Zero rating implentation strategies
Last year, one large mobile operator in Canada started to zero-rate its own mobile TV offering. It appears that routers kept counting all the data, but that the company then subtracted usage generated by its video servers to come up with billable Gigabytes for each user. (This was quashed by the regulator in Canada) In the last week, another mobile operator announced it was zero rating approved music streaming services (Spotify, Google Play and a few others). If you are dealing with "foreign" content that comes from servers you don't control, what are the "best practices" to zero-rate content from multiple outside sources ? To make matters more interesting, the FAQ for that service indicates that if you listen to a music stream that exceeds 128kbps, you MAY be charged for the data, and that you will be charged to listen to videos that could be offered by that service, and for non streaming data such as album covers, list of songs etc. Would this point to specific IPs (streaming servers for low quality 128kbps sound) ? How scalable is this when you start to have a whole bunch of source IPs whose traffic is to be zero rated ? Or would another way of doing this to setup private routes into the ISP's network for each approved service, so the data would enter through a different interface and be counted separately ? Or, and this is my most important question: Is it possible with current networking software to zero rate any data flow that is less than a certain value (eg: 128kbs) ? Or would current software require network operator to get 5 minute usage for each user and only bill if average data rate during last 5 minutes exceeded 128kbps ? (which means that your music is billed if you also listen to netflix at same time since total data flows are greater than 128kbps) Of note: not all customers get this treatment, only those with higher end packages. Those with lower end packages are charged for usage by those very same services. And for the record, this isn't to setup a similar system, it is to better understand the issue for a regulatory challenge.
Zero rating is not a new concept. It has existed in the mobile world since the days of the dumb phone. Got a reference to why this was killed by the regulator in Canada? Mobile networks typically use their packet core (and prior iterations of the same termination, rating, billing, management gear) to rate and bill specific to each subscriber. It is done with voice minutes, text, data. Whether or not you consider the solutions scalable is up to one's individual judgement. But this zero rating billing model has and is very widely deployed and at massive scale. In fact, there are specific interfaces defined for just these purposes in the applicable standards. There are many many conceivable ways in which billing mediation and associated infrastructure for zero rating can and is implemented. This is not new and is very well understood in the mobile industry. Not sure what you're after here. Best regards, Christian
On Aug 31, 2015, at 6:01 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
Last year, one large mobile operator in Canada started to zero-rate its own mobile TV offering. It appears that routers kept counting all the data, but that the company then subtracted usage generated by its video servers to come up with billable Gigabytes for each user.
(This was quashed by the regulator in Canada)
In the last week, another mobile operator announced it was zero rating approved music streaming services (Spotify, Google Play and a few others).
If you are dealing with "foreign" content that comes from servers you don't control, what are the "best practices" to zero-rate content from multiple outside sources ?
To make matters more interesting, the FAQ for that service indicates that if you listen to a music stream that exceeds 128kbps, you MAY be charged for the data, and that you will be charged to listen to videos that could be offered by that service, and for non streaming data such as album covers, list of songs etc.
Would this point to specific IPs (streaming servers for low quality 128kbps sound) ? How scalable is this when you start to have a whole bunch of source IPs whose traffic is to be zero rated ?
Or would another way of doing this to setup private routes into the ISP's network for each approved service, so the data would enter through a different interface and be counted separately ?
Or, and this is my most important question: Is it possible with current networking software to zero rate any data flow that is less than a certain value (eg: 128kbs) ?
Or would current software require network operator to get 5 minute usage for each user and only bill if average data rate during last 5 minutes exceeded 128kbps ? (which means that your music is billed if you also listen to netflix at same time since total data flows are greater than 128kbps)
Of note: not all customers get this treatment, only those with higher end packages. Those with lower end packages are charged for usage by those very same services.
And for the record, this isn't to setup a similar system, it is to better understand the issue for a regulatory challenge.
On 15-09-01 12:36, Christian Kuhtz wrote:
Zero rating is not a new concept. It has existed in the mobile world since the days of the dumb phone.
Yes, but is now in a different scale and when you start to zero rate content that comes from CDN (aka: many IPs which may also serve non zero rated content).
Got a reference to why this was killed by the regulator in Canada?
