Here’s to hoping that this is just another crazy idea to make money that never comes to pass. It seems that Allot Communications and Openet, two companies that call Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone clients, have come up with the brilliant idea for wireless providers to begin charging premiums for things like Facebook, Skype, and YouTube, while leaving carrier services free of charge. Here is a direct quote from a marketing webinar put on by the two companies:
[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.
What’s worse is the fact that the FCC is expected to exempt wireless providers from the net neutrality regulations they are expected to pass next week, opening the door for something like this to actually become reality. Net neutrality advocates will be throwing up giant red flags over this one, and rightfully so. We’ll be following this one closely, so stay tuned.
[via Engadget]