BoR (17) 112

Draft

Net Neutrality Regulatory Assessment Methodology

This document contains BEREC regulatory assessment methodology in order to provide guidance to National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) with the implementation of the net neutrality provisions of the Regulation 2015/2120 [1]. The work will build upon previous BEREC guidance on net neutrality, Internet access service (IAS) quality monitoring and best practices.

Chapter 3 specifies a harmonised quality of service measurement methodology. It is targeted to maximising measurement accuracy and to enable the comparison of measurement results between different member states. The speed measurement is based on multiple HTTP connections and the document describes the calculation of the speed. The document also illustrates the difference between the two options of calculating speed based on TCP or IP payload. This document also defines measurement metrics for delay, delay variation and packet loss measurements.

Chapter 4 gives recommendations on various tools for detecting traffic management practices that impact individual applications and suggests other indicators of performance closer to the user experience. It includes recommendations for detecting traffic management practices that affect the connectivity and ultimately a possibility to use and provide individual applications. The document describes also recommendations for detecting traffic management practices that affect the quality of individual applications like the prioritisation and/or throttling of specific applications.

Chapter 5 describes the most important factors that should be taken into account when assessing the measurement results and gives guidance on information collection. Thus, especially in a crowdsourcing based measurement setup, a number of end user environment factors may impact the results. These factors include for example Wi-Fi usage, modem and computer performance and radio conditions when measuring speed for mobile subscription.

Chapter 6 provides recommendations for validation of the collected measurement results. It also provides some further guidance on how the speed measurement results should be assessed in comparison to the contractual speed values for end users. The topic of data aggregation for market level assessment purposes is discussed and guidance on monitoring the general IAS quality (IAS as a whole and effect of specialised services on IAS) as well as individual applications using IAS is provided.

Finally Chapter 7 gives guidance on the criteria that NRAs could take into account when providing their own certified mechanism or certifying a third party mechanism.

BEREC has developed this regulatory assessment methodology in order to provide guidance to National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) with the implementation of the net neutrality provisions of the Regulation 2015/2120 [1]. It is intended to help NRAs in the monitoring and supervision of the net neutrality provisions of the Regulation based on various net neutrality measurement tools and harmonised measurement methodology for quality of service indicators. Other aspects of harmonisation such as sampling and validation of collected measurements have not been fully considered here.

The work will build upon previous BEREC guidance on net neutrality, internet access service (IAS) quality monitoring and best practices.

Under the Regulation, NRAs may have several objectives in measuring IAS:

• Measurement tools can be used for detecting traffic management practices which may or may not be allowed (art. 3(3) of the Regulation).

• Measurement tools can be used for the establishment of what the ‘general quality of IAS’ is. This is relevant to the assessment of whether services other than IAS (in the meaning of article 3(5) of the Regulation) can be provided.

• Measurement tools may be part of a monitoring mechanism certified by the NRA as referred to in article 4(4) of the Regulation.

NRAs may have additional objectives in measuring or detecting certain practises related to the IAS. The objectives could for example be defined based on end-user reporting. BEREC notes that it is for NRAs to determine the most appropriate measurement tools to serve their objectives. Different objectives may lead to the use of different measurement tools.

In this document, BEREC specifies the methodology for the measurement of IAS speed to enable NRAs to assess IAS performance compared to the contractual minimum, normally available and maximum speed values. The methodology also gives guidance on some criteria that NRAs could take into account when providing its own measurement tool as a certified mechanism or certifying a third party mechanism in accordance with the Regulation and BEREC NN guidelines.

This document aims to describe a measurement methodology that could be combined with a crowdsourcing approach so that it would be possible to provide measurement tools for end users. For in-browser or app based crowdsourcing measurement tools it is hard or even impossible to have full control over the all factors such as the end user environment that impact measurement results. This introduces a possibility for error in measurement results that cannot be fully avoided. This methodology provides guidance on how to increase the accuracy and reliability of such measurement results. This is discussed in Chapter 5