Bell Mobility zero rating its own MobileTV offering was decided in January 2015 by CRTC: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2015/2015-26.htm ## The Commission finds that Bell Mobility Inc. (Bell Mobility) and Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron Ltd. and Videotron G.P. (collectively, Videotron), violated subsection 27(2) of the Telecommunications Act by exempting their mobile TV services Bell Mobile TV and illico.tv from data charges. Subsection 27(2) prohibits Canadian carriers from conferring an undue disadvantage to others, or an undue preference to itself or others. ##
Mobile networks typically use their packet core (and prior iterations of the same termination, rating, billing, management gear) to rate and bill specific to each subscriber. It is done with voice minutes, text, data. Whether or not you consider the solutions scalable is up to one's individual judgement. But this zero rating billing model has and is very widely deployed and at massive scale. In fact, there are specific interfaces defined for just these purposes in the applicable standards. There are many many conceivable ways in which billing mediation and associated infrastructure for zero rating can and is implemented. This is not new and is very well understood in the mobile industry.
Not sure what you're after here.
What I am after is what sort of logic is used to determine whether a packet is to be counted towards total monthly usage or not. Is it based on sourse IP address ? DPI equipment looking at content ? And more importantly, if it is possible to zero rate any flow that is below a certain speed. (whether from a radio station or some heart monitor).
Inline.. On Sep 1, 2015, at 10:13 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca<mailto:jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca>> wrote: On 15-09-01 12:36, Christian Kuhtz wrote: Zero rating is not a new concept. It has existed in the mobile world since the days of the dumb phone. Yes, but is now in a different scale and when you start to zero rate content that comes from CDN (aka: many IPs which may also serve non zero rated content). I don't agree with that assertion. Not a new concept. I worked on stuff like that over a decade ago, with multiple CDN providers. Wasn't even mobile, it was for DSL. There are scaling issues if the idea was out of touch with how interwebs actually work. Only in those cases might it have technically worked but priced itself out of reality. But there wasn't anything fundamentally to say it couldn't be done. CDN's have for a very long time had ways to implement custom mappings and tweak their algorithms to source specific content to a specific subscriber in a very specific way or place source nodes in particular locations (logically or physically). They only varied in their ability or willingness to do so on terms that might seem reasonable to a given partner (which generally means you either do or don't come to terms on contracts). It wasn't a fundamental technical barrier even 10-15 yrs ago. Got a reference to why this was killed by the regulator in Canada? Bell Mobility zero rating its own MobileTV offering was decided in January 2015 by CRTC: Thank you. The key here appears to be this: Subsection 27(2) prohibits Canadian carriers from conferring an undue disadvantage to others, or an undue preference to itself or others. So this appears to be about distorting the competition between their own services and third parties rather than about zero rating per se. Mobile networks typically use their packet core (and prior iterations of the same termination, rating, billing, management gear) to rate and bill specific to each subscriber. It is done with voice minutes, text, data. Whether or not you consider the solutions scalable is up to one's individual judgement. But this zero rating billing model has and is very widely deployed and at massive scale. In fact, there are specific interfaces defined for just these purposes in the applicable standards. There are many many conceivable ways in which billing mediation and associated infrastructure for zero rating can and is implemented. This is not new and is very well understood in the mobile industry. Not sure what you're after here. What I am after is what sort of logic is used to determine whether a packet is to be counted towards total monthly usage or not. Is it based on sourse IP address ? DPI equipment looking at content ? And more importantly, if it is possible to zero rate any flow that is below a certain speed. (whether from a radio station or some heart monitor). All of the above and more. Depends on content. For example, if you obtain the knowledge of origin and subscriber, you have what is needed. Origin should not be constrained to origin in terms of IP address space or port numbers. It can be marked in the protocol header, content, sourced from specific interfaces etc etc. The ways are pretty endless and the gear is readily available. There is an entire cottage industry peddling this stuff from sourcing, detection through rating and billing in addition to the major equipment vendors. There are no inherent limits. You can do it with or without DPI. You can do it with or without subscriber management systems (like BRAS). You can do it with or without knowledge of source or destination IP addresses. You can do it with any kind of content. You can do it with or without flow awareness. You can do it with or without special protocol semantics. What is capable is (as always) up to the engineering clue, business savvy and business model supporting the implementation. And I really mean anything can, has, and will be brought to life at scale given a suitable business cause. I don't mean to be obnoxious. The question is a bit like asking if interwebs have limits ;-).. Yes, there are stupid ways to screw things up, but there is a huge variety of ways to make it work and make money doing it. And without pissing off regulators. There is no red flag from a regulatory perspective based on the technology itself in my opinion. Hope this helps. Best regards, Christian
On 15-09-01 13:35, Christian Kuhtz wrote:
There is no red flag from a regulatory perspective based on the technology itself in my opinion.
