Buy Your Bandwidth When You Buy Your App

As the mobile industry starts selling more connections to support sensor networks and non-traditional mobile devices such as game players and media players, it is going to create new charging methods as well.

The Kindle, for example, hides the cost