See also:
Net freedom is at risk from carriers say coalition
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Net Neutrality not all it's cracked up to be

The whole debate about net neutrality is much wider than whether telcos get to charge a premium for delivering bits across their networks with a guaranteed quality of service: it's about control of future telecoms networks and survival of the  traditional telcos.

In 1997 David Isenberg, then a researcher at Bell Labs, coined the term 'The stupid network' Isenberg contended that the telecommunications networks of the not-too-distant future, and the way services and applications would be delivered would be so different from those of today that it will be beyond the competency of most telcos to adapt and evolve.

The real driver of this cataclysm is what Isenberg calls the 'End-To-End Principle'. "Put simply it states that if you can do something at the end of the network do it at the end of the network and take it out of the network. That turns your network into pure commodity: it reduces it to just the commodity component."

According to Isenberg, this means that traditional telcos will go the way of water and electricity and sewerage companies. "They are going to fade away into the infrastructure and play nowhere near the important role they do today."

I first spoke to Isenberg in 2002 when the US telecoms industry was in a far more parlous state than it is today after all the recent mega mergers. Things were so bad that the FCC had just convened a full bench hearing to " discuss the financial state of the industry and what measures need to be taken to revitalise and restore the financial health of the telecommunications industry, restore public trust and prevent further erosion from the current financial turmoil in this sector."

A lot has happened since then: the rise of the new age players such as Google and Skype that, in Isenberg's words "do everything at the end of the network and take it out of the network" has been meteoric. But so to has been progress and possibilities in the next generation network, epitomised by British Telecom's massive and ambitious 21CN project.

The same path, however is being followed by every major traditional telco, they are simply at different stages.

The NGN is much more about simply carrying all services as IP packets. Its about the possibilities of convergence: between fixed and mobile service: between what were previously broadcast services like TV and radio and telecoms services like voice, data and Internet access.

The recent evolution of the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) said to be viewed as the most important thew technology of the past decade by carries and vendors) ahs given the NGN vision a tremendous boost. It's a standardised architecture spanning both the fixed and mobile worlds that specifies the functional units and the interworking between then that underpin all these new converged services.

This is the future as the old world telcos see it. An NGN network that is an integrated entity able to deliver the full range of services to any subscriber by any means and for services to be mixed and matched under control of the network operator and the consumer.

They've got a fairly good idea of what sort of discrete services will be possible and popular over the NGN but they have barely started to explore the synergies that will be possible by converging different services over the NGN.

It's the exact opposite of the stupid network: it would convey strong advantages on integrated carriers able to access consumers by fixed and mobile networks and give them huge leverage with Those whose services are created at the edge of the network and delivered over it (eg Skype, Google and Microsoft).

In reality we're unlikely to have a totally stupid network and lots of dead old world telcos or totally smart networks were the telcos are able to dictate everything that is connected to the network and every service that is carried on (just like the old world telco monopoly of not so many years ago!). But between these extremes there any many possibilities. Abandoning net neutrality is simply round one to the old-world telcos.

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