DoT, Trai find no violation of net neutrality in network slicing

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and telecom regulator are of the view that network slicing, a key feature of 5G technology, will not violate principles of net neutrality, said senior officials, adding that appropriate changes will be made in licensing rules to allow slicing.

Top telcos Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel had sought clarity on this aspect, which is critical for offering private captive network services to enterprises and for garnering future 5G revenue. DoT, which has held preliminary discussions internally and with the industry, feels operators are not going to throttle speeds for consumers when they slice the network. Giving equal access to all without throttling of speed is the main parameter of net neutrality rules.

Classic 5G Use Case

"When required, we will amend the rules stating that slicing should not be treated as a violation of net neutrality," said a DoT official, on condition of anonymity. DoT needs to amend or clarify unified licensing (UL) to allow network slicing. The official added that rules may be revisited in a couple of years, when network traffic gains pace.

Network slicing is a classic 5G use case, wherein a single physical network can be sliced into multiple virtual networks that can support different types of services running across the network. For instance, telcos can reserve a portion of bandwidth for a particular service while the remaining capacity can be shared by everyone else. According to an industry executive, it's like having a private network on a public network.

Jio and Airtel have called on policymakers to revisit the net neutrality rules to best utilise 5G technology, which offers features like slicing of a network and offering dedicated experience to an enterprise.

Telcos feared some may classify this as flouting equal-Internet-for-all rules and wanted clarity from the government. Operators expect around 40% of 5G revenue to come from captive private networks in the future.

According to recent spectrum leasing rules, DoT has allowed carriers to offer captive private networks as a service to enterprises through network slicing over its public network. But that needs to be factored into the UL as well.

Apart from DoT, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), in its preliminary assessment, has also not found fault with network slicing in 5G, another official said.

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