A BATTLE IS brewing between wireless carriers and the feds and caught in the crossire are all of the smart phones, netbooks, and bandwidth-hungry mobile applications that users are increasingly enjoying. Both camps claim to be doing what’s right for consumers. One side says that it is heading of a mobile meltdown by enforcing rules on the types of devices and service that can access their networks, while the other says that the priority should be on giving users unfettered access to the wireless Web.

Depending on which side wins, if you’re, say, an AT&T Mobility customer, someday you might be prohibited from visiting certain Websites or using competing voice and television services on your iPhone or on a 3G-enabled netbook. Or, in an alternate scenario, the Federal Communications Commission might be able to force Verizon Wireless to allow its customers to stress its cellular network through downloads of mammoth media iles via BitTorrent.

The fight is about who controls the wireless pipes of tomorrow, and whether emerging wireless services will bloom or wither as a result. In other words, the conflict concerns network neutrality, the idea that service providers must give equal treatment to all uses of the Internet as it might be applied to the wireless industry. And just as the topic has caused a ruckus among cable providers, which have lobbied against FCC neutrality rules, in the wireless industry the debate is heating up.

Wireless Service Comes With Warnings
The problem, wireless providers such as AT&T say, is that wireless bandwidth is a finite resource. AT&T and other carriers, as a result, restrict bandwidth-hungry services from running on their networks. One example is the mobile version of SlingPlayer, the streaming sotware for the Slingbox place-shiting device: AT&T says that if everyone could stream SlingPlayer data over AT&T’s 3G network, the network would grind to a halt. Currently, users can run SlingPlayer only over
Wi-Fi; 3G is of-limits.

AT&T says that it wants to keep a tight grip on its biggest bandwidth hogs. At the CTIA wireless-industry trade show held in early October, AT&T Mobility president and chief executive officer Ralph de la Vega remarked that AT&T needs to manage its network’s most-intensive users, alluding to the Apple iPhone subscriber base.

De la Vega claims AT&T research shows that 3 percent of AT&T’s smartphone customers (likely iPhone owners) use 40 percent of all the smartphone data on its network. He estimates that this 3 percent consumes 13 times the data of “the average smartphone customer,” yet represents less than 1 percent of AT&T’s total postpaid customer base. Is this disproportionate usage a harbinger of problems to come for other carriers?

AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon all deal with bandwidth hogs by limiting the total amount of data that a customer can use each month to around 5GB for the 3G data service ofered to laptop users. (AT&T doesn’t cap data usage for iPhone customers.) If you go beyond the 5GB cap, the carriers either throttle your network speeds or charge overage fees. What’s less clear is how they manage specific uses of their mobile networks before customers reach that bandwidth limit.

Matters are even less straightforward when it comes to services that could be competitive with carriers. “he number one concern any telecoms has is about seeing their margins get eroded by new entrants with a different cost structure,” says Joshua King, an industry veteran who has worked for AT&T Wireless and Clearwire. hat new entrant might be a service like Google Voice or Skype, piggybacking on AT&T’s network. And the pricing for Google Voice or Skype is, in many cases, free.

Recently, with Apple’s rejection of Google Voice on the iPhone, AT&T has found itself at the center of this issue. hough Apple has taken complete responsibility for rejecting the app, it’s not hard to see how Google Voice’s free text messaging and cheap international calls could rule AT&T’s feathers. he company has shown a change of heart on Skype and other VoIP services, allowing them to run over 3G on the iPhone in exchange for AT&T talk-time voice minutes but even so, using Skype over 3G as an alternative to traditional cell phone minutes isn’t possible. All of this could change in an open wireless network, says King, who sees a proliferation of VoIP services in an age of regulated wireless Internet.

Is AT&T really worried about bandwidth, or is it just trying to keep a lid on competitive services? that remains under debate.

Bring in the Feds
Enter Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. In a speech at the CTIA show, he acknowledged that with regulation one size doesn’t it all but he also reaffirmed his commitment to an open Internet, regardless of how people access it.

Under Genachowski, the FCC has been playing a more active role in the mobile industry’s business. When Google Voice was rejected on the iPhone, the feds demanded answers from Apple, AT&T, and Google . Although Apple has said that AT&T was not involved with the decision, both companies had to admit that they do have a deal to block VoIP apps (which Google
Voice is not, technically).

To be continue

Tags: 802.11g, Wi-Fi, Mobile Broadband