FCC'S TAC CALLS NETWORK VULNERABILITY MAJOR ISSUE IN VOIP GROWTH
Network vulnerability is a critical issue that needs to be addressed when building a new voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) network, several speakers agreed at a FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC) meeting Mon. in Washington. Consultant Stewart Personick said “from an engineering perspective,” protecting networks from terrorist attacks was “one of the most difficult issues we face… Shall we duplicate the networks that are vulnerable tomorrow as they are today given that… attackers are more difficult than they were before?” MCI’s Vint Cerf agreed, saying “pressure to create resilient [networks] will be driven by applications of VoIP… Fundamental communication and connectivity is a critical part, and their resilience is more distinct.”
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MIT’s David Reed said there was a “need for control of a highly decentralized system. We have passed that point, and if somebody” decided to do it now, he or she would be “in big trouble.” However, he said “law enforcement should have a right for legal wiretapping, and you need to rethink the conditions of that.” He said the “key point” was that “as we put more functions into 3rd parties, we need to know who those parties are… We need to pay attention to who else can listen to the phone calls.” However, he acknowledged that “decentralized systems tend to develop very rapidly… The market is a much better driver of innovation.”
Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia U. said he believed the industry needed “published and reliable metrics” similar to switch availability reporting “to build a reliable Internet that is far beyond VoIP… We need to have access to the information at all levels. You can’t have competition without information.” “Most importantly,” he said, consumers had “no good ways to compare service availability. Only some very large customers may get access to carrier-internal data.” He said it didn’t have to be done by the FCC: “Sampling with a well-respected methodology would be just fine.”
VoIP enables, but doesn’t force, end point services, Schulzrinne said: “We can move service location decisions to end users with trade-offs in cost, control, availability, functionality and technical sophistication needed… I believe that’s where it should reside.” He said the industry needed a regulatory framework that “ensures this user choice” and prevented “network operators from stifling service competition. To do that, it becomes a consumer protection issue in the sense we need to have service rules for effective monopoly and oligopoly providers.” He said the goals were: (1) To ensure transparent Internet. (2) To encourage service innovation. (3) To encourage service competition.
Addressing is “the biggest issue today” and should be seen as “a core regulatory issue,” Schulzrinne said. He said externally routable “address shortage excuse” made it “difficult to have inbound connections.” He also said regulation should “not bias technical and business decisions on in-house vs. outsourcing.” Some TAC members agreed that the pricing distortions issue was another that should to be addressed, saying pricing was best left up to the market, not regulation.
On spectrum sharing, Personick said “one should be cautious in assuming that the generalization of spectrum sharing to leverage new spectrum sharing methodologies will be as easy to implement in practice as it is in theory.” However, he said “being cautious” didn’t mean that “one should abandon or significantly delay the development and use of more effective methods of spectrum sharing.” He said policy-makers and the engineering community should “approach the deployment of advanced spectrum-sharing technologies with an awareness that new and technically complex types of harmful interference between systems may occur.” He said when those techniques were applied in situations where spectrum sharing entities were “not highly motivated to cooperate, technically complex types of harmful interference were likely to lead to significant post-deployment costs” in the forms of losses of applications use, re-engineering expenses and litigation. He said policy-makers should “factor these post-deployment costs into their decision- making processes,” while the technical community should “anticipate these post-deployment costs, and should pro- actively engage in research and development efforts that produce solutions and methodologies to minimize these costs.” For example, he said, the technical community should “avoid and quickly resolve harmful interference.”
On the E911 issue, Schulzrinne expressed concern that not many phone companies did selective routing of 911 calls to Public Service Answering Points (PSAPs): “PSAP information [is] tightly guarded,” and although it’s a public information, “it’s hard and costly to get.” He said that for service competition, there should be an ability to “route to PSAP from my home proxy,” and there should be “open access to PSAP information.”