TORONTO – While the concept of network neutrality is a hot button issue among some web denizens, for Rogers Communications senior vice-president, regulatory, Ken Engelhart, it’s basically a fake issue.
This was right after he called the Commissioner of Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) “a bit of a waste of money.” (Ed note: We love RCI’s regulatory chief. We can always count on him to speak his mind.) Engelhart was speaking on the “regulatory blockbuster” panel at the 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit Tuesday at the Toronto Congress Centre.
Engelhart pointed to myriad other “nonsense” issues over the years that used certain buzzwords that worried people, such as being roadkill “on the information superhighway,” for example. Generally, the people talking about it – just like network neutrality, “don’t know anything about running a network.”
“We always need a completely fictitious issue for people to talk about,” Engelhart said of the network neutrality camp. “It’s a popular issue among people who know nothing about network management.”
People buy high speed Internet service in order to get content and Rogers delights in telling people it has the fastest network. So, “the whole thesis (of the network neutrality scare mongers) is we’re going to go to the content people who are making us rich and give them a hard time… there’s no logic to it.”
John Lawford, the lawyer on the panel representing the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, vehemently disagreed with Engelhart, saying NN is “the number one hot button issue for our constituency.”
Lawford said PIAC is concerned that only peer-to-peer applications are being targeted and shaped by the likes of Rogers and Bell and other large ISPs while the rest of the activity on the internet is allowed to run free and clear of any limitations.
“Shouldn’t (limitations or traffic shaping) be shared among all the applications on the Internet causing congestion?” asked Lawford. “It’s unjustly discriminatory.”
That goes back to Engelhart’s point about a fundamental misunderstanding about how a network works and how P2P applications prowl. “P2P is different. It is designed to overwhelm the network. They would take all of the bandwidth if it is not managed.” So, Rogers gives P2P its own lane in the upstream network and the rest of the web applications are not touched at all. People can still surf where they want and download whatever they like.
Rogers has no problem with mega-downloaders or their P2P applications. They’re good customers, after all. They just don’t want to ruin the online experience – VOIP phone calls included – for the rest of the customers. P2P technology is built to consume all bandwidth it can find, wherever it can find it.
Rogers or Bell or anyone else can add as much new fibre and other bandwidth enhancing gear to its network as it wants but without managing it and making sure P2P applications run only on their own lane on the network, the very nature of those applications will consume all available bandwidth if the network is just left alone, meaning no one else would even be able to send an e-mail.
And, added Engelhart, it doesn’t seem to be an issue among Rogers customers. “We hardly get any complaints,” he added.
