Time Warner Cable isn’t happy about Netflix’s new “Open Connect” initiative, a separate network ISPs can use to pull data from the streaming video service.

Why? Well, it has something to do with Netflix implying that TWC’s network isn’t good enough to provide 1080p video streams and 3D content. Allow me to explain.

Currently, the Netflix pulls a majority of its data through commercial content delivery networks, which are optimized for a variety of data from multiple sources. The new Open Connect network, which Netflix debuted in June, would optimize the flow of Netflix-only video data through a new network that ISPs can build into their own services. And considering that Netflix accounts for nearly a third of all video streaming in the country, the video service said it makes financial sense to provide its own Open Connect network, just as YouTube has done in the past. Also, Open Connect means lots of customers will stay happy because their Netflix service will be more reliable.

And to get ISPs on board with this change, Netflix said it will only provide 3D content and 1080p high-definition videos (dubbed Super HD) to customers who subscribe to an ISP that uses Netflix’s Open Connect standard. So basically, that means major ISPs not using Open Connect (TWC, Comcast, or FiOS) look like the bad guys, or at the very least, become the reason why you can’t get the highest resolution and 3D movies.

“While they call it ‘Open Connect,’ Netflix is actually closing off access to some of its content while seeking unprecedented preferential treatment from ISPs,” TWC said in a statement to Multichannel News. “We believe it is wrong for Netflix to withhold any content formats from our subscribers and the subscribers of many other ISPs. Time Warner Cable’s network is more than capable of delivering this content to Netflix subscribers today.”

TWC’s standards might be good enough to carry the higher-quality video streams, which require transferring more data than regular video streams, but it isn’t good enough for Netflix. The streaming video company also denies TWC’s claims that it wants special treatment.

“OpenConnect provides Netflix data at no cost to the location the ISP desires and doesn’t seek preferential treatment,” Netflix said in a statement to VentureBeat. “We hope TimeWarner will join the many major ISPs around the world who are participating in Open Connect to reduce costs, better minimize congestion and improve data delivery to enhance the consumer experience.”

Plenty of ISPs have already jumped on the Open Connect bandwagon, including Cablevision, Virgin Media, British Telecom, and Google Fiber. My guess is that TWC and the others will soon jump on board as well, but obviously some of them aren’t happy about it.

Hostage image via val lawless/Shutterstock

Most politicians only speak up about inadequate tech policy when there’s an overly complicated bill up for a vote. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), however, is not one of those politicians.

Wyden spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, outlining the topics in tech policy that we need to discuss in 2013 and beyond. He focused on data usage and policy: two themes that have carried over from 2012, and will likely remain under scrutiny for years to come.

Wyden is known for his opposition to SOPA, a bill that attempted to protect copyright laws but could have impeded freedom of speech and led to the wholesale shutdown of websites accused if copyright infringement. He is also known for submitting an amendment to the FISA bill, which allows the government to listen in on Americans’ conversations with those overseas in the name of national security and foreign intelligence. In his amendment, Wyden suggested the government be more transparent and reveal how many people have been affected by the Bush-era bill.

The amendment was shot down.

Now in 2013, Wyden believes we need to get more serious about making sure Internet service providers — wireless and wired alike — are held responsible for making sure no specific types of data are discriminated again. That is, he believes that an Internet Service Provider, such as Comcast, must not slow down speeds if someone is attempting to access streaming content from competitors, while providing great data speeds for its own streaming services. This, of course, is just an example, but you can see the problem.

He also believes we need to look at patents. Last year showed us just how far companies are willing to go to prevent competitors from using their patented technology without paying up. Wyden explained that we need to think of software as “building blocks” and allow people to improve on it.

He also reached back to FISA and CISPA, saying we need rethink how much access to our data the government should have. He suggested we rework the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and put more protections in place that stop law enforcement from checking out Americans’ email communications.

via Ars Technica; Ron Wyden image via his website

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s decision to make its FaceTime video chat app compatible with cellular networks has been a big headache for AT&T.

And the carrier’s solution has been just as problematic: Rather than offer unrestricted access to the app, AT&T is forcing its subscribers to sign up for its Mobile Share data plans in order to use it on the AT&T cellular network. Regulators and consumers alike have been unhappy with the move, which limits the amount of control AT&T’s subscribers have over their devices.

And how does AT&T defend the decision? By playing games with the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules.

“AT&T does not have a similar preloaded video chat app that competes with FaceTime or any other preloaded video chat application,” AT&T senior vice president of regulatory affairs Bob Quinn wrote today, in an effort to convince the public that AT&T actually isn’t unfairly competing with FaceTime.

Of course, AT&T doesn’t have a video chat app — but its cellular service is effectively one big voice chat app. Quinn’s defense completely sidesteps the largest concerns that groups like Public Knowledge have had from the beginning: FaceTime is a direct competitor to AT&T’s voice services, and AT&T’s new rules cut into subscribers’ ability to use the app.

And that’s a big no-no for the FCC.

Quinn also defended the move by arguing that the FCC rules do not regulate whether cellular network operators can control apps that come pre-installed on phones they offer. The problem? The FCC rules say nothing about preloaded apps.

“There is simply nothing in the rules that distinguishes ‘preloaded’ applications from ‘downloaded’ applications,” Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner said in a statement today.

While the company has valid concerns that FaceTime could negatively impact network performance, the far more pressing reality is that if its customers are using FaceTime, they’re not chatting over AT&T’s voice network.

If network performance was truly a concern, AT&T would just ban FaceTime outright (not that this is something it would be legally able to do anyway). Instead, it’s splitting its subscriber base between those who have Mobile Share data plans and those that don’t. And it’s that division that’s drawing the attention of those who want to keep cellular networks as neutral as possible.

The Internet Defense League (IDL), an organization dedicated to keeping the internet open, officially kicked off its efforts today with a conference call that included several members of the tech industry and a handful of U.S. congressmen.

The group said it has set up its own version of Batman’s bat signal.

