There have been much better brains than mine brought to bear on the issue of net neutrality this week, since the Google and Verizon news broke.
But I would point out that aside from the main issues raised, mobile operators are going to have to do something about how traffic is moved around. The recent round of quarterly reports from mobile operators in Europe showed that the are not achieving profitable, organic growth through services.
With mobile operators ever more squeezed on margins, they will look to other partnerships. But they will also be forced into charging customers for what they are actually consuming. This is a harsh view but I can’t see any way around it. The two-sided model, whereby customer data useage is essentially subsidised by advertising and content partnership and application revenue shares, looks too far away.
I think the Google-Verizon aspect may be a red herring, but enterprises paying for class of service, users paying more for guaranteed service quality levels, other users paying less for a cheap and cheerful service: all these things will come to pass and will be very relevant.
Allied to that, I think we are going to see a restructuring of the way mobile operators do their business. It will start with internal actions, and more network sharing deals etc. But I also think we are going to see mobile operators start to look at other ways of moving traffic around – including striking relationships with cable operators and fixed line providers.
This still leaves the mobile operator applying policy and class of service management to support the customer experience and protect operators from poor service quaiity, but leaves them being much more flexible about how traffic is moved around and where it is offloaded. Look for cable companies to be involved not just in terms of leasing fibre out to a base station for backhaul, but as actual partners in network planning and small cell distribution – both outdoor and indoor. The have the plant, sites and reach, in many markets.
As that happens, look for more distributed and cell-site-integrated policy engines that can apply traffic prioritisations and shaping decisions to traffic at the edge.
Look for some reconnection between the services that consumers use (bandwidth, especially) and what they actually pay. Without it, operators are looking at years of negative organic growth before the two sided, Telco2.0 model, comes to the rescue, if it ever does.
Is that the death of net neutrality? I’m not so sure
Keith Dyer,
Editor,
Mobile Europe
http://mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8040-neomedia-and-buongiorno-partner-on-mobile-barcode-solutions
http://mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8039-ucell-deploys-4g-network-in-uzbekistan
http://mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8038-zte-and-iberbanda-deploy-spains-first-wimax-80216e-network-for-residential-and-enterprise-market
http://mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8037-mobile-video-revenues-to-triple-by-2014-says-research