US appeals court strike down Net Neutrality, so what now if you are offering Hosted UC?

by Alex Danyluk - Marketing Director

 

Tuesday of this week the US federal appeals court ruled that the US Federal Communications Commission exceeded its authority when it tried to stop Comcast from slowing internet traffic for specific applications such as Bit Torrent back in 2008. This is significant blow to the Net Neutrality advocates and so called “over the top” provides which don’t own networks.

So what does this mean if you are considering offering Hosted UC and are not a Network Service Provider – will your VoIP & Video traffic potentially be sloooooowed Dooooown? While a single VoIP connection is not that heavy, the traffic of an entire company does add up and video increases the load further. The ruling could potentially open the door for service providers to degrade such traffic.

The majority of our current Hosted UC partners are either Service Providers, so this won’t impact them, or have decided to partner with Service Providers, so again they won’t be impacted. If you are not a Service Provider, partnering may be a good approach to hedge your bets if you are considering launching Hosted UC solutions. At Microsoft’s 2009 World Wide Partner Conference, Outsourcery from the UK discussed how they thought through partnering to build their UC offer. See the following video to understand their thought process.