Fixed Network Bandwidth Caps Might be Unnecessary, to Prevent Congestion

Many predictions prove quite false. Consider the 2009 study of pandemic impact on internet access by the U.S. General Accountability Office. That study warned that, in a serious pandemic, “increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors.”

Pointedly, the report said “DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion.” As it turns out, internet service suppliers, in the normal course of supporting their businesses, built networks robust enough that measures to deal with internet congestion simply were not needed. 

It is worth noting that the report suggested “an influenza pandemic could result in 200,000 to 2 million deaths in the United States.” Though any loss of life is lamentable, that prediction has not proven close to correct. 

“Increased use of the Internet by students, teleworkers, and others during a severe pandemic is expected to create congestion in Internet access networks that serve metropolitan and other residential neighborhoods,” the report warned. 

Of course, a pandemic did happen in 2020, did result in the shutdown of most of the economy, people did have to stay at home, away from school and work. But the feared internet access disruption never happened. In fact, the percentage of people required to stay at home vastly exceeded the 50 percent figure the GAO assumed. It was virtually 100 percent in most parts of the United States. 

For the week of March 15 to March 21, 2020, as people were ordered to stay at home,  internet access services in 200 U.S. cities maintained service levels, though 13.5 percent of cities had seen average speed dips of 20 percent of typical ranges, according to Broadband Now. 

In late March and early April, consumer traffic was up possibly 30 percent to 40 percent in affected countries where stay at home policies were in effect. 

An earlier  2007 DHS study was said to “confirm that the increased traffic generated in neighborhoods during a severe pandemic is likely to exceed the capacity of the providers’ aggregation devices in metropolitan residential neighborhoods.” That has not proven to be the case. 

Notably, the GAO report said that at 40 percent of absenteeism (workers forced to stay home),  “at the 40 percent absenteeism level, the study predicted that most users within residential neighborhoods would likely experience congestion when attempting to use the Internet.” 

The Covid-19 pandemic caused close to 99 percent stay at home behavior. 

The point is that predictions always are hard to make. In this case, ISPs built robust networks that were able to handle the absolute worst case scenario for internet usage caused by a pandemic, with only a slight slowing of peak speeds. 

If nothing else, the stay-at-home orders put into place to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have stress-tested consumer internet access networks. 

That raises the question of whether data caps for fixed line services actually are necessary for the oft-stated reason of preserving quality of experience by reducing potential congestion. 

Most consumers seem to understand that mobile networks likely require more management, have less bandwidth and are more prone to actual congestion than fixed networks. At least that is what a Government Accountability Office survey might suggest. 

Fixed networks might be another matter. To be sure, use or non-use of usage caps is a business issue, not a technology issue. The pandemic performance pretty much confirms that. To wit, bandwidth caps are not needed, on today’s fixed networks, to prevent congestion. The consumer networks were able to handle the sudden and unexpected demand creating by nearly everyone staying away from work and school. 

The next question is whether a significant number of large ISPs will decide there is market advantage to be gained by dropping the bandwidth caps, increasing them substantially (it should not matter, in terms of congestion), or abandoning caps altogether. 

The performance of networks suggests it is technically safe to do so. The issue is whether business policies will change, or not.

Only AT&T U-verse Loses No Net Video Subscribers in First Quarter 2020

It will not surprise you that leading cable and telco subscription video providers lost customers in the first quarter of 2020. What might surprise you is that AT&T’s U-verse service lost zero customers in the quarter. That was the exception to the rule, which was that service providers lost customers in the quarter. 

Pay-TV Providers

Subscribers at end of 1Q 2020

Net Adds in 1Q 2020

Cable Companies
Comcast	20,845,000	(409,000)
Charter	16,074,000	(70,000)
Cox	3,820,000	(45,000)
Altice	3,137,500	(41,700)
Mediacom	693,000	(17,000)
Atlantic Broadband	306,252	(2,386)
Cable One	303,000	(11,000)

Total Top Cable

45,178,752

(596,086)

Satellite Services
DIRECTV	15,136,000	(897,000)
DISH TV	9,012,000	(132,000)

Total DBS

24,148,000

(1,029,000)

Phone Companies
Verizon FiOS	4,145,000	(84,000)
AT&T U-verse	3,440,000	0
Frontier	621,000	(39,000)

Total Top Phone

8,206,000

(123,000)

Streaming Service
Hulu + Live TV	3,300,000	100,000
Sling TV	2,311,000	(281,000)
AT&T TV NOW	788,000	(138,000)

Total Streaming

6,399,000

(319,000)

Total Top Providers

83,931,752

(2,067,086)

source: Leichtman Research

Tech Workers Like Work from Home, But Worry Their Careers Could be Affected

Human preferences always matter when evaluating the future of trends such as work from home, which conventional wisdom suggests “must” increase dramatically in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

That might not be as big a trend as many expect. A survey of workers from leading technology firms found, as have other surveys, that most professionals prefer remote work to office work. Some 53 percent of respondents say they would rather work remotely. 

On the other hand, 33 percent of those respondents also believe remote work will affect their career progression. Some 41 percent of Uber and Facebook professionals are concerned about their career progression.

