Image courtesy of Ondra Soukup  via the Creative Commons attribution license.

Andrew Seybold, consultant on technology and trends shaping the world of wireless mobility, today published an interesting perspective on data congestion and new pricing models. Seybold prefaces the article with the following scenario:

Every network operator with the exception of Sprint/Clearwire is moving to broadband data usage pricing models and away from all-you-can-eat data. If you have an iPhone, you still have access to unlimited data, but if you opt to tether it to a notebook or other external device, your all-you-can-eat pricing goes away. Why is this happening?

You can blame this on data hogs—that 3-4% of the wireless broadband population that accounts for nearly 50% of all wireless broadband usage—but it is also because wireless bandwidth is shared bandwidth. Unless bandwidth is well managed, data hogs end up with most of it and the rest of us with very little. Data usage has increased more than 5,000% over the last two years and there is no sign of a let-up. A large percentage of wireless broadband traffic (some say up to 40%) is video, which is increasingly popular and requires a lot of bandwidth.

Responding to the current state of the mobile industry, Seybold offers a number of ways to manage available bandwidth and capacity usage in wireless networks, including the roll-out of new pricing models.

Click here for the article. 

-Stacey Infantino