Classroom Companion: Business

 
Chapter 21 · Net Neutrality

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terweighted by innovations in new technologies and applications. The proponents 
include application service providers, content providers, research communities, and 
consumer organizations.
 
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Questions
1. What are the effects of strict net neutrality on picture and sound reproduction 
on video conferencing?
2. Why is it possible for operators of 5G mobile network to levy different charges 
for the telephone service and data communication?
3. Does the Apple ecosystem—iPhone and App Store—constitute a violation of 
device neutrality?
 
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Answers
1. With strict net neutrality, packets are handled by network routers using the 
first-in-first-served principle. This means that a packet received at the router is 
queued until all earlier packets in the queue have been forwarded. Moreover, 
packets belonging to the same service may be forwarded on different routes 
with different propagation delay. This results in unpredictable variation in the 
time adjacent packets are received by the decoder. Real-time video, music, and 
voice are extremely sensitive to this type of jitter that, in the worst case, may 
distort the picture or garble the speech.
2. When accessing the network, the mobile terminal indicates the type of services, 
e.g., telephone call, data call, or one of several other categories. This informa-
tion is required by the network to allocate bandwidth (e.g., narrowband for 
telephony, wideband for video streaming) and to indicate how the call shall be 
handled by the network (real-time priority, minimum required bandwidth, no 
restriction). The mobile ISP then knows the category of service the user wishes 
and may, therefore, levy different charges for different service categories. This 
is violation of net neutrality necessary for technical reasons (for efficient usage 
of frequency recourses and for guaranteeing a minimum quality of service).
3. Yes. This is because apps that run on the iPhone can only be downloaded from 
the App Store. Apps not available on the App Store cannot be run on the 
iPhone. Furthermore, apps on the App Store cannot be downloaded on devices 
other than the iPhone.