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net neutrality: the Orange perspective

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net neutrality

At the heart of the net neutrality debate lies a question about the open character of the internet.
The internet’s ‘openness’ can be described at the retail and wholesale levels:

  • At the retail level consumers want to be able to reach the information and services of their choice.
  • At the wholesale level the providers of services and access want all their end-users to be able to have access to their services

Orange France Telecom Group believes that, for the purposes of regulation, internet ecosystem must be taken as a whole. Internet neutrality must be guaranteed in Internet access as well as in devices Operating Systems or in Internet services. A coherent regulatory framework must be applied both to electronic communication services and those with which they compete on the internet, the so called ‘over-the-top’ services.

Net neutrality concerns the public internet – that is to say internet access and services. Users of the Internet must be in a position to choose the internet offer that best corresponds to their needs, thus offer-segmentation and flexibility in the retail market are essential. Customers must, for example, be able to select a less expensive offer lacking in some costly services, as long as other offers are available with these same services.

With regard to internet access, net neutrality in Orange’s opinion, means that the public internet must be open and that traffic management, necessary for the effective function of the network, must be non-discriminatory in effect.

Services managed by an operator (‘TV on ADSL for example) are not part of the public internet because the operator controls their provision from end to end and is responsible for the whole connection. It guarantees the level of quality. These managed services must not however be seen as working at the expense of the public internet. Their revenues contribute, in effect, to the investment in the network and permit a better allocation of bandwidth resources which benefits the public internet.

The growth of traffic raises serious questions about the viability of the economic model of the internet. In recent years, service and content providers, a few in number but economically powerful, have launched services – particularly video – which have dramatically increased traffic on the networks. Orange believes that the best solution is to ask these companies to contribute fairly to the variable costs created by the asymmetric traffic that they transmit.

On July 23rd 2012, Commissioner Neelie Kroes considered that open access to Internet primarly results from consumers’ choice and operators’ freedom of action in a competitive and transparent market. Orange fully supports that position.

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last update: 09 April 2013