Is AT&T playing gatekeeper to the Wireless Web?

[Brian Warkoczeski]

Is AT&T playing gatekeeper to the Wireless Web?

by Marguerite Reardon

June 18, 2009

www.cnet.com

AT&T's decision to allow Major League Baseball fans to stream games live 
onto their iPhones while restricting video streaming using another video 
application has one advocacy group crying foul.

With the release of the 3.0 version of Apple's iPhone operating system 
this week, subscribers to a popular application from Major League 
Baseball called At Bat will now get the chance to stream live video 
feeds of baseball games directly to their iPhones or iPod Touches. The 
first game was streamed Thursday afternoon, featuring a match up between 
the Chicago Cubs and White Sox.

But unlike other video streaming applications, such as SlingPlayer, the 
MLB At Bat live video can be accessed regardless of whether a subscriber 
is connected to the Internet via AT&T's 3G network or a Wi-Fi connection.

The SlingPlayer app, which allows iPhone users to redirect cable and 
broadcast TV from their TVs at home to their iPhones, is only permitted 
by AT&T to operate over a Wi-Fi connection. When the SlingPlayer 
application was first released last month, AT&T said that it restricted 
the application to Wi-Fi because streaming live broadcast TV over its 3G 
wireless network "violated the company's terms of use."

But now AT&T is allowing MLB to do exactly what it would not allow Sling 
to do, which is stream live broadcast TV over its 3G cellular network 
onto iPhones. So what gives? Is AT&T playing favorites?

That's exactly what Ben Scott, policy director for the advocacy group 
Free Press, thinks. The group issued a statement Thursday expressing its 
concern over what it sees as an inconsistent policy.

"We are troubled that carriers like AT&T are playing gatekeeper to the 
next generation of wireless Internet applications," Scott said in a 
statement. "No Internet service provider should be allowed to pick 
winners and losers online."
Free Press has long supported the notion of a free and open Internet. 
And the company has pushed the Federal Communications Commission to 
confirm that its Net Neutrality principles also apply to wireless 
networks. The FCC's Internet Policy Statement protects consumers' right 
to access any online content and services on any device of their 
choosing. These principles were used effectively last year to punish 
broadband provider Comcast for deliberately slowing some of its 
customers' BitTorrent traffic, a move that other broadband providers 
including AT&T has pointed to as evidence that no further regulation is 
needed to protect consumers' access to Internet applications.

AT&T has also publicly supported the notion that these Net Neutrality 
rules should also apply to wireless Internet access. In fact, Jim 
Cicconi, senior executive vice president of legislative affairs for 
AT&T, said as much during a panel discussion hosted by a Washington Post 
reporter in November.

"The same principles should apply across the board. As people migrate to 
the use of wireless devices to access the Internet, they...certainly 
expect that we treat these services the same way," the Washington Post 
reporter quoted Cicconi as saying in her blog post.

Free Press's Scott, who appeared on the panel with Cicconi in November, 
pointed out AT&T's contradiction in his statement.

"AT&T has acknowledged that open Internet principles should apply to 
wireless and that consumers expect unfettered mobile access," Scott 
said. "So why is AT&T deciding what online video its iPhone customers 
can watch and what they can't?"

The argument put forth by Free Press is a compelling one. And right now, 
AT&T doesn't have an answer or an explanation as to why the MLB 
streaming video would be treated differently from the Sling video. Mark 
Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said the company could not comment yet until 
it looked into the matter further.

But earlier this year, Siegel had plenty to say about Sling and 
streaming video in general. As a guest on the Clark Howard radio show, 
Siegel compared using Sling's service over a wireless connection to 
sending bulk e-mail and spam, activities that he said eat up too much of 
the network's bandwidth. "You can't use a service called 'Slinging,' 
where you redirect a wireless TV signal to your phone. We do not allow 
that type of application on our phones," he said. "It's absolutely cool 
(technology), but if we allowed these kinds of services, the highway 
would quickly become clogged."

Indeed, streaming video eats up a lot of bandwidth. Because cellular 
networks are divided into cells, users in a particular cell share the 
available bandwidth in that cell or region. This means that streaming a 
lot of high-quality video over the network could potentially eat up all 
the available bandwidth and degrade service for other subscribers in 
that cell.

This is why MLB.com is using a standards-based streaming technology that 
will detect the speed of the network and adjust the quality of the video 
to the bandwidth that is available. The latest version of the 
SlingPlayer submitted to Apple for the App Store used similar technology 
that would cap the bit rate to ensure it was below Apple's and AT&T's 
threshold, according to David Eyler, a project manager for Sling Media, 
who commented for an earlier story on CNET News on this topic.

Eyler also said during that earlier interview that the explanation he 
had been given for not allowing the SlingPlayer to be used over the 3G 
network was that AT&T doesn't allow video services that redirect TV 
signals onto its network.

What's even more puzzling about why AT&T would allow MLB's At Bat 
application to be used over its 3G network and not the SlingPlayer, is 
the fact that the MLB application is likely to put a lot more strain on 
the network than the SlingPlayer App. Here's why. The MLB At Bat 
application is likely to have more subscribers streaming video than the 
SlingPlayer app. MLB.com At Bat 2009 ranks among the top 100 overall 
paid applications in the App Store, according to the MLB's own Web site. 
And the application, which costs $9.99 to download, has only been 
available for about two months.The new, free streaming capability is 
likely to encourage even more downloads.

Meanwhile, the SlingPlayer app, which costs $29.99 to download, is 
likely to appeal to only a niche audience, since it also requires users 
to have a $150 SlingBox device in their homes to redirect the TV signals 
to their iPhones.

But more importantly, MLB At Bat subscribers will be tuning into the 
same video event at the same time. And since sports fans often root for 
teams in their own city, there is a good chance that many fans tuning 
into a particular game on their iPhones will be in the same geographic 
area, which is exactly the kind of scenario that could bring a cellular 
network to its knees. AT&T struggled to keep its 3G network up and 
running in Austin during the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference 
earlier this year when there was a high concentration of iPhone users.

By contrast, SlingPlayer users are not likely to be accessing the same 
video content at the same time in the same exact cell or region, which 
is actually less taxing on a wireless network.

But this isn't the first time that AT&T has shown preferential treatment 
to one application over another. OrbLive, which is offered on the App 
Store, also redirects TV signals onto the iPhone using a Wi-Fi network 
or the 3G cellular network. The application is designed to allow people 
to stream media from a PC to the iPhone wirelessly, much like how the 
SlingPlayer works.

For right now, iPhone users are simply left to wonder "why?" But stay 
tuned for more updates. I'm confident that AT&T will have an explanation 
shortly.

Marguerite Reardon has been a CNET News reporter since 2004, covering 
cell phone services, broadband, citywide Wi-Fi, the Net neutrality 
debate, as well as the ongoing consolidation of the phone companies. 
E-mail Maggie.