AT&T Chief Warns About Heavy Users

The top three percent of smartphone users consume 40 percent of all mobile data bandwidth, says AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets president Ralph de la Vega. Those three percent of users also consume 13 times the data of the average smart phone user, he adds. Another way of quantifying such usage is to note that users who consume 40 percent of AT&T's mobile data bandwidth constitutute just 0.9 percent of all AT&T postpaid mobile subscribers.

The point was clear enough: Without adequate management of network access, most customers will find their experience damaged because of a small number of other users.

There are legitimate public policy concerns about anti-competitive behavior in the wireless and wireline businesses where it comes to gatekeepers of any sort using that power to impair competition. But that is a different and distinct matter from the obvious need to manage shared network resources in ways that actually preserve reasonable access for all other users.

De la Vega used the word "crowd out" to describe such contention, and it is a legitimate issue. Anti-competitive actions certainly are to be protected against. But there are valid network resource managment issues that obviously have to be addressed as well, especially in the wireless domain.

Beyond that, there are valid reasons for wanting competition protected, but without stifling consumer access to new products that offer mass market customers features enterprise users take for granted, such as the ability to prioritize their own use of bandwidth to perserve performance of mission-critical applications. If any consumer end user wants to prioritize their own video, voice or other bits, they ought to be able to do so.

There is nothing anti-competitive about this, so long as any applications in the class can receive such prioritization. Consumer advocates are right to note that issues can arise if voice bits sold by the ISP can be prioritized, but not voice bits sold by other competing service providers.

Some approaches will work better than others, and that is an issue one would hope policymakers take seriously into account as new "neutrality" rules are crafted.