 5G service and the others will likely follow suit, each one claiming its will be bigger, better and more affordable than any 5G service that has gone before.
The current timeframe for standardised 5G deployments is 2020 onwards. With Japan, South Korea, the U.S. and now China aggressively chasing this target, it may well be that the EU is relatively late to the 5G party, but it won’t be because the EU refused to budge on net neutrality.
To hear about this and more, come to the TT Congress, which takes place in London on 4-5 October.
