The latest from Telecom-Funda
- UK ISPs Code of Practice on Traffic Management - OK as a start, but major flaws
- Malta - Go Mobile and Internet Acess - A Near Miss
| UK ISPs Code of Practice on Traffic Management - OK as a start, but major flaws | Top |
| A group of the UK's largest fixed and mobile ISPs have published a "Code of Practice" about managing traffic on their broadband networks. The full document is here with the announcement press release here . The group includes BT, Vodafone, 3, O2, Virgin, BSkyB and TalkTalk, but currently excludes others, notably EverythingEverywhere, the Orange/T-Mobile joint venture. (Regular readers may remember that I put up a suggested draft Code of Conduct for traffic management last year - there seems to be a fair amount that has been picked up in the UK document. My input also fed into the manifesto published my partners at Telco 2.0, here ) There's some good stuff, and some less-good stuff about the new Code of Practice. Of course, if you a Net Neutrality purist, your good/bad scale will shift a bit. On the positive side, the general principle of transparency is extremely important. The committment to being "Understandable, Appropriate, Accessible, Current, Comparable, Verifiable" is entirely the right thing to do. I think there is a lot of good stuff in the Code here, going as far as the need for independent verification (although that would probably happen anyway - I'm sure Google and others have their own techniques for watching how traffic shaping is used by telcos). The fact that it has been signed by both fixed and mobile operators is also a good thing, although there isn't much in the document about the specific issues inherent in wireless networks. But the main problem is that it attempts to define traffic management policies by "type of traffic" in terms of descriptions that are only meaningful to boxes in the network, not to users themselves. Ironically, this fails the Code's own insistence on being understandable and appropriate. There are also no clear definitions on what constitutes the various categories such as "gaming" or "browsing". The problem here is that DPI boxes don't really understand applications and services in the way that users perceive them. "Facebook" is an example of an application, including links or video which are displayed on the web page or inside a mobile app. "WebEx" is another application, which might include video streaming, messaging, file transfer and so on. Add in using HTML5 browsers and it all gets messier still. Having a traffic policy that essentially says "some features of some applications might not work" isn't very useful. It's a bit like saying that you've got different policies for the colour red, vs. green. Or that a telephone call is #1 priority, unless a voice-recognition DPI box listens and senses that you're singing, in which case it gets reclassified as music and gets down-rated. And even in terms of traffic types, the CoP conspicuously misses out how to deal with encrypted and VPN traffic, which is increasingly important with the use of HTTPS by websites such as YouTube and Facebook. Given that SSL actually is a protocol and "traffic type" this is pretty important. At the moment, the footnote "***If no entry is shown against a particular traffic type, no traffic management is typically applied to it." to me implies that encrypted traffic passes through unmolested under this code of practice. (I'd be interested in a lawyer's view of this though). Another problem is that there is an assumption that traffic management is applied only at specified times (evening, weekends etc), and therefore not just when or where there is *actual* congestion. I suspect Ofcom will take a dim view of this - my sense is that regulators want traffic management to be proportionate and " de minimis " and there seems no justification for heavy-handed throttling or shaping when there is no significant congestion on the access network or first-stage backhaul. There is also no reference to what happens to any company which fails to meet its obligations under the Code (which is "voluntary"), or how enforcement might happen in the future. Lastly, there is no reference to bearer-type issues important in mobile. In particular, whether the same policies apply to femtocell or WiFi offload. Overall, on first read I'd give it a 5 out of 10. A useful start, but with some serious limitations. | |
| Malta - Go Mobile and Internet Acess - A Near Miss | Top |
| This week I was in Malta for a couple of days and as usual I was looking for some affordable local tariffs for wireless Internet access with one of the 3G operators on the island. Offers from both Vodafone and Go Mobile sounded promising and reception in the hotel room was equally good so I let chance decide which one to take. Vodafone SIMs were sold out in two tourist shops I tried but I was able to get a Go Mobile SIM card with the second one. No registration, they are just sold over the counter for 10 euros and an extra 10 euros for some credit to activate their internet offer for 4 euros for 10 days, 350 MB max. This should do for the vacation. So far so good. Activation of the SIM card was straight forward by just calling a short code and activation of the Internet offer was done quickly as well by sending an SMS with the name of the offer which was confirmed within the minute. What didn't quite work as expected was that the line was not provisioned for packet access, i.e. the GPRS attach was always rejected. Strange, you can book an Internet offer but GPRS services are not activated at the same time? So I first called the customer help and top-up line (123), or at least tried to, as whenever I pressed the option in the voice based menu for a customer representative the call was released. Real good customer service... After the third time I gave the leaflet that came with the SIM card a closer look and found another direct number for the customer help line. Fortunately there was an English help-desk so I explained the issue without getting too technical. The support person insisted to send me an SMS to configure my phone despite me explaining several times that it's not the phone but the network that needs to be configured. I gave up in the end hoping that the SMS configuration would perhaps also trigger the corresponding network parameters for my line to be set up. Unfortunately it didn't. I was almost prepared to give up and search for a Vodafone SIM but wasting 20 Euros is a bit much. So I decided to give them a final call. I ended up with the same support person as earlier, explained to him the issue again and this time gave him the full technical issue --> "Configure my line in the HLR for GPRS services". I was put on hold for a couple of minutes so I guess he spoke to a network technician. When he came back he told me that things should be working now so I restarted the phone and indeed, the GPRS attach went through this time. Fine, I had Internet access now but this raised a number of questions: Why were packet services not activated in the first place? Why weren't they activated when I bought the Internet bundle via SMS? Why was the call to the help line not working via the general number? Why did it take two calls to get things working despite a precise error description? Without technical background knowledge I don't think I would have gotten it to work. Also I was quite glad I had a Symbian phone with me because here one can see on the idle screen why things weren't working (the GPRS attach already failed). On other devices based on Android, for example, this information can't be seen at all. So, Go Mobile, if you read this, have a look at your back-end procedures to see how they can be streamlined to make things a bit smoother. Oh and yes, by the way, make the default APN work so people don't have to guess the APN for general Internet access after the GPRS attach works (which is 'rtgsurfing' by the way). | |
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