THE OPEN-ACCESS POLICY DEBATE, which raged last year and then curiously subsided after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said the agency should not force wireless networks to give unfettered access to third-party devices and applications, is once again alive.
The issue appears to have been re-energized by a confluence of forces, though there is little indication the cellphone industry – whose largest players have vowed to loosen their iron-clad grip on networks – is losing any ground in its campaign to fend off a wholesale open-access mandate.
At industry association CTIA’s trade show in Las Vegas in April, Martin became a huge crowd-pleaser when he told a keynote audience he wanted the FCC to reject a petition by Skype Ltd.
The software-based Internet phone company last year asked the FCC to apply to the wireless industry a requirement in the landmark 1968 Carterfone decision allowing third parties to attach devices to the public landline network.
“In light of the industry’s embrace of this more open approach, I think it’s premature for the commission to adopt any other requirements across the industry,” Martin said at the time. And thus … I am going to circulate to my fellow commissioners an order dismissing a petition by Skype that would apply Carterfone requirements to the existing wireless networks.”
In addition to wireless carriers’ favorable overtures on open access in the past, Verizon Wireless must comply with open access guidelines with respect to a nationwide collection of regional licenses it purchased at the 700 MHz auction in March.
How open will open be?
Still, the question of what precisely open access means continues to be the subject of debate. Advocates of open networks remain skeptical about whether wireless carriers will welcome third-party applications and devices in a meaningful way.
The GOP-led FCC has yet to rule on the Skype petition. As such, lobbying on the issue continues even though it still remains likely that agency will eventually dismiss Skype’s request.
But even if its wireless Carterfone petition goes down to defeat, Skype has signaled it will continue the fight, and the firm appears to have already recalibrated its strategy to persuade telecom policymakers to ban cellular carriers from shutting the door on its product and those of other firms also anxious to reach the nation’s 265 million mobile phone subscribers.
A new analysis by the Phoenix Center, a think tank that focuses on telecom policy, is bound to make Skype’s advocacy that much more challenging. The study concludes an open access rule on the wireless industry would raise cellphone prices for consumers.
“It is ironic that proponents of wireless Carterfone tout the rules as being ‘pro-consumer’ because our analysis shows that such rules would likely drive up the cost of equipment with little, if any, reduction in wireless service prices,” said Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center and co-author of the paper. “The pricing implications of wireless Carterfone are about as anti-consumer as you can get.”
Carriers change stance
Skype, meantime, told the FCC that remarks by wireless executives at the cellular industry’s recent conference in San Francisco tends to undermine mobile phone carriers’ professed embrace of open access.
“Instead of broadly carrying forward the commission’s tremendous strides toward open networks, the word coming from the CTIA gathering is that open networks present a multitude of problems for the carriers, and that to protect consumers from too many choices network operators must be the gatekeepers of the consumer experience,” Christopher Libertelli, senior director for government and regulatory affairs in North America for Skype, said in an FCC filing.
Libertelli pointed to press reports quoting T-Mobile USA Inc. Chairman Robert Dobson, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam and Sprint Nextel Corp. CEO Dan Hesse. He said the wireless industry’s attitude towards open access was aptly captured by Hesse, quoted in RCR Wireless News as saying, “The big Internet can be daunting. . There can be too much choice.”
Libertelli said statements by wireless executives do not square with the FCC’s Broadband Policy Statement insofar as promoting choice, innovation, competition and technological neutrality on high-speed Internet pipes.
Skype wants the FCC to affirm that its 2005 Broadband Policy Statement applies to the wireless ecosystem.
“This would be a measured response to the dynamics of the wireless market and would send the correct message to an evasive wireless industry,” Libertelli said. “It would also encourage those in the application development community, like Skype, who have reasonable expectations that applications will run as they were designed on wireless broadband platforms.”
Libertelli noted the FCC’s crackdown on Comcast Corp. for degrading peer-to-peer traffic as an example of how the agency could address similar abuses on a case-by-case basis in the wireless industry. As such, Skype appears to be taking a different policy tack in efforts to gain inroads into the U.S. wireless space on par with what it has achieved in other countries.
Skype’s petition and other efforts to pry open wireless networks are tied to a broader net neutrality debate in which the two major presidential contenders differ. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) opposes net neutrality, while Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) supports such a policy because it would go beyond the FCC’s open Internet principles.
