Canada: Yes, same traffic-shaping rules apply to mobile data

By Nate Anderson

If your cable or DSL provider can't block some low-bandwidth application like VoIP simply because it competes with one of their own offerings, why should mobile operators have the right to do so? In Canada, they no longer do.

Last week, Canadian regulators decided that ISPs all have to play by the same traffic management rules, regardless of the technology they use to deliver the bits. This makes tremendous sense, as opposed to the technology-centric approach taken previous by Canada (and still used in the US).

Canada's FCC equivalent, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), laid down the rules for wireline ISPs last year, but at the time did not address whether they applied to mobile operators. On June 30 2010, CRTC at last decided to apply the same traffic management framework to mobile Internet access in order to address "potential issues regarding unjust discrimination or undue preference in the provisioning of mobile wireless data services."

The country's Internet traffic management rules don't amount to strict "net neutrality," and management practices like P2P delay are still allowed. But Canadian ISPs do operate under a set of useful rules. Internet traffic management must not be "unjustly discriminatory nor unduly preferential." Management must "be designed to address a defined need, and nothing more." Outright blocking of content is prohibited, and so is any "delay" technique in which content is "slowed down to such an extent that it amounts to blocking."

Content that is not time-sensitive, such as most P2P traffic, can be delayed. Time-sensitive traffic, on the other hand, cannot be messed with at all, as any delay "amounts to controlling the content and influencing the meaning and purpose of the telecommunications in question." Any mobile operators having dark thoughts about returning to a past in which VoIP services were blocked or throttled from mobile devices can think again.

Investment, not traffic management, "is a fundamental tool for dealing with network congestion and should continue to be the primary solution that ISPs use." And all traffic management techniques must be publicly disclosed.

In the US, people like Columbia University prof Tim Wu have pushed hard for the similar concept of "wireless net neutrality," which would apply consistent principles to all Internet access. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski supports the idea, but with the FCC in turmoil about how to proceed, there's no telling when or if such a policy will take hold here as well.