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Thursday, March 12, 2009

'The Economist' and rats smelling discrimination

Will the 100million mobile broadband users be allowed to exploit their dongles? Of course not!
"The growth, however, comes with a couple of big drawbacks for the operators. One is loss of control. Subscribers can do what they want: the operator is merely a “dumb pipe” to the internet. Next, rates have been falling quickly. “The pricing is crazy—mobile broadband is becoming a commodity way too fast,” notes Didier Bonnet of Capgemini, a consulting firm. Another problem is overuse. Operators complain that a small group of users eats up most of the available network capacity. Some are users of illegal file-sharing networks who want to be harder to track down. To throttle them, operators are thinking of giving some data packets (such as web traffic) priority over others (such as file-sharing). “Network neutrality”, the principle that operators should not discriminate between different forms of traffic, will not succeed on mobile networks, says Holger Knöpke of T-Mobile, a European operator."

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