Sometimes you can see an issue coming long before it erupts. Consider the hearing now being held by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) over network traffic shaping policies, pending legislation sponsored by Congressman Ed Markey that might be more adverse than the FCC is considering, and then the advent of dual-mode mobile services that allow users to shunt mobile traffic over an in-home or at-office WiFi connection.

 

Here’s the connection: assume some new safeguards are put into place that limit any Internet service provider’s (ISP’s) ability to traffic shape peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. Assume that dual-mode services become popular. Though application providers, P2P and mobile uses will be happy, ISPs won’t.

 

Forced to provision much more bandwidth at peak hours to accommodate heavy P2P usage, and possibly improve network performance on the latency and jitter fronts as well, costs will rise. The current prices for broadband access won’t allow facilities-based ISPs to recover their investment costs. So they’ll start raising prices for users who consume more bandwidth.

 

Better latency and jitter performance might be even more costly a proposition, if more users start running voice traffic over the terrestrial connection instead of the air link. At some point, facilities-based ISPs are going to resent providing high-quality network transport for services provided by wireless providers in whose revenue stream the broadband access providers are not sharing.

 

Maybe wireless providers will be happy with “best effort” latency and jitter. But it doesn’t take much insight to predict that facilities-based ISPs will then have all the incentive they need to create new tiers of service, based not only on bandwidth consumption, but on the quality of bandwidth a user or application provider may require to provide adequate quality of experience.

 

That might be the very behavior application providers have worried about. The ways facilities-based ISPs respond will depend on the specific rules the FCC or Congress decides to implement. What is predictable enough is that there will be response.

 

Comcast (News - Alert)—and lots of other ISPs, apparently—use traffic shaping to preserve quality of service for users of its cable modem services. If they are prevented from doing so, they will have to find other ways to ensure quality of experience.

 

You might call it another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The stated purpose any new rules or laws will be to ensure that anti-competitive behavior—the blocking of content services with which an ISP has competitive offerings—is prevented. The unintended consequence will be tiered levels of service that application providers wanted to prevent in the first place.