IDL members (you can sign up on the organization’s official website) will have access to tools for automatically alerting people to issues that may hinder the web’s freedom. Members can put a piece of code on their website that will contain updates on issues, send out automated messages on Twitter or Facebook, and receive e-mails. The group calls this effort the “Cat Signal,” appropriately named for the Internet’s nearly universal fascination with kitties.

“This is a call to arms for all the people who are creating something online,” said Reddit and Breadpig founder Alexis Ohanian during today’s call, adding that the Internet needs a watchful protector like DC super-hero Batman. “Whether they’ve got a Twitter account with 20 followers or a website with 30 million visitors, they all have a Gotham, so to speak, to protect.”

“The Internet, from the time it was commercialized, has proven to be a place where innovators come together, or innovate on their own,” said Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) during the call. “Had the government intervened through regulation … the Internet today would look much more like a telephone system and much less like a communications system (that is) an economic engine that has driven so many new and innovative products.”

The IDL — whose members include companies like Reddit, WordPress, Cheezburger Network, Fark, and others — was formed in the wake of successful protests by a number of groups to thwart such now-dead pieces of legislation as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The group is attempting to bring together regular Internet users, companies that build their business around the Internet, and others into a permanent coalition able to alert the community to threats to net freedoms in the future. And as VentureBeat previously reported, many IDL members have already come together to sign a Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The IDL wants to be the caped crusader for the Internet. And in keeping with the Batman metaphor, not only is the group scheduling its launch to coincide with the release of the latest Batman movie, but it’s also creating a digital version of the bat signal with its Cat Signal.

Oh, and it’s also got real-life Cat Signals.

Seriously. The organization started a crowdfunding campaign to get real life Cat Signals beaming the IDL’s “cat-signal” icon onto clouds in the sky or neighboring buildings. The group has raised almost its entire $19,000 target to have these spotlights used in five different cities across the globe. Depending on how much you donate, you can even receive IDL trinkets and gear, such as a personal cat signal torch-light key chain, IDL t-shirt, stickers, and more.

Additionally, members have the option of donating money to the organization’s future efforts.

Logistics of flipping on the Cat Signal

During the call there was some discussion about how the IDL would identify each threat, as every member will likely not agree with everything the new organization deems hurtful to the web.

For instance, issues regarding net neutrality would end up being put on a case-by-case basis.

“Net neutrality is a tricky question, because a lot of people really love the idea in theory, but finding a legislative way to do it without attaching a lot of power to a group or (government) agency is incredibly difficult” said EFF’s Rainey Reitman on the call. “It would just depend on the legislation.”

The group will, however, monitor websites, including a IDL subreddit devoted to threats against a free Internet. Based on the limited discussion on the conference call, it didn’t sound like there was any standard procedure for identifying threats that would be fed through the Cat Signal, at least not for the moment.

Some IDL members, like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), don’t foresee this as a huge problem. “Once there is an issue brought up by either the (IDL) community or through mainstream media, the public is going to drive it,” Wyden said, adding that any issue that needs to be addressed won’t be hard to identify for the organization.

For the immediate future, the IDL plans to keep its eyes on the senate version of cyber-security legislation CISPA.

Netflix head honcho Reed Hastings isn’t one to keep quiet when he thinks his company isn’t getting a fair shake against the competition. But unlike most CEOs who use official channels like press releases or company blogs, Hastings doesn’t hesitate to fire off a round of highly critical comments from his personal accounts on social networks.

Case in point, Hastings posted a short rant on Facebook yesterday (his second, in April alone) that accused cable TV and Internet service provide Comcast of no longer following net neutrality principles — the position that there should be no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers’ access to the web.

Lots of people have raised an eyebrow over Comcast’s Xfinity TV, which is the streaming on demand video component of the cable giant’s TV service. Comcast recently launched an Xbox 360 app that allows people to gain access to this service through the game console, and one of the big selling points was that all data consumed in this way didn’t count against a subscriber’s monthly data cap of 250GB.

Hastings writes:

Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles.

Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.

I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.

When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.

For example, if I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.

The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.

In what way is this neutral?

Some people responded to Hastings comments by pointing out that Xfinity TV data is sent over the same network Comcast uses for its digital cable TV service, which has previously been called a private network — not over the public internet. This is true, but the Xbox app marks the first time Comcast has allowed access to its private network through a third-party device. It’s a privilege typically reserved for Comcast’s cable boxes. And because Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Go are Xfinity TV competitors that are also available on the Xbox, Comcast has an unfair advantage.

The argument that Comcast’s private network data isn’t the same as internet data goes out the window when you pit the data-cap-less Xfinity TV service against other services. Even Comcast decided to backtrack on the “private network” terminology, after realizing it may end up opening a Pandora’s box of criticisms and possible antitrust suits.

Comcast can easily avoid this by forcing its Xfinity TV Xbox app to run over the internet, the same way people access Xfinity in web browsers and mobile devices. Alternately, it could begin allowing its customers to access competing streaming video services through its leased cable boxes without affecting data caps.  The former option is probably the easiest, but I’m guessing Comcast is going to ignore this situation with the hope that it’ll go away in a few months.

It’s unlikely Hastings and his company will keep quiet about the situation. Netflix recently launched its own political action committee, FlixPAC, to increase its influence in Washington.

Photo via Baahduodu

Eat your heart out Humpty Dumpty. Comcast has managed to put the Internet back together again with just a few simple keystrokes and mouse clicks. But before you go patting the company on the back, you should know that it’s responsible for fracturing the internet in the first place — or at least implying that it’s fractured.

Confused? Allow me to explain.

Just days ago the cable company launched its Xfinity TV app on Xbox 360, which allows Comcast subscribers to watch both OnDemand and live streaming video content through their gaming console. One of the Xbox app’s big perks is that data from watching those high-quality videos doesn’t count against Comcast’s self-imposed 250GB per month data cap. The company’s FAQ page initially explained that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap.” In other words, there are two different parts of the internet, according to Comcast.

VentureBeat previously declared shenanigans on Comcast’s “private network” for Xfinity TV content , because both the “public internet” and “private networks” are delivered over the same broadband infrastructure. Since other streaming services on the Xbox do count against that data cap (and don’t have their own broadband infrastructure), Comcast arguably has an advantage. Comcast is essentially treating the Xbox 360 like one of its cable set-top boxes, which also don’t affect that 25oGB data cap.

