While discussion continues to rage around net neutrality and the applications that should gain access to wired networks, the real challenge will be the use of traffic engineering and the mobile Internet.

Within the wired Internet, carriers have access to limitless bandwidth with which to work. It’s just a matter of adding a new fiber run or lighting up a new channel on their fiber backbones. What’s more, there’s enough historical data to enable the FCC to define a base level of Internet service comparable to what’s received today by users, enabling carriers to charge more for better-performing Internet services.

But the mobile Internet is fundamentally different. Bandwidth continues to be at a huge premium. The FCC has received numerous petitions to open up the spectrum, not the least of which is from the CTIA, which requested they allocate up to 800MHz of additional bandwidth to the mobile Internet.

Those petitions have not fallen on deaf ears. "We will need a lot more spectrum," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said. "Spectrum is the oxygen for mobile broadband networks."

Where that spectrum will come from is anybody’s guess. Just 10MHz is available today for allocation. Will the FCC identify services that are no longer widely used and reallocate that bandwidth, or will it rely on encoding improvements to increase the amount of spectrum on a given wavelength? Nobody knows.

Even with that additional bandwidth, the FCC is working toward determining regulations around performance management of wireless networks. In the notice of proposed rule-making, the FCC requested input on this very point.

Opponents argue that the FCC is missing the point. “The issue we're fighting for is equal access to the network for all apps, devices, etc.," Chaim Haas, spokesperson for Skype, wrote in an IM. “The carriers are trying to use the limitations that they've designed into the network as a means of blocking this open access, which is why the issue goes away with 4G.”

Ultimately, 4G networks may well render the matter moot; even then, however, we’ve seen how quickly capacity is consumed by new applications, such as mobile HDTV. Traffic engineering is a discipline necessary for nearly any network, and the FCC is right for developing a policy around its use on today’s mobile networks.