5G Kills QoS "Opportunity"

Some might argue that 5G and better networks, growing competition for internet access services, plus content encryption, have killed the means and the demand for quality-assured consumer broadband services.

Even if ISPs wanted to sell services that prioritize quality, the technical ability to do so, and the consumer demand, are not present.

Ignore for a moment the politics of network neutrality. It can be argued that internet service providers rapidly are losing the technological ability to “degrade” or “slow down,” much less identify, packets they deliver. And without packet visibility, it is impossible to apply the quality of service mechanisms net neutrality proponents fear.

Keep in mind that any attempt to categorize and apply service level features to internet content becomes impossible when the data is encrypted. QoS packets are encrypted at the edge, by the app providers themselves.

When that happens, service providers cannot prioritize, because they have no idea what actual class or category of content is delivered. In other words, they cannot “tamper with what they cannot see. And that is the growing trend as most traffic gets encrypted.  

By about 2020, estimates Openwave Mobility, fully 80 percent of all internet traffic will be encrypted. In 2017, more than 70 percent of all traffic is encrypted.

There are other reasons packet discrimination is not possible, for technical and business reasons.

Can 5G service providers charge a premium for low-latency performance guarantees, when the stated latency parameters--best effort--are already so low? Could they charge a higher fee for faster speeds, when faster speeds are the norm?

Will 5G best effort service be good enough, latency-wise and bandwidth, to obviate the need for any additional quality of service features to preserve low latency and bandwidth, even if that were the intention?

Simply, is there a market for quality of service when delivered bandwidth rates are so high, and latency performance so much better than 4G? In a broader sense, as network performance keeps getting better on both latency and bandwidth dimensions, can connectivity providers actually sell customers on QoS-assured services?

The other change is the emergence of edge computing for latency-sensitive applications. We can assume that the whole point of edge computing is to provide a level of quality assurance that cannot otherwise be obtained. But QoS is not going to be a long-term problem.

Among the disingenuous arguments raised about network neutrality is that it somehow “saves internet freedom.” It does not. The heart of the network neutrality argument is that internet service providers should be barred from offering any quality of service features for consumer internet access services, on the theory that any other policy would allow ISPs to degrade service on their networks, while creating “value added” services that run faster.

Ignore for the moment that fixed network speeds increased about 38 percent in 2018 alone; that with 5G delivering an order of magnitude faster speeds; with new low earth orbit satellite constellations launching; with new ways to deploy fast fixed wireless access networks; with the number of ISPs actually growing; and that you would be extremely hard pressed to find any actual instances of ISPs deliberately building “crappy” networks that run slow, just so they can try and upsell.

Ignore the coming era of edge computing that will make network responsiveness even higher. Ignore Amazon’s entry into the ISP business; Google’s existing operations and Facebook’s satellite and other ISP operations.

Every public policy has private interest implications. Net neutrality essentially protects Google, Facebook and others from potential underlying cost pressures, even as all major app providers themselves pay to “speed up” their own services, using content delivery networks.

All those firms win when “everybody” has internet access, of good quality and low price. Net neutrality rules are viewed as ways to promote such outcomes. U.S. regulators never have allowed ISPs to block or degrade consumer internet access to all lawful applications, period.

So net neutrality cannot be about preserving consumer access to lawful applications, despite the breathless rhetoric. A fair assessment would be that the danger to consumer welfare comes from the content and application sphere these days: privacy violations; excessive sales of user data; biased filtering policies; selective censorship and so forth. None of those ailments are caused by ISPs.