That was true of 37 percent of respondents at Amazon, LinkedIn and Salesforce. 

About 35 percent of new hires also fear that remote work will negatively affect their career progression. But about a third of all the respondents, with work tenures ranging up to more than 10 years, also say they worry about career impact.  

Are you concerned that the new work dynamics will impact your career progression?	Yes	No	Too soon to tell	Grand Total
	1236	1172	1392	3800
	33%	31%	37%	100%
Are you concerned that the new work dynamics will impact your career progression?	Yes	No	Too soon to tell	Grand Total
Amazon	37%	27%	36%	310
Microsoft	33%	31%	36%	291
Google	35%	25%	40%	194
Facebook	41%	24%	35%	133
Uber	41%	24%	36%	76
LinkedIn	37%	25%	38%	65
Salesforce	37%	23%	40%	52
Intel Corporation	20%	35%	45%	49

source: Blind

80/20 Applies to Covid-19, Telco Capex, Most of Business and Life

A study suggests that 80 percent of Covid-19 cases were caused by 20 percent of spreaders. That is an example of how ubiquitous the 80/20 rule is quite common in nature, business and life. 

Also known as a Pareto distribution--the 80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the theorem states that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of the actions.

The Pareto distribution applies to business performance, It seems to apply to telco capex. It seems to appy to the India mobile business.  

As one example, 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of clients, or 80 percent of wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people.

In customer service 80 percent of your problems are going to come from 20 percent of your customers, and 80 percent of your profits are going to come from 20 percent of your customers.

In management 80 percent of your value is going to be created by 20 percent of your employees, and 80 percent of your problems are going to come from 20 percent of your employees (not necessarily the same 20 percent.

In computer science fixing 20 percent of your most common bugs will fix 80 percent of your errors and crashes.

In mobile gaming 80 percent of your in-game purchases are going to be made by 20 percent of your users.

In website management  80 percent of your traffic is going to come during 20 percent of your uptime and 80 percent of your traffic will route to 20 percent of your page. 

In construction 80 percent of your injuries are going to come from 20 percent of your hazards.

In sports  80 percent of your wins are going to come from 20 percent of your competitors 

or teams.

In weight loss and muscle gain, 80 percent of your results are going to come from 20 percent of 

your exercises.

In user experience — 20 percent of the features of your product or service will be used by users

80 percent of the time. 

Whose Free Speech is Protected?

First Amendment law admittedly is arcane, but occasionally becomes important in the context of how industries ought to be regulated. One thorny issue is whether social media apps actually are platforms or publishers. It matters. The traditional poles of regulation have had unregulated and protected “free speech” rules applied to publishers, while common carriers are regulated. 

The distinction is that a publisher exercises editorial judgment, and picks and chooses what it will say. The common carrier, such as a railroad, electrical or gas utility, merely transports, and does not choose. 

As applied to internet app platforms, the claim has been that the likes of Facebook and Twitter only transport, or allow, content and views to be expressed; they do not “publish” by exercising editorial control. The problem is that they now do so, even if they remain a mix of platform and publisher. 

Hybrid matters have emerged. Radio and television broadcasting, as well as cable TV services, historically were not as unrestricted as newspapers or magazines, in part because they use public rights of way or public airwaves. Also, broadcasters once were covered by a fairness doctrine that restricted complete broadcaster publishing freedom, even if, generally speaking, stations had freedom to program their content. 

In the case of broadcasting, choices also were made about “who” has the right of free speech, the speaker or the listener. Though we might argue it was the speaker whose rights are protected, broadcasting regulation often has shifted that “right” to the listener. That is what the equal time rule or fairness doctrine implies. 

Nor is the matter as simple as originally intended, to protect citizens and speakers from restrictions by government entities. The original notion was that political speech, in particular, was what needed protection. Over time, the range of expressions deemed to be protected political speech has been extended. 

While the First Amendment only protects citizens from government restraint, most would agree that private entities (big platforms) arguably have an equally-chilling impact on citizen free political expression. 

To the extent that Facebook and Twitter claim to be “platforms,” they arguably operate as do common carriers, in the specific sense of “transporting” what others say, not saying themselves. To the extent they exercise actual editorial control, they act as publishers (as do newspapers, magazines, radio stations, web sites). 

To complicate matters, this is not to say Twitter and Facebook, as legal entities, have no “right of political speech” as entities speaking for themselves. They do have such rights. What is confused is speech rights held by the speakers on their platforms, as compared to the “readers or viewers” on their platforms. When Twitter censors speakers, it is because Twitter claims to protect “readers and viewers,” not speakers. 

And that is part of the philosophical underpinning of the “platform or publisher” discussions. There are elements beyond free speech implications, but the choice of “whose political rights to protect” is in play. It is not merely the issue of whether Twitter is a common carrier or a publisher. 

There also is the key matter of whether the right of political free speech is possessed by the speaker or the viewer or listener or reader. Traditional First Amendment rights have been for the speaker in the case of newspapers and magazines, generally in favor of the speaker in the case of radio, TV or cable TV, but with a shift in the direction of protecting the rights of viewers or listeners. 

That same distinction now shapes our understanding of how political free speech is protected when platforms are so dominant.