Earlier today, GigaOM noticed that Comcast had removed all mention of “private networks” from the FAQ page — and just like that, the internet is no longer two segregated parts, (right?). The revised language reads: “The Xbox 360 running our XFINITY TV app essentially acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service, and our data usage threshold does not apply.”

The truth is, Comcast probably decided it wasn’t wise to imply that its TV service is a separate, private network that just so happens to be delivered through the same broadband infrastructure as its internet service. Some people have pointed out that Comcast’s current TV service isn’t IP-based, and thus, is different from other streaming services. That isn’t necessarily true for its Xfinity TV content. And if Comcast is prioritizing its own video services over competitors by imposing data caps, then it definitely merits investigation by federal regulators.

Humpty artwork via Vertigo/DC Comics

Using Comcast’s Xfinity TV app on Xbox Live won’t count against data caps for those that subscribe to Comcast’s internet service, according to the company’s Frequently Asked Questions page.

The Comcast App, which launches today along with HBO Go, is one of several new services available through Xbox Live, including Verizon FiOS, Epix, Vevo, Vudu, YouTube, and others. Entertainment usage on the Xbox is growing at a rapid pace, surpassing multiplayer games usage for the first time ever, Microsoft announced today. So, it’s likely most Comcast subscribers with an Xbox will be taking advantage of the new app — especially since the service has an advantage over competitors.

Comcast customers are allotted 250 GB of data per month before they get charged overage fees. For most people that primarily watch video through a traditional cable TV service, the data cap of 250 GB is generous. You  can watch about 80 hours of content (along with regular internet usage) on competing streaming services before hitting the data cap. The Xfinity TV service from Comcast functions a lot like a Netflix service, offering streaming videos on demand. The exception is that now when you want those videos via Xbox 360, it won’t affect your data cap.

This essentially gives the Xfinity app an unfair advantage over other services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Vudu. And more to the point, it takes the concept of net neutrality, and throws it right out the window.

Comcast explains that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap.” However, this doesn’t apply when you watch video via Xfinitytv.com or use the Xfinity TV service on other devices over the “public” internet.

Comcast has previously said that its spending resources to build out an IP-based video delivery service, as VentureBeat reported in June. But since all data runs through the same broadband infrastructure, I just assumed there would be no differentiating between a “public” internet network and a “private” network dedicated to Xflinity TV content. Essentially, Comcast is treating the streaming video as an extension of service that’s typically found through one of its cable set-top boxes.

I’m not sure I buy this logic. Arguably, Netflix also has its own “private” network that is only accessible through the “public” internet. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Not surprisingly, Verizon continues to be vehemently opposed to wireless net neutrality — so much so that it’s urging investors to vote against a new resolution that presses the issue.

Following an SEC ruling last month that wireless carriers must let their shareholders vote on net neutrality — the notion that web traffic should be treated equally, no matter its origin or destination — Verizon has included a resolution about it in its latest proxy statement.

“The open (non-discriminatory) architecture of the Internet is critical to the prosperity of our economy and society,” the company wrote in the resolution. “We believe this economic and social value is an important factor in the growth of our economy and widely diversified investment portfolios… Shareholders request the company publicly commit (while not conceding or forfeiting any issue in litigation related to network neutrality) to operate voluntarily its wireless broadband network consistent with network neutrality principles.”

But Verizon’s board isn’t letting the resolution pass without a fight, urging shareholders to vote against it with a blistering response. The board writes that the proposal “will harm Verizon’s ability to provide robust and secure wireless broadband service to its customers.”

It’s an old argument, but one that the board backs up by pointing out that even the FCC doesn’t approve wireless net neutrality yet (it only supports wireline net neutrality). A wireless proposal “was rejected by the FCC in its recently adopted rules addressing net neutrality issues,” Verizon’s board writes. “The FCC recognized that managing a broadband network in “non-neutral” ways was critical to ensuring network integrity, providing security capabilities and reducing congestion.”

This certainly isn’t a black and white argument. Wireless and wireline networks differ drastically when it comes to their infrastructure and management — and as more consumers jump to smartphones and 4G data plans, the difference between the two will become all the more clear. I’m personally all for net neutrality, but when it comes to wireless networks, we may need to find a middle ground that both activists and carriers can live with.

Here’s the full response from Verizon’s board:

The Board of Directors strongly believes that by requiring the Company to “not privilege, degrade or prioritize any packet transmitted over its wireless infrastructure based on its source, ownership or destination” this proposal will harm Verizon’s ability to provide robust and secure wireless broadband service to its customers. The delivery of high-quality and safe wireless Internet access services is a highly complex, technical undertaking. The proponents appear to have no concept of the negative technical and operational ramifications of requiring purely “neutral” routing of Internet traffic. This proposal would substantially interfere with the technical operation of Verizon’s wireless broadband network and have a wide-ranging and significant impact on Verizon’s business and operations. Among other things, the proposal would prevent Verizon from engaging in reasonable network management practices designed to address potential congestion, security and other wireless network problems and make the network more efficient and more widely available to all customers. The proposal would also prevent Verizon from giving priority to police, fire and military communications over its wireless broadband network in the event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Importantly, this very proposal was rejected by the FCC in its recently adopted rules addressing net neutrality issues. The FCC recognized that managing a broadband network in “non-neutral” ways was critical to ensuring network integrity, providing security capabilities and reducing congestion. It further concluded that wireless networks in particular present unique operational issues and expressly permitted providers to develop
differentiated services that this proposal would prevent. The proposal disregards the FCC’s conclusions about the importance of network management and would impede Verizon’s ability to manage its networks and offer services to meet the needs of its customers.

Finally, Verizon is committed to maintaining an open and vibrant Internet. Verizon already complies with the FCC’s net neutrality rules and voluntarily operates its wireless broadband networks in accordance with additional openness principles published on its website. The Board believes that the rigid operational requirements of this
proposal will not further the “openness” of the Internet; to the contrary, it would expose Verizon’s wireless broadband customers to reduced service quality and security.

