So once again broadband speed and connection quality is in the news again today. It is announced that the UK’s biggest ISPs (BT, Virgin Media and Sky, named in the report) are to publish their traffic management policies for all to see.

You may have heard about the term Net Neutrality before – where a two-tier Internet is feared due to ISPs offering a different level of service for different content, or content providers. In my opinion the bad thing would be the latter, throttling content based on the provider. Imagine this: Sky as a creator of TV content decides to give priority to its own TV streaming services; other services such as the BBC iPlayer get throttled, possibly unless they pay a fee to Sky. This I categorically disagree with although one can’t deny that at first it might seem like a tempting business model.

However, traffic management is the number one tool of the network engineer. If ISPs didn’t implement some form of Quality of Service everyone would be complaining about delay or dropped Skype calls, bad quality playback from iPlayer or YouTube; rather than a handful of heavy downloaders complaining that they don’t get their full connection speed all of the time. Traffic management allows ISPs to give priority to these time critical services while slightly delaying downloads, web site requests and email among others that users do not notice. A couple of seconds added on to an email  sent is well worth it for you to make that international phone call to Australia, right?

That said ISPs still have another issue of advertised speeds to deal with. Claiming that you get up to 20Mbps when the vast majority get below 8Mbps will always confuse and annoy the average consumer. But on the traffic management side, I’m glad to see that ISPs are embracing some openness. We can hope that the free market will induce this to be a fair market; I would hope that you would all quickly abandon an ISP who decided to give priority over its own content. But we shall see.