FierceWireless
Latest
Wireless carriers openly considering charging per service (update: audio)
That slide above is no joke -- it comes from a marketing webinar put on by two companies that count Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone as clients, and it describes a system that identifies customer internet activity and charges a different rate for using Facebook than watching YouTube, while allowing access to Vodafone services for free. Yes, that's basically the nightmare scenario for net neutrality advocates. The two companies behind the slide are Allot Communications and Openet, which sell subscriber-management tools to carriers around the world -- tools that Allot's director of marketing says can scan even encrypted packets to determine what service customers are using and charge accordingly. We're not making this up -- here's the direct quote from the webinar: [We use] a number of different methods to accurately identify the application -- methods like heuristic analysis, behavioral and historical analysis, deep packet inspection, and a number of other techniques. What's key is that we have the best application identification available on the market, which means that even applications that are encrypted or use other methods to evade detection will be correctly identified and classified... We essentially feed this real-time information about traffic and application usage into the policy and charging system. Each subscriber has a particular service plan that they sign up for, and they're as generic or as personalized as the operator wants. Yeah, that's not how anyone actually wants the internet to work -- except carriers, who've been saying increasingly insane things about charging even smartphone manufacturers for customer data usage lately. What's more, it's rumored that the FCC will cave to Verizon and AT&T and exempt wireless internet service from major parts of net neutrality regulation it's expected to pass next week, so this nonsense could very well hit the US sooner rather than later. We'll be keeping a close eye on things -- we'll let you know. Meanwhile, listen to the webinar yourself immediately below.
T-Mobile FCC memo cites Android app that caused network chaos
Remember, back in 2007 -- you know, Year One BTAS (Before The App Store) -- when Steve Jobs gave Apple's rationale for keeping the iPhone a closed platform versus allowing native app development? "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up," he famously said, and was mocked by us and others for his seeming excess of caution. Now it seems the rogue app is on the other foot -- or, more to the point, on the other OS and carrier. Mike Dano at FierceWireless takes note of a January FCC filing (PDF) from T-Mobile planning & performance engineering director Grant Castle, where Castle makes part of T-Mobile's case on net neutrality rules and the need for traffic shaping and optimization for wireless data. The entire memo is a good read -- surprising enough, considering the audience and topic -- but the real zinger is the revelation about an unnamed instant messaging application that rolled out onto T-Mobile's Android handset base. This mystery app apparently worked fine and dandy when tested on WiFi by the developer, but once in the wild it began to cause network issues; signaling demand went up, particularly on already-busy nodes in urban settings, and in one test the app was shown to increase device network utilization by 12x. The problems were exacerbated as the app grew in popularity, and eventually the traffic issues began to degrade service overall. In this case, T-Mobile was able to reach out to the developer and request fixes to the app to resolve the network pain and suffering (which must have been a fascinating phone call). Still, this example of one poorly-adjusted application having widespread impact on a carrier network does indeed validate the original precautions in place for the web-apps-only iOS 1.x world, and today's gated garden/kill switch environment for iOS apps in the wild. Interestingly, even though T-Mobile's support for unlocked iPhones in the US is officially unofficial, it's not entirely without challenges. FW also pointed out that back in April the carrier reported to the FCC that jailbroken phones on the T-Mobile network caused signaling issues akin to a DDOS attack. One could easily imagine a popular jailbreak application going off the network rails, with no way to restrain or recall it -- depending on the percentage of JB phones in the wild, it could get hectic. [via Engadget]