For these reasons, the Board strongly opposes the proposal.

The Board of Directors recommends that you vote AGAINST this proposal.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AT&T is planning to launch a new service allowing content providers and developers to pay for their customers’ data usage, thus lowering the expensive data charges for some of its wireless subscribers.

Essentially, big companies like Comcast (owner of NBCUniversal) can pay AT&T for the total data charges associated with watching their content online. For instance, if you watched Celebrity Apprentice, Community, or Parks and Rec from NBC’s official application, none of the data used would count against your monthly allotment. The same would be applicable for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Sound like a good deal? Well, it’s not.

AT&T’s new free-to-customers data service is similar to what the telephone companies did with toll-free calling on 1-800 numbers, AT&T’s head of Network and Technology John Donovan told the Wall Street Journal in an interview Monday.  The motive behind the new service is to create a new source of revenue for the company to compensate for the increased fees associated with higher data consumption from its subscribers.

The problem with this particular strategy is that it gives big companies with lots of money a way to succeed while smaller inventive/progressive companies will continually get ignored. Think about it. If you can only afford AT&T’s 250MB per month data plan, and all Twitter/Facebook data is free, you’ll never have incentive to use a better service. The next “Twitter” or “Instagram” is dead before birth. Eventually, this will hurt innovation and give the U.S. carriers more leverage over our mobile communication habits.

This kind of data service indirectly violates net neutrality — the position that there should be no restrictions by Internet service providers or governments on consumers’ access to networks that participate in the Internet.

AT&T, however, loves this new service because its much easier to secure millions of dollars in data usage from a big company than it is to collect it from each subscriber’s bill every month.

“This new plan is unfortunate because it shows how fraudulent the AT&T data cap is, and calls into question the whole rationale of the data caps,” said Harold Feld, legal director of digital consumer rights special interest group Public Knowledge in a statement. “Apparently it has nothing to do with network management. It’s a tool to get more revenue from developers and customers.”

Public Knowledge has made two request to the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether its necessary for wireless carriers to institute data caps. Such an investigation would shed new light on the real costs of doing business.

As for AT&T’s new data service, Feld said: “This is exactly the type of market manipulation we hoped the FCC’s Open Internet rules would prevent. If the Commission does not believe it has the authority under those rules to investigate this practice, it should do so under its general authority over wireless services.”

What do you think about AT&T’s new proposed service plan that would allow big media companies and app developers to pay for all the data you use? Let us know in the comments.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission said Wednesday that AT&T and other wireless telecom companies will have to let shareholders vote on net neutrality, thanks in part to a proposal from a group that includes Mike D of the Beastie Boys.

Net neutrality, the notion that online traffic must be treated equally by ISPs, is now a “significant policy” issue, the SEC said in a letter posted on its website. The agency is recommending that AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon include a resolution in their annual shareholder votes declaring that they won’t treat data differently based on its “source, ownership or destination.”

The move comes in response to a proposal sent to the SEC by Trillium Asset Management, which represents Mike D and two other AT&T shareholders. Previously the SEC found net neutrality wasn’t a large enough issue to include in shareholder votes. But thanks to the policy push by the likes of Trillium, as well as the FCC’s own support of net neutrality for landline ISPs, it seems the tide is finally beginning to shift in favor of those who want fair wireless-web access.

Of course, the SEC’s recommendation doesn’t guarantee that carrier shareholders will vote in favor of net neutrality. But at least shareholders can now get their say, instead of just accepting the carrier’s position.

Via Bloomberg; Mike D photo via Fabbio Venni/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Kaminsky calls his invention Nooter (a contraction of the phrase “neutral router”). It is a sort of lie-detector test for internet service providers (ISPs). Nooter will be able to send traffic along different paths and determine whether or not your ISP is deliberately slowing some of your internet traffic, such as data from file-sharing web sites.

Kaminsky (pictured with his 88-year-old grandmother, who bakes cookies for the people who attend Kaminsky’s talks) said in two separate talks at the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas that he has figured out how to make the hidden traffic policies of ISPs more transparent to everyday internet users. ISPs generally say they don’t slow down certain traffic because that would make them run afoul of the principle of net neutrality, where the companies that are the backbone of the internet adopt a neutral position on content. Like the old common carrier telephone companies, these ISPs aren’t liable for the content traveling through their broadband networks if they treat it all equally.

Yet the motivations of ISPs are complex, and for the most part net neutrality is not a legal requirement. If law enforcers say that child pornographers are shipping illegal pictures through their networks, the ISPs are obliged to shut them down. Some ISPs are surreptitiously redirecting some traffic, such as search queries, to merchant sites that may pay them for the referrals. And some ISPs, such as cable companies that own movie content (i.e. Comcast) are motivated to slow traffic related to Bittorrent services and other sites that let you download pirated movies. They’re routinely accused of secretly setting policies that slow down the delivery of content that they don’t like, while keeping other content moving fast.

This is where Nooter comes in. Kaminsky says that it will test the speed of the delivery when the web destination is clearly visible to the ISP and the speed of the delivery of the same content when the web destination is hidden from the ISP. The result will be a clear indication of what the ISP is doing to your traffic.

“What happens if my ISP is messing with me?” Kaminsky said. “I can tunnel around it. What if it is subtle? We will always be able to know if an ISP is changing your traffic.”

As an example, he said, you will be able to find out if your ISP cares whether you use Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service or Sony’s PlayStation Network. Nooter would be able to discover whether an ISP is slowing down traffic to either site for any reason, Kaminsky said.

Nooter could be available in a couple of weeks or so.

This kind of technology is what Kaminsky is known for. In 2008, he found a flaw in the DNS (the domain name system, which serves as the internet’s address book) that threatened the integrity of the whole internet. Last year, he was part of a team that was so trusted that he got a key to reboot the internet if a catastrophic failure shuts it down.