There are other sections in the Canadian Telecommunicatiosn Act about controlling content. And there was a reference to the supreme court on whether ISPs were liable for content that their deliver to customers, which found that an ISP that blindly delivers packets doesn't control content and therefore is not responsible for it. So depending on how the zero rating is implemented, this may (or may not) have implications. What I am trying to do is to build a list of realistic techniques (aka: what industry actually uses) which should force Vidéotron to fees up to which one it uses.
The regulatory killing of that was probably unrelated to implementation. The regulators probably objected to the mobile provider creating an advantage (no data charges) for their own service against competing video services that would incur data charges. Perhaps that will help you understand what you need for a regulatory challenge. Owen
On Sep 1, 2015, at 09:36 , Christian Kuhtz <chkuhtz@microsoft.com> wrote:
Zero rating is not a new concept. It has existed in the mobile world since the days of the dumb phone. Got a reference to why this was killed by the regulator in Canada?
Mobile networks typically use their packet core (and prior iterations of the same termination, rating, billing, management gear) to rate and bill specific to each subscriber. It is done with voice minutes, text, data. Whether or not you consider the solutions scalable is up to one's individual judgement. But this zero rating billing model has and is very widely deployed and at massive scale. In fact, there are specific interfaces defined for just these purposes in the applicable standards. There are many many conceivable ways in which billing mediation and associated infrastructure for zero rating can and is implemented. This is not new and is very well understood in the mobile industry. Not sure what you're after here.
Best regards, Christian
On Aug 31, 2015, at 6:01 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
Last year, one large mobile operator in Canada started to zero-rate its own mobile TV offering. It appears that routers kept counting all the data, but that the company then subtracted usage generated by its video servers to come up with billable Gigabytes for each user.
(This was quashed by the regulator in Canada)
In the last week, another mobile operator announced it was zero rating approved music streaming services (Spotify, Google Play and a few others).
If you are dealing with "foreign" content that comes from servers you don't control, what are the "best practices" to zero-rate content from multiple outside sources ?
To make matters more interesting, the FAQ for that service indicates that if you listen to a music stream that exceeds 128kbps, you MAY be charged for the data, and that you will be charged to listen to videos that could be offered by that service, and for non streaming data such as album covers, list of songs etc.
Would this point to specific IPs (streaming servers for low quality 128kbps sound) ? How scalable is this when you start to have a whole bunch of source IPs whose traffic is to be zero rated ?
Or would another way of doing this to setup private routes into the ISP's network for each approved service, so the data would enter through a different interface and be counted separately ?
Or, and this is my most important question: Is it possible with current networking software to zero rate any data flow that is less than a certain value (eg: 128kbs) ?
Or would current software require network operator to get 5 minute usage for each user and only bill if average data rate during last 5 minutes exceeded 128kbps ? (which means that your music is billed if you also listen to netflix at same time since total data flows are greater than 128kbps)
Of note: not all customers get this treatment, only those with higher end packages. Those with lower end packages are charged for usage by those very same services.
And for the record, this isn't to setup a similar system, it is to better understand the issue for a regulatory challenge.
On 15-09-01 14:19, Owen DeLong wrote:
The regulatory killing of that was probably unrelated to implementation.
Demonstrating that the Mobile TV packets traveled in exactly the same way as any other packets over the Bell Mobility network was a large part of the decision. When packets travel undifferentiated on the same pipe, then it is not justified that one packet be treated differently than the other one. This is quite different from Bell Canada's wireline TV service where multicast is used and on a separate VLAN with dedicated capacity which means that TV packets don't cause congestion on data packets and vice versa. This is why understanding of how some marketing tactic is implemented at the network level is important.
participants (3)
-
Christian Kuhtz -
Jean-Francois Mezei -
Owen DeLong