US bill heralds end of walled gardens

Clearwire

It is not just the mobile operator that needs to find a way to keep customers in the garden by choice rather than force. The very breed of provider that threatens the cellcos’ grand plans, the mobile broadband ISP, also has to find a way to make money from content and applications even in an open environment.

Ambitious pre-WiMAX start-up Clearwire has repeatedly stressed that competing on price will be a losing model for broadband wireless and operators must rely on finding attractive added value applications that generate premium rates. However, most of these will rely on next generation equipment with full support for mobility, advanced video and so on.

In the meantime, Clearwire has been defensive around services like VoIP, facing the same dual threat as the cellcos do from open IP services – that these will overload the network without generating revenue for the network owner, and that they will steal customers from the operator’s own services. The controversy over Clearwire’s alleged blocking of third party VoIP services has been ongoing for some months, with the broadband wireless provider now saying such offerings must be certified to guarantee they will not be kicked off the system.

Clearwire, which will launch its own VoIP services later this year as part of its alliance with Bell Canada, was accused earlier this year of blocking Vonage and some other offerings but now said this was accidental, and would be avoided by the partner program. In March, the company said it wished to preserve stable performance by excluding bandwidth greedy applications such as streaming audio and video or high traffic web site hosting, and also including VoIP.

This was an argument that did not reflect well on Clearwire either way – if true, it threw doubts over the robustness of its first generation network pre-WiMAX network (although this is being upgraded soon, with better support for streaming services one of the features, and presumably as a prelude to making the Bellhosted VoIP functions live). If this was just an official line, then Clearwire was behaving defensively in blocking a rival, a policy that is increasingly unlikely to find favour with regulators or legislators.

With the Congress proposals veering towards open access, the regulator, too, is getting impatient about blocking. Vonage previously won a battle with a local telco, Madison River Communications of Mebane, North Carolina, which was blocking its VoIP service. Madison River had to pay a $15,000 fine.

The latest line from Clearwire is that it will set up a partner program to certify services and ensure that these are not blocked “inadvertently”. Clearwire’s CTP Rob Mechaley told the VON conference in Boston last week that the ‘Clearwire Certified’ program would kick off on September 30. It will enable VoIP providers to exchange technical detailswith Clearwire so that the service provider can better manage its network.

According to Mechaley, Clearwire had not deliberately blocked any service but said: “To us, VoIP traffic can sometimes look like a port scanner taking over a computer”, a mistake that could be avoided with more detailed knowledge of the partners’ systems. However, some saw the certification program as a way to keep control and, potentially, to exclude certain services by not offering membership of the program.

These debates and dilemmas will persist for the next few years, as service providers work out their new models and form their content partnerships and as WiMAX becomes mature. US proposals to ban carriers from limiting access to content and applications will no doubt be emulated elsewhere and will accelerate the process, but even without legislation, consumer behavior has changed too much to allow any outcome but the collapse of the garden walls. What is less certain is which providers will adapt best to the open IP world – and ironically, it will not always be the IP operators.

Copyright © 2005, Wireless Watch

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