White spaces, DPI and net neutrality

With the recent White Spaces news (which I think is pretty neat - more competition is needed in the states, and the US is a pretty damn big area to cover by the usual means), I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: traffic management will be required. We're talking somewhat larger cell sizes than WiFi and the medium is decidedly shared.

I've seen nothing about a public access mandate for this space, so let's assume it's all about commercial ISP's. Any provider entering the fray here would be competing against the incumbent Telco or Cableco and would need to compete on price and service, pretty much.

It's certainly doable, but don't expect the Network Neutrality Marvel at work here. It won't be fast and every-packet-is-equal. Either of, perhaps, but not both. And if you're selling service, I'm pretty sure I know which one goes away first.


This might perhaps be even more applicable if the AWS bit goes through. Citing that article:

"The FCC now says that the ultimate winner of its AWS spectrum auction must use up to 25 percent of its capacity to provide free, two-way broadband Internet service at data rates of at least 768 kilobits per second in the downstream direction. "

Right. And this, again, is over a shared medium? Let's say that 25% of the capacity is 25Mbps per frequency and cell. With at least 768 Kbps per user, they'll have a hell of a hard time covering peak usage. I suppose it boils down to how many frequencies the radios can muster and how many users they're getting, but it's a service that'll suffer more as it gets more popular - and being free, I can see how a lot of casual Internet users would use it.

You'd probably see ~0.15 Mbps per active subscriber at peak, giving us ~160 users per frequency and cell before you actually start seeing bad congestion. And that's assuming that the users follow a pretty average usage demographic - a few YouTube addicts or filesharing users will skew that somewhat badly since we're seeing a pretty low number of total users per cell/frequency.

I admire the notion, but I think they'll be needing to do both host fairness, ideally some smart queueing and perhaps bulk services shaping in order for it to be very usable at peak. Pretty much the same deal as 3G providers and WiFi providers today.