Why enterprises should care more about net neutrality

OK, but why should enterprises care? Let me count the ways.

1. Lack of Internet QoS makes inexpensive consumer-Internet infrastructure less useful to businesses as an access technology for remote sites and work-from-home sites. Of 447 enterprises who commented on remote site access, 422 said that lack of premium handling options for the Internet was one of the top two reasons for staying with more expensive options, like Ethernet.
2. Some business communications missions, especially those related to IoT or real-time applications, would benefit from or even require premium handling, particularly low packet loss and latency. Without it, these applications have to be supported through local compute resources, resources out in the wild where they’re more expensive to support.
3. Lack of a way to improve the profitability of consumer Internet access services leads to increased profit pressure on operators overall. Their only option besides subsidization is to increase prices on business services. Businesses note that they already pay “ten times or more” as much for capacity, and price increases can threaten the business case and ROI on applications companies already depend on, not to mention making it more difficult to launch new applications.
4. Neutrality policies, in the words of one big multinational, “blow in the political wind” in nearly every market, and those winds usually blow in different directions for each regulatory jurisdiction. The result is a haze of uncertainty about policies that lead to network planners’ hunkering down on the most restrictive possible outcomes anywhere they need service. “We have a five-year capital cycle for network gear,” one enterprise said. “We can’t easily accommodate policy changes every couple of years.”
5. Financial pressure leads to potentially radical changes in the network operator space, including M&A, service and service pricing changes, even changes in support policies and service coverage. All of this creates a risk to an enterprise, and one with a large market footprint may face more changes than planning can readily accommodate. One enterprise in a large and dispersed market has already had to engage three alternative access providers so far in 2024.

How enterprises can deal with these five factors, and perhaps additional ones that crop up as policies shift, is a problem in itself. Tracking regulatory policy in a dozen or more jurisdictions is simply too difficult for enterprises to undertake, and only 43 of the enterprises found any “satisfactory” third-party firm to do the job for them at a reasonable price. But 72 said they started by gaining contact with the regulatory affairs group of each of their operators. These people have a vested interest in regulatory engagement, and often a specific mandate to sustain an active relationship.

Almost all of these 72 enterprises use a small (one to three people) “watchdog staff” to engage with operators’ regulatory affairs teams and digest the trends for dissemination to planners and key managers/executives. So far, every one of them says the process satisfies their planning needs, which is a contrast to those using third-party firms, only half of which are similarly beneficial.

These enterprises also suggest that the sales teams in each regulatory jurisdiction be aware of local news regarding net neutrality and feed these developments back to the enterprise regulatory watchdog staff. News items can then be an indicator to look into and summarize any developments for dissemination within the enterprise. Enterprises that are themselves regulated may find their own regulatory contacts a useful source of local neutrality news, even though telecommunications policy is likely not handled by the same contacts.

Enterprises generally believe that lobbying for a given neutrality policy is unlikely to be helpful, but they agree that feeding back concerns through the regulatory affairs people of their network operators may help those operators set and communicate their own policies. That, in turn, could help business service users.

Internet policy impacts an enterprise’s increasingly critical relationship with prospects, customers, suppliers, partners, and even their own workers. It also impacts the business data service choices available, and the price and capability of each. Net neutrality policies are the single most significant regulatory influence on the Internet and data services, so while they’re politics and therefore messy and frustrating, you need to care about them and work hard to see where they’ll take your network.