Kaminsky admitted he was making big claims but he tried to explain how Nooter works, using both software and some hardware that he pulled together. He warned that any ISPs who have set policies to throttle traffic to web sites should stop doing so now, unless they want to be discovered and “be on the front page of a newspaper.”

Normally, internet traffic requests go from the user’s machine through a network router to the internet service provider, which then fetches the requested web site from the rest of the internet. Kaminsky says everyone fears “a magic box” exists within the ISP that contains policies such as, “if the user goes to a torrent site, then slow the transfer of bits to a crawl until the user decides not to do that.”

“Policies can be anything,” Kaminsky said. “They can alter content and you won’t know. If Bing is 50 milliseconds slower than Google at searching, you won’t know why. Maybe it is because Google uses better hosting or routers or servers.”

Since many things can affect the speed of internet traffic, it’s hard to pinpoint an ISP’s role in slowing it down. That gives ISPs “plausible deniability” when they are accused of violating Net Neutrality principles.

But if Nooter determines that traffic to one particular web site is faster one way than another, based on whether the ISP knows about the destination site or not, then “you found a biased network,” Kaminsky said.

The use of encryption is how the Nooter device can see inside what is going on with an ISP. If you send encrypted requests for a web site, the ISP can’t where it’s going and it just passes it through at normal data rates. If the speed of unencrypted requests are slower, then you have to wonder why. When Kaminsky told that to the crowd in the huge Penn & Teller theater at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas at Defcon, he got a roar of applause. Kaminsky said he can even identify which leg, or hop, of an internet request is the part where the policy is put into effect and the traffic is slowed down.

“Either way, Nooter wins,” he said. “Biased policies might as well be transparent because I am going to find them. That is the end game.”

The practice of treating all Internet traffic equally—whether it’s text, e-mail, audio, or video—is commonly referred to as net neutrality. This move makes the Netherlands the second country in the world to put net neutrality into law, after Chile.

The concept of net neutrality is contested by ISPs, which want the ability to slow down the traffic of customers using a larger-than-average amount of their bandwidth. Online gamers, illegal downloaders, and those who stream movies and music are likely the biggest winners under the new law.

The law also bans Web advertisers from leaving cookies in a user’s browser without first getting his or her consent. It will have a strong impact on mobile data usage as carriers will no longer be able to charge customers extra to use Skype or other VoIP apps to make phone calls. T-Mobile, which had blocked all VoIP apps, will now have to allow them on its network.

Some net-neutrality-informed rules have been issued in the U.S., but they have not been made into law. In December, the Federal Communications Commission outlined basic rules that banned ISPs from blocking specific kinds of content and websites, but did allow them to throttle web connections if they believed a customer was using too much bandwidth. Wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, are exempt from these rules.

Would you like to see the U.S. sign an official net neutrality bill into law?

Kaufman (@lloydkaufman) is still making films that appeal to cult movie fans, including the upcoming Toxic Avenger 5. And he said he doesn’t mind at all that others have taken his films and pirated them. His talk at the MI6 game marketing conference showed that the interests of indie artists are often at odds with the mainstream media conglomerates and that these artists are often more adept and creative when it comes to embracing new technologies.

“We are not so much against piracy, ” he said in a conversation with Frank Radice (pictured below, right) of Definition 6 on Thursday in San Francisco. “There is a lot of economic blacklisting going on because big media conglomerates control all of the distribution and the means of getting information. But social networking helps us get our message out and piracy also helps us. We’re in business because a lot of people pirate our movies. They’re sharing, not stealing. That’s OK.”

The discussion, ostensibly about guerrilla marketing, was freewheeling and full of jokes. Kaufman said his classic 1984 The Toxic Avenger film (where a 15-year-old kid gets run over by a car and then, as the car backs over him again, gets his head squashed) is being remade with a $100 million budget.

Radice said, “Sounds to me like you sold out.” Kaufman replied, “I’ve been trying to for many years.” Kaufman said that Toxic Avenger The Musical is coming to Broadway after students made their own musicals based on the film. Some students wrote to ask him if it was okay for them to stage a musical based on the films, and he said yes.

“We gave the rights to Toxic Avenger the Musical to students in Portland, Oregon, who had no money to pay us. I figured this was good publicity for our DVDs,” he said. “Another group in Omaha did the same thing. They attracted the Broadway guys. It was a gift of piracy….Otherwise, how are people supposed to know about it?”

Kaufman has chronicled his guerrilla tactics over the years in books such as Make Your Own Damn Movie, Direct Your Own Damn Movie, and Sell Your Own Damn Movie (coming out in June). Those books sold well, so the Borders book store chain started selling Troma’s DVD movies.

The conversation had its serious points. Kaufman said that when people take a copy of his work and make their own version of it, he considers that to be sharing, not piracy, in contrast to the views of major motion picture studios. That sharing often leads to greater awareness and better deals over time.

“Let the pirates have fun with your stuff,” he said. “As long as they are not charging, it keeps you in the public eye. It’s a disgrace that millions of young teenagers are being classified as criminals. What kind of society is that?”

Kaufman added, “Copyright law has to be changed. Disney can make millions off of Mickey Mouse. But maybe there will be a William Shakespeare out there who takes Mickey Mouse (adapts it) and makes Romeo and Juliet out of it. Shakespeare himself plagiarized. He took an Italian play and made the greatest romance that has ever been written. Imagine if copyright law was around then. We wouldn’t have had Romeo and Juliet, and then we wouldn’t have Tromeo and Juliet,” a Troma film.

He noted that Cannibal! The Musical, an indie film (with a lot of partially eaten dead people) created in 1993 by South Park co-creator Trey Parker, has never been on TV or any form of American broadcast TV, yet Troma has sold more than 400,000 DVDs of the film, largely through web marketing and, more recently, through social media.

Kaufman is chairman of an association representing the independent movie industry and has testified in favor of Net Neutrality. He favors policies whereby the owners of the internet’s distribution networks (such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T) should not be allowed to dictate what can or cannot be allowed to pass through the distribution to consumers.

“There is no question that Net Neutrality on the internet is the main reason that we are still here,” Kaufman said.

