FCC Will Probe Managed Services As Part of Network Neutrality Push

Apparently the Federal Communications Commission will be asking questions about managed services in the upcoming Network Neutrality proceeding. In general, managed services are ill-defined, but most carriers will tell you they include features that customers pay extra for and as such, require guaranteed levels of service — things like IPTV or virtual private networks back to a corporate office. No one paying for telco TV wants to let VoIP calls or Hulu interfere with the Big Game when they're watching it on IPTV. But the FCC apparently wants to know how far carriers can take that. If taken too far, then carriers could protect their revenue streams and get around any net neutrality provisions by allocating more of their network for managed services rather than for the public Internet. The FCC is worried that a neutral public Internet that gets forced through a smaller pipe so that carriers can invest more on upgrades and capacity for managed services won't be able to support the innovations of tomorrow. So we expect the FCC to ask some probing questions aimed at exposing how the carriers view this managed services, as well as how, from a technical perspective, they currently wall such services off. The FCC's attention on managed services is an effort to make sure that the fat pipes the carriers are building will be available for innovations that aren't delivered through a carrier-created and controlled managed service. The threat of ensuring a quality-of-service guarantee for some offerings means, at its heart, that certain traffic is shunted aside when traffic deemed to be a priority comes through.