Mark Lyn­der­say

It proved to be one of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty's more heat­ed con­sul­ta­tions, but for once, the fire wasn't com­ing from the floor.Gath­ered in one room were rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Tatt, Dig­i­cel, TSTT and Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions to dis­cuss the tick­lish mat­ter of what peo­ple do with their In­ter­net con­nec­tions.

Dig­i­cel, which has tak­en the lead in mak­ing hard moves on the is­sue of Over the Top (OTT) ser­vices by block­ing, al­beit briefly in T&T, third par­ty Voice over IP (Voip) soft­ware, spoke first on the mat­ter, their Gen­er­al Coun­sel, David Geary re­it­er­at­ing the points the com­pa­ny has been mak­ing from the start (http://ow.ly/OB6eq).

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that OTT ser­vices are gen­er­al­ly pos­i­tive, Geary lament­ed that the com­pa­ny was forced in­to com­pe­ti­tion with providers "that are not re­quired to hold a con­ces­sion and who are not sub­ject to the same rules.""If a class of ac­tiv­i­ty is reg­u­lat­ed," Geary ar­gued, "then just be­cause it is car­ried across the In­ter­net does not make it im­mune from reg­u­la­tion."

OTT ser­vices such as Voip, Geary said, are in di­rect com­pe­ti­tion with the rev­enue streams of li­censed com­pa­nies but pay no tax­es and pro­vide no an­cil­lary ser­vices, such as emer­gency call­ing, which Tatt re­quires of its con­ces­sion­aires.They con­tribute noth­ing to the in­fra­struc­ture that they use to de­liv­er those ser­vices and ex­ist out­side of the le­gal frame­works of this coun­try.

Those rev­enue de­clines are like­ly to be the largest is­sue on the agen­da of any telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny ob­ject­ing to the pres­ence of Voip soft­ware on their net­works.Cit­ing re­search on the sub­ject, Geary not­ed that the drops will be sig­nif­i­cant. Es­ti­mates in glob­al rev­enue drops for mo­bile op­er­a­tors es­ti­mate that voice and SMS in­come on in­com­ing in­ter­na­tion­al calls will drop by 30 to 40 per cent while over­all rev­enues look to de­cline by as much as 25 per cent.

Dig­i­cel, he said, had seen a 40 per cent drop in in­ter­na­tion­al calls over the last 18 months."It will not be pos­si­ble for in­creas­es in da­ta us­age to make up that short­fall," Geary said.The state­ments from TSTT's Christa Lei­th were more con­cil­ia­to­ry, of­fer­ing a hands off po­si­tion on how cus­tomers used their net­work but de­clar­ing the com­pa­ny will­ing to seek col­lab­o­ra­tive arrange­ments with such providers.

The po­si­tion of Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, as ar­tic­u­lat­ed by David Cox, him­self a for­mer reg­u­la­tor, was more de­ter­mined­ly ag­nos­tic about the use that its users made of its net­works and de­clared the Tatt con­sul­ta­tive doc­u­ment a "wa­ter­shed in re­gion­al de­lib­er­a­tions on the mat­ter.""What is the role of net­work man­age­ment poli­cies?" asked Cox, who not­ed the need to man­age traf­fic, since band­width is fi­nite.

Cox was clear that Flow, Colum­bus' cus­tomer fac­ing ISP, would not en­gage in the block­ing of OTT ser­vices (a TTCS dis­cus­sion on block­ing is here: http://ow.ly/OB6p6)."Voip and IPTV are le­git­i­mate tech­nolo­gies that are used by lo­cal telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies," Christa Lei­th said, "but does the mod­el of an OTT provider com­pro­mise the lo­cal com­pet­i­tive mar­ket?"

Since OTT ser­vices are usu­al­ly dis­rup­tive to es­tab­lished ser­vices, it seems that such con­flicts are in­evitable.It al­so re­mains to be seen what the po­si­tion of Flow will be when the OTT ser­vices de­liv­er­ing ca­ble tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming, al­ready in use lo­cal­ly but still to spread in­to the main­stream, be­gin cut­ting in­to their cus­tomer base.

Kim Mal­lalieu, a Tatt di­rec­tor and UWI com­put­ing lec­tur­er asked from the au­di­ence per­spec­tive, how the me­chan­ics of such reg­u­la­tion and its en­force­ment would work.Kier­an Meskell, Head of Reg­u­la­to­ry Af­fairs for Dig­i­cel T&T re­spond­ed that, "Block­ing is the de­fault en­force­ment tool, if a provider us­ing lega­cy con­nec­tions doesn't com­ply with reg­u­la­tion, Tatt's ac­tion would be to block their ser­vice."

Mal­lalieu clear­ly want­ed more nu­ance than that, but it wasn't forth­com­ing.In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Colum­bus' David Cox spelled out the sit­u­a­tion quite clear­ly: "If you can en­force, then you should do some­thing, if you can­not en­force, that should be fac­tored in­to your de­lib­er­a­tions."There seemed to be gen­er­al agree­ment that there is need for more for­mal as­sess­ment of the ac­tu­al pres­ence and im­pact of OTT ser­vices, some­thing that Tatt hopes to ad­dress in its up­com­ing Tatt In­ter­net Us­age Sur­vey.

While many con­cerned voic­es were raised from the au­di­ence about lim­it­ing OTT ser­vices, one of the fi­nal clear voic­es on the mat­ter was UWI lec­tur­er Si­mon Fras­er's."Voice is dead, long live the da­ta," he told the pan­el. "If you are a busi­ness that de­pends on voice, you are push­ing against the wave. If you are a com­pa­ny sell­ing da­ta, it's the best of times and you will thrive by get­ting peo­ple to use as much da­ta as pos­si­ble. It's all over the top."

"Are we go­ing to reg­u­late every­thing? Are we go­ing to cut them off? Well, they are like­ly to say fine, you are just a round­ing er­ror in our busi­ness.""

This is a much big­ger mat­ter than just Voip. All our reg­u­la­tions, all our think­ing has to change. Stop push­ing against the wave. You'll have more fun buy­ing a surf­board."

Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn here: http://ow.ly/OB62F.