Alcatel-Lucent CEO wants governments to leave net neutrality alone

CONDEMNING HISTORY seems to be a popular theme with network equipment vendors these days, with Alcatel-Lucent becoming the latest to pour scorn on old practices.

Alcatel-Lucent, one of the world's largest communication equipment vendors, got its annual Technology Symposium underway by saying that the network industry is in transition. Gone are the days of walled gardens, now users expect ubiquitous access to data and services through the use of cloud services, and network providers want 'intelligent pipes' to meet demand.

Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent didn't go quite as far as HP in targeting a specific vendor, but he said that there is an "arrogance of the market that the players that are here today will be here tomorrow". He also said that the big challenge for mobile operators will be to increase the revenue they make from wireless data services.

As Alcatel-Lucent's main customers are multi-national telecoms operators, it's not surprising that Verwaayen wants the operators to be left alone when it comes to the issue of net neutrality. When asked to comment on the 'pay for content' model that telecoms operators are so keen to implement, Verwaayen said, "The answer is not regulation, the answer is not building a new kind of definition, the answer is to let the market develop into multiple layers of relevance."

Verwaayan's "multiple layers of relevance" is a nod towards different network applications such as music and video streaming and smartphone applications content delivery. According to Verwaayan, governments "cannot order change in people's habits" and he said that the "answer is persuasion". The problem for consumers is that the persuasion involved could manifest through network operators throttling network traffic to the point where consumers are forced to fork over cash for acceptable performance.

Verwaayan's comments about operators wanting to be free of any regulation are not surprising. Telecoms operators look to network vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens to come up with ways they can differentiate and compartmentalise services so that they can charge for particular aspects of network access.

The idea that rapacious free market economics will safeguard net neutrality deserves to be met with a great deal of scepticism. However with network vendors and mobile operators calling for governments to leave them alone and let them do whatever they want, it's likely that the lobby will be very well funded.

If they succeed in abolishing net neutrality and turn the internet into some dystopian rich club of bandwidth haves and masses of have-nots scrabbling for scraps of bandwidth amidst the carcass of a once brilliant network, whole economies will suffer as they decline into irrelevance as a result, even while their big telecom firms and media companies get fat on the internet the public financed. µ