BT fixed network broadband customers now can sign up for a new “Stay Fast Guarantee” that assures consumers their service will be optimized, automatically and remotely, with a quality of service guarantee.
For a few of you who might immediately recognize this, such quality-of-service features are chief among the practices supporters of strong forms of network neutrality always decry. But advancing technology (packet encryption, application requirements, edge computing and much-faster speeds) also undercut the need for strong network neutrality laws, it can be argued.
In other words, best-effort, everyday performance is getting good enough (on mobile and fixed networks) that the “need” for quality of service mechanisms, or even access to higher-speed tiers of service, is largely moot. There is little need for “fast lanes” when “every lane is a fast lane.”
Bluntly, fast, low-latency networks kill the consumer need for QoS-assured tiers of service, as well as killing the service provider market opportunity to sell such tiers of service.
The new BT QoS offer for consumer broadband is among the growing number of reasons why such laws arguably are not needed, in some part because it is becoming impossible for internet access “bad actors” to intentionally speed up or “degrade” a consumer’s connection.
For example, in a market where 5G latency is so low, and typical best-effort speeds so high, what advantage is gained by services that are optimized for latency or speed?
Doing so normally is thought to require use of deep packet inspection, but that becomes quite challenging to impossible when traffic is encrypted, and that is getting to be the case for 80 percent of all traffic, already.
That is not to deny some utility for the BT QoS guarantee. In the U.S. fixed network market, consumers own their in-home wiring. So when that network malfunctions, it is the consumer who pays the cost of the repairs. Such in-home wiring might not malfunction or degrade very often, but it does happen.
That might be especially true for wiring that is on the exterior of a home or building.
When BT customers sign up to a new BT broadband plan or extend their existing contract, they will be given a guarantee of speed based on the estimated capability of the line. If it’s believed a broadband customer could get a faster line speed, BT will remotely optimize broadband performance without the customer having to do a thing, or will dispatch a technician, the company says.
If BT has not managed to get a customer’s broadband speeds back to where they should be after 30 days of a fault being identified, customers will be eligible to receive £20 back, up to four times a year, BT says.
BT will also ensure customer broadband speeds are being monitored and optimized remotely 24 hours a day, every day.
Some will complain that the Stay Fast offer violates net neutrality principles. Others might argue it should not be illegal to sell a quality-of-service-assured access service. In principle, BT’s Stay Fast offer only offers consistency of service, not a fast lane.
Beyond that, it might be argued that such offers offer less value than might once have been the case. Faster fixed network speeds and low-latency, high-bandwidth 5G, plus packet encryption, all combine to reduce the potential value of QoS-assured services.
When problems are resolved, it makes little sense to continue trying to “fix” them. It is beginning to look as though strong forms of network neutrality are proposed solutions to problems that are going away. Time to move on?