Mainstream media conglomerates are trying to “colonize the internet,” and “we all know that colonization doesn’t work. Just ask he French,” Kaufman said. “They are trying to build a superhighway on the internet for themselves and leave everyone else on the dirt roads. The media conglomerates don’t want to get up in the morning and compete. If we all wake up in the morning and look at cats on the internet, no one is going to watch the latest Adam Sandler movie.”

Asked if the music industry should have embraced file sharing services such as Napster, Kaufman said, “I don’t think that Metallica did itself any good by suing little fat kids in their basements blogging about X-Files. I don’t think it was a good move for Warner Bros. to sue kids who are making fan films about Harry Potter. They have to embrace the new technology. That’s the way to get around it.”

Check out a small portion of the video of the talk below.

The explosive growth of online video over the past couple of years has begun to unravel the way both businesses and consumers have used and paid for Internet access over the past decade. Although past Internet growth has been exponential, the deluge of video that is coming in the next decade has already forced a series of legal, regulatory, and business disputes that have set the stage for significant changes for the next decade of video on the Internet.

A lot of this has been talked about in the lofty intellectual framework of net neutrality, which advocates present as the principle that providers of Internet access should not discriminate between types or sources of traffic on their network. But what it really comes down to are a new set of business arrangements for who will pay to get the bits from point A to point B. A host of developments in the past year have set the stage for major battles over bandwidth in 2011.

In April, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC overturned a 2008 Federal Communications Commission ruling forbidding Internet service providers from throttling BitTorrent, a popular video sharing protocol. With that ban overturned, ISPs now had free reign to meter particular bandwidth-hungry protocols.

Comcast had already effectively worked around the FCC decision by capping consumer consumption to 250 gigabytes, a relatively large amount of bandwidth that most consumers never came close to reaching. However, with the advent of HD streaming from Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon.com, and others watching 100 hours of HD video, or just 3 hours a day, can exceed that cap, prompting many “over the top” users to transition to more expensive “business class” plans that do not cap bandwidth.

Right before the Christmas holiday, the FCC issued a description of an upcoming set of rules regarding net neutrality for service providers. Wired broadband providers such as Comcast and Time Warner could no longer “unreasonably discriminate” against competing content providers like Hulu, but they could theoretically still discriminate against bandwidth-hogging protocols like BitTorrent.

In a King Solomon-like decision, the FCC also decided that wireless providers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless could definitely discriminate against particular protocols and apparently even particular providers such as Hulu, although this aspect is not completely clear until the full rules are published early next year. Most wireless providers had already capped their “unlimited” data plans earlier this year in response to the increasing consumption of video on their networks.

This FCC decision to allow discrimination on wireless neworks set the net neutrality community into a holiday-season tizzy. Despite the uproar, it has to be argued that since bandwidth is indeed limited on wireless networks, allowing providers to discriminate was a reasonable decision.

At some level of bandwidth, even net neutrality advocates cave. I had a funny exchange with a prominent net neutrality advocate earlier this year after he had posted on Facebook that he was using GoGo, the inflight Internet-access provider, on a plane. “Aren’t you glad GoGo caps your neighbors from sucking up all the bandwidth with Hulu and YouTube?” I asked. “This is different,” he responded.

The FCC thinks that wireless networks, too, are different, with inherent limitations in bandwidth. So it ruled they can discriminate in order to maintain predicable service, although the may revisit this once fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless technologies like WiMax and LTE get larger penetration.

While most of the fuss was about the legal landscape, the biggest video salvo came on the business front in late November, when Level 3, an Internet backbone provider that had recently entered the content delivery network business through its acquisition of Savvis’s operation, publicly complained that Comcast was attempting to extort large fees in order for Level 3 to deliver Netflix’s video streams to Comcast customers.

Level 3 claimed that Comcast was doing this in a discriminatory manner in order to promote its own competing Fancast property and its soon to be acquired stake in Hulu via the Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal. Comcast in turn argued that it was simply charging for a standard “peering” arrangement in order to deliver a vastly increased amount of data from Level 3, that Level 3 had underbid to win Netflix’s business and was trying to have Comcast, in essence, subsidize its contract.

For many readers of VentureBeat who invest in or operate Internet businesses, the practice of paying to serve content on the Internet is well known. The more successful a company is at distributing its content, the more it has to pay in hosting bills. All the main hosters used by startups and large companies alike, ranging from MediaTemple to Amazon.com to Rackspace tier their prices based on the number of bytes sent out.

Why do content companies have to pay by the byte sent if the Internet is “free”? Because, in fact, the hosters in turn must pay to plug into various backbones, and they pay by the amount of traffic they are sending upstream, and deduct by the amount of traffic they are accepting back. The word “Internet” is short for “internetworking.” What’s presented as a single network is in fact a collection of interconnected networks, each of which pay to send data to each other. This system of “the more you send, the more you pay” has been in place since the start of the commercial Internet. It’s called “peering”: If two companies are sending each other the same amount of data at an interconnection point, they are by definition “peers”. If one is sending a lot more, it has to pay more.

The commercial Internet has long had a “fast lane,” called a content-delivery network, where companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks have servers and data centers located in the same facilities as ISPs or close by. They pay the ISPs for a high level of peering connections and copy content to those colocated facilities. So when you are reading a New York Times article, or watching a YouTube video, chances are it is being served from an Akamai server very close to you, and the content provider is not paying to send the content from their server through their backbone links. This is cheaper for a media distributor since the CDN only has to pay for the uplink into your ISP or to colocate servers at your ISP, and is faster as well since it is not hopping across a bunch of networks.

The most interesting aspect of the Level 3 and Comcast fracas is that it is an attempt to use regulatory and fair-trade claims to change how the commercial Internet has worked to date. It is unlikely that the FCC or Federal Trade Commission will force ISPs to deliver an unlimited amount of data for free. What if Netflix was plugging directly into Comcast’s network? Wouldn’t they be expected to pay a connectivity fee like they are currently paying their backbone and CDN providers? Peering arrangements are the fabric of how the commercial Internet has operated, and it is unlikely that regulators will attempt to change this.

Netflix already accounts for an estimated 20 percent of primetime Internet traffic, a figure that is constantly growing. That company can easily switch to Akamai or Limelight which already have the infrastructure in place with ISPs like Comcast to delivery video streams. However, it is likely that regulators will force ISPs like Comcast, which also provide their own competing video streams and services, to offer CDNs reasonable and nondiscriminatory pricing for peering connections.

The FCC mandate requiring wireline ISPs not to discriminate will be pushed to the limits by multichannel video providers like Comcast and AT&T U-Verse, since it is a fundamental aspect of their operation to discriminate. A multichannel wire coming into your home might provide digital TV, digital telephone, and Internet data. But it’s not three different connections: It’s just one, with Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon and the rest operating their networks to deliver a certain amount of bandwidth to each service.

As it stands right now, these providers secure video content licenses from firms like CBS and HBO and deliver it with dedicated bandwidth to proprietary cable boxes. It really is no different than Netflix licensing the same content, paying for connectivity with a CDN, and streaming it to a Roku box. But although both signals are coming across the same cable, for now everyone is committed to keeping them separate from a regulatory perspective.

As more and more video viewing shifts from cable television to Internet video, multichannel providers like Comcast and AT&T are very likely to want to shift dedicated bandwidth from the digital television portion of their networks to the Internet portion, and allow viewing of their licensed video content on Web browsers and Roku boxes in addition to proprietary cable boxes. Such a shift will likely cause a huge battle with net neutrality advocates and streaming competitors such as Netflix. It is not clear how the FCC and FTC will rule on this issue, and is very dependent on the upcoming government climate.

One option would be to force providers to lease dedicated bandwidth to video streaming competitors at reasonable and nondiscriminatory pricing, much like how in the early days of broadband phone companies were forced to lease their lines to competitive DSL providers. This would enable legacy providers such as Comcast and new entrants like Netflix to play on a relatively even field.

But as the heated discussion around net neutrality shows, there’s no guaranteed bandwidth for reason in this discussion.

[Image via Theoffside.com]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The Federal Communications Commission voted today to lay down a number of basic rules that ban Internet service providers from blocking specific content and help keep the web open.

The new rules keep ISPs from blocking specific websites and other content. The rules also allow ISPs to throttle web connections if they believe their customers are using too much bandwidth, but require the ISPs to be “reasonable” when doing so. Internet providers also have to have a greater level of transparency.

But wireless telecommunications companies were exempt from the packet discrimination rules — which is a bit of a head scratcher. Mobile web use is growing rapidly and some actually rely on wireless networks for their Internet usage through mobile hot-spot devices. Without those rules in place, wireless companies are free to stop some smartphone users from taking advantage of their data plans by throttling download and upload speeds.

Both Google and Verizon agreed that wireless web access requires a different set of tools and technology. The chief executives for both companies said too many rules would hamper a provider’s ability to optimize its network, a suggestion FCC chairman Julius Genachowski (pictured left) was less than thrilled with. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that both companies had been in discussions for over a year, and that they already had discussions with the FCC.

Government officials have been arguing about net neutrality for some time now. The idea first came up when the FCC ordered Comcast to halt plans to slow Internet traffic for peer-to-peer file sharers. A federal appeals court said that the FCC had overstepped its authority. The vote happened right down party lines, with both Republicans on the committee voting against the new net neutrality rules.

Back when President Barack Obama was campaigning for office, he made net neutrality a big part of his tech policy platform. But as wireless Internet use continues to grow, it’s unclear whether the FCC will step in and begin regulating that space and lay out a new set of net neutrality rules for wireless providers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Tell us what you really think, Verizon. The company yesterday issued a press release titled “Congress Needs to Update the Nation’s Antiquated and Anti-Competitive Telecom Rules” — which, as you can guess, isn’t exactly a love letter to the FCC.

Verizon executive vice president of public affairs Tom Tauke is quoted as saying in the release: “The grinding you hear are the gears churning as policymakers try to fit fast-changing technologies and competitive markets into regulatory boxes built for analog technologies and monopoly markets.”

The company’s frustration isn’t unwarranted. The FCC is still fighting for authority when it comes to regulating the internet, mainly because current telecom rules aren’t suited to the issues we’re facing today like net neutrality. The agency tried to reclassify internet communications in a “third way” that gave it more authority earlier this year — after a US court declared that the FCC didn’t have the authority to impose net neutrality on providers.

Verizon’s position now is even more extreme than its stance earlier this year, when it proposed its policy for an “open internet” together with Google. The company is now proposing four components that it feels are necessary for a new policy to guide the internet: It should be a federal framework; allow for case-by-case rulings; government intervention should be allowed only to protect consumers from harm or to stop anti-competitive activity; and perhaps most importantly, a single federal agency should be given clear jurisdiction.

As Engadget points out, Congress already started looking into a revamp of the Telecommunications Act earlier this year. Perhaps Verizon’s prodding will move things along even more quickly.

Via Engadget

Back when President Barack Obama was campaigning for office, he made net neutrality (the idea that all Web traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers) a big part of his tech policy platform. So why are we still in the proposal phase? Genachowski blamed a “frustrating and seriously incorrect” decision by a federal appeals court arguing that the FCC had overstepped its bounds when it slapped down Comcast.

Now, Genachowski said the FCC’s lawyers are looking at how the agency can work within the ruling while still enforcing net neutrality. The agency proposed a “third way” earlier this year where the FCC would regulate Internet access but not content.

Genachowski was speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where he was also asked about a controverisal Google-Verizon proposal which ostensibly advocated for neutrality but also waffled on whether wireless Internet should be regulated. He replied that he was glad to see companies that seem to be on opposite sides of the issue working together. The policy needs to be developed with a lot of public input, he said, rather than “having some government policymakers and lawyers sit in a room and come up with a right answer.”

At the same time, Genachowski said the proposal “slowed down some other processes that could have led to a resolution.” With a shrug, he added, “But there we are with that.”

The call was a response to reports from last week that the companies were nearing an agreement for Google to pay Verizon to speed up internet access to its services. Schmidt claimed that those reports were entirely false, and that there is no business arrangement whatsoever between the companies.

Instead, they’re joining together to promote a public policy initiative that they, and hopefully other companies, will follow. “We need network, and they need the valuable content we provide,” Schmidt said.

The highlights of the proposal are as follows:

- They believe that there should be no discrimination for wired broadband connections — meaning nothing can be blocked, and all blocking is against the rules.

- There should be enforceable transparency provisions for both wired and wireless connections so that “consumers would know what is happening with their service.”

- The FCC’s authority should be clearer, and it should have the ability to charge a $2 million fine against bad actors.

- They want to ensure that the broadband platform in the U.S. gets stronger.

- They want to emphasize the differences between wired and wireless broadband worlds. “Wireless has different technologies, different interplay between different devices and the network,” said Seidenberg. “We’re worried that too many rules will hamper our ability to optimize our network, but a transparency requirement would be a very good thing.”

- They also want to support reform of the Federal Universal Service Fund so that it supports broadband deployment.

Before anyone could ask, Seidenberg explained why Verizon is working together with Google on the policy initiative: “There’s been so much discussion of this issue, that we feel this debate has been hijacked by issues that’s not reflective of what the company’s doing. We support the FCC, we built a fiber network, we built a wireless network, we purchased spectrum and agreed to open-access.”

He went on to say that Verizon will post the the above principles on its website, and “follow them as corporate policy thereafter.” We can expect the same from Google.

In the question and answer period, Schmidt clarified that there will be “no prioritization of traffic coming from Google”, and that they “like the public internet.” Google will also be monitoring Verizon to make sure it sticks to the outlined rules. Schmidt reiterated that both companies have been in discussions for over a year, and that they’ve already had discussions with the FCC.

Seidenberg also clarified why wireless networks need more flexibility than wired connections: “If we have to prioritize voice traffic in an emergency or kill spam, network operators need flexibility. It’s not about services.” Verizon has no intention of blocking bandwidth heavy applications — as long as they’re lawful and not damaging the network.

When asked if other companies will follow suit, Schmidt said: “We’ve talked to our other colleagues and we think they should follow our policy. We think this moves the ball forward, and we hope others will see this the same way.”

via Engadget

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google and Verizon have denied a New York Times report, published yesterday, that claimed the companies are nearing an agreement for Google to pay Verizon to speed up internet access to its services.

The agreement, if true, would have run counter to Google’s long-standing support for network neutrality — the idea that all web traffic should be treated equally by internet service providers. Many were incensed by the news, since it was clearly out of character for Google.

While the news of the agreement is suspect, we do know that the two companies have been discussing net neutrality for some time, according to a statement earlier this week by Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured above with Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam at a press conference).

Google’s first official response came from its Public Policy Twitter account: “@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.”

A Google spokesperson later made a similar statement to the Guardian.

Verizon’s denial came from David Fish, Executive Direct of Media Relations, on its Policy Blog:

The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect.

At this point, it seems like the New York Times may have misunderstood some information it received about a potential Google and Verizon deal. Bloomberg published a similar report today, which states that the companies have reached a deal that would bar Verizon from slowing down certain web content on its FiOS fiber internet service, but would leave it free to limit traffic on mobile devices.

With so much rumor and speculation swirling about, I expect we’ll hear a lengthier response from Google on the matter soon.

When Voice over IP first began to get a foothold in the Internet landscape, traditional phone companies failed to realize the potential – and the threat – of this new type of communication system. This, in turn, allowed new businesses, such as Skype and Vonage to establish themselves as legitimate competitors to the baby Bells.

Now the technology, commonly known as VoIP, is starting to reach into the mobile marketplace – and wireless carriers are making just as many mistakes. As a result, a new battle is brewing – one that could result in major changes to the mobile landsacape.

The level of network usage for a mobile carrier determines the quality of service – so the rules governing how these resources are allocated is becoming a hot debate. Several carriers are facing legal headaches after capping bandwidth or blocking VoIP applications.

In Europe, for example,  Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for information society and media, recently fired a strong message to a mobile operator. “Discrimination of Voice over IP services by operators with significant market power must not be tolerated by national regulatory authorities.”

The rebuke doesn’t affect U.S. companies of course, but the message is clear: The times, they are a-changin.’

While a number of smaller operators are offering more Internet access and pursuing VoIP and other similar applications from third parties, larger carriers are generally slower to move.

For many, VoIP is firmly in the crosshairs, despite the fact that VoIP traffic consumes significantly less bandwidth than other applications, including video. (Ironically, half of the companies’ mobile services are planning to launch or increase access to real-time video in the next two years.)

Making telephone calls (that have the same quality as a landline) over Wi-Fi takes up, on average, 24-32 Kbps. An HD voice call made via WiFi takes around 22- 96Kbps. The difference, you can see, is negligible.

HD voice, for those new to the concept, is telephone voice quality similar to digital or FM radio. Regular telephone quality, using this analogy, is akin to listening to AM radio while you drive under a bridge.

So while mobile VoIP appears to pose a challenge to the $692.6 billion global mobile voice market, there’s also a huge market opportunity for carriers. Data usage would rise dramatically, helping offset any loss in mobile voice minutes. Consumers, meanwhile, would have a superior telephone quality with HD voice.

Mass-market mobile messaging solutions that aggregate popular instant messaging and social network communities are pioneering the way. Some, like Nimbuzz, are offering one-click access to instant messaging and mobile VoIP calls with HD voice quality.

Nimbuzz users make more than 200 million VoIP calls each year, and the company is growing at a rate of one million users per month. This clearly demonstrates a demand for VoIP/HD voice. And, like Skype in the early days of VoIP, small companies focusing on it are growing at exponential rates.

Mobile operators have the opportunity to offer more features and applications to their customers, dramatically increasing data usage. Ultimately, this can increase their average revenue per user.

Unfettered high-speed access to the Internet will only inspire more innovation from mobile application developers and entrepreneurs. If mobile carriers can overcome their fear and get on board early this time, it can be a win-win situation for them, entrepreneurs – and, most of all, consumers.