A Noble (if Impractical) Stab at Keeping the Mobile Operators Honest

If you are a fan of “tilting at windmills," Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) has proposed a new law titled the “Next Generation Wireless Disclosure Act” that would require mobile operators to disclose details about their 4G network services to “ensure that consumers have all the information they need to make an informed decision."

Now the last thing in the world the mobile operators ever want is anything that would lead to “informed decisions,” so you can imagine they will be lining up against this. CTIA - The Wireless Association is already on record as saying "We are concerned that the bill proposes to add a new layer of regulation to a new and exciting set of services, while ignoring the fact that wireless is an inherently complex and dynamic environment in which network speeds can vary depending on a wide variety of factors." Can you spell “obfuscation?”

The Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, is behind the proposed law, and their spokesman Parul Desai says the Eshoo bill "will help people cut through the clutter so we can compare prices and options, and we can better understand what really constitutes 4G data service, ...Right now, there aren't a lot of consumer protections for mobile broadband customers." I certainly won’t argue with that, but I don’t think they will make much headway with this.

Rep.Eshoo's proposed law would require mobile operators to disclose several details about their data plans. First, the operators would have to spell out "the guaranteed minimum transmit and receive data rates ... to and from on-network hosts for the service." This "guaranteed" minimum data rate would have to be available "for a percentage of the time in a calendar month," the details to be specified by the FCC. It’s easy to see how this would send a chill through the operators’ hearts, as theoretically they would have to specify a minimum that would apply anywhere in their networks.

The challenge is the range of variables that come into play in determining the data rate each user is going to get. Cellular data services operate on the principle of channels that are shared by all users in a cell or a sector (in many cases a cell coverage area is divided into two or three “sectors,” that’s while you’ll see the antennas mounted on those triangular frames). To make it even more complex, users with stronger signals operate at higher data rates and there are adjustments that can be made in the protocol’s scheduling algorithms to optimize overall performance. In the end, I don’t think that “minimum” would make any of them look very good, but it wouldn’t give us much in the way of meaningful information either. If you want an idea of how complex this is, take a look at this 3G/4G comparison piece from PC World.

The operators would also have to publish a "reliability rating" of their services, and again the FCC would specify the method for determining the rating. For usage sensitive plans they would have to disclose price and volume and for flat rate plans they would have to identify any limits. This is indeed reasonable as the going definition of “unlimited data plans” is a “data plan with limits.” For the most part, the carriers have disclosed those limits, though it is still virtually impossible to figure out how much capacity is required to send a text, a picture, download a song or a web page or just about anything else you’d do with your phone. As a minimum, a warning message when you are approaching that limit would be a nice touch. The legislation would also require details about what 4G technology the consumer is getting (e.g. LTE or WiMAX), and a map of the coverage area of service.

The one provision that will undoubtedly set off the mobile operators is the requirement to disclose "any business practices or technical mechanisms employed by the service provider, other than standard best-effort delivery, that allocate capacity or prioritize traffic differently on the basis of the source of the applications, content, or services." This would include "any limits or prohibition" on the use of various applications or services, and any "traffic shaping or throttling mechanisms that affect the service as a result of exceeding certain usage limits."

You will recall that the mobile operators are explicitly exempted from the 'Net Neutrality rules. This is important in that one potential that is regularly proposed for reducing mobile voice costs is to utilize VoIP over the 3G/4G data service as an alternative to the operators’ traditional cents-per-minute circuit switched voice service. VoIP over a 3G data service is an iffy proposition today, and user adoption has been minimal. If it were to become a revenue issue for the operators, that ‘Net Neutrality exemption would give them the freedom to “stack the deck” in a way that would willfully degrade the performance to those voice streams. I’m pretty sure the operators won’t want that news getting out.

While these types of performance comparisons would be even more valuable to enterprise users (who might actually understand what the numbers mean), better consumer protection is long overdue in the mobile service business, but I don’t think this is the right path. Mobile networks are big investments with hundreds of thousands of base stations, thousands of square miles of coverage areas, complicated sharing mechanisms all on top of radio technologies that are maddeningly unpredictable to begin with. I don’t think you’re going to be able to come up with one or two simple numbers to effectively characterize them in any meaningful fashion.

I do applaud Rep. Eshoo for taking a stab at this however, and while the “couple of numbers” assessment of a whole mobile operator’s network won’t shed much light on the situation, maybe it could start us on the way to better disclosure and fairer treatment for wireless consumers. In the meantime, expect the CTIA’s PR team to shift into high gear to quash this idea.