A little-known vendor named Caspian Networks Inc. has been shopping its approach to “fair use” with Verizon Communications Inc., COMPTEL and The VON Coalition — and plans to present it to the FCC at an unspecified future date — in what it says is an attempt to find a consensus solution to the issue of net neutrality.
Although Caspian announced its product last year, just last month the company formally unveiled what it calls its Fair Use Policy Framework and came out with a paper on it, done in cooperation with law firm Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. According to Junaid Islam, Caspian’s vice president of marketing, Kelley Drye’s analysis shows the Caspian fair use mechanism is most in line with FCC goals for a balanced market, allows service providers to make money and gives subscribers the ability to access any applications they desire. “People have spent billions on Juniper [Networks Inc.] and Cisco [Systems Inc.] networks, and now they want to make money on it,” adds Islam, who says Caspian is about doing just that by dynamically assigning bandwidth and delivering QoS through policy enforcement.
Caspian’s fair use model, which would require incumbent telcos to install new equipment at key traffic transit locations like peering points, dynamically doles out bandwidth equally to all users on the network at a particular time, and it can prioritize premium services nondiscriminately to online services and incumbent operators — all without deep packet inspection. The system also protects emergency traffic like CALEA and GETS (government emergency telecommunications system).
Jon Canis, partner at Kelley Drye, notes that net neutrality has become a hot-button issue since big wigs at the RBOCs have said things like, “The Internet can’t be free” (Ed Whitacre, now CEO of AT&T Inc. said that in a Business Week interview earlier this year) and “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity” (this quote from Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon). While the AT&T folks have back-peddled some on Whitacre’s comments since they ignited a fire storm of controversy, the question remains as to how to keep the Internet an open network over which anyone can offer or receive virtually any application while providing those that invest in the network infrastructure an incentive to continue investing.
Islam of Caspian, whose technology is in use with at least a couple carriers in Asia, says his company recently had a “great meeting” with Dave Young, Verizon’s vice president of policy and government affairs. “He’s actually helping champion this within Verizon. It was a very positive meeting. He’s a very courteous guy,” Islam tells xchange. Verizon did not return xchange’s calls requesting an interview with Young.
COMPTEL President and CEO Earl Comstock did not recall a meeting with Caspian.
But VON Coalition President Staci Pies says while her group is not backing the Caspian approach, it is working to set up an educational session so its members can learn more about the vendor’s technology. “What we are opposed to is technology that engages in any deep packet inspection, or that permits the network owner to look at packet for origination of the packet,” says Pies. “From what I understand, the Caspian [technology] doesn’t do that.”
Caspian’s Fair Use Policy Framework
Source: Caspian Networks Inc. |
Pies says that Caspian is not a member of the VON Coalition, nor are Juniper Networks or Redback Networks Inc., which have their own policy-based QoS solutions, but Cisco Systems is a member. She says Cisco has not asked for VON Coalition support for its solutions. “The discussions with Cisco are about what rights network ownership has,” says Pies. “We have agreed network owners should be able to offer tiers of services to enable prioritization of traffic.”
VON Coalition is opposed to deep packet inspection because that would enable network operators to differentiate between traffic from different service providers. That’s a problem because some VoIP providers, like Vonage Holdings Corp., already have charged that incumbent network operations unfairly are degrading their services.
Of course, the RBOCs deny this and are against the creation of legislation or other rules requiring net neutrality. However, terms of the SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI mergers mentioned these companies must comply with net neutrality rules previously laid out by the FCC; that’s basically just some wording about consumer freedoms contained in the FCC’s broadband policy statement. FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin has said he doesn’t plan on adopting rules for net neutrality.
But net neutrality is vaguely mentioned in new national franchise legislation that’s in the works. However, Canis of Kelley Drye believes the best way to tackle fair use and net neutrality is by going to the FCC “on an incremental basis and having the FCC give some credence” to a particular approach, like Caspian’s, so service providers feel comfortable moving forward with such an approach. He says Caspian may seek a petition for a declaratory ruling on fair use from the FCC.
| Links |
| Caspian Networks Inc. www.caspiannetworks.com Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com Juniper Networks Inc. www.juniper.net Kelley Drye & Warren LLP www.kelleydrye.com Redback Networks www.redback.com The VON Coalition www.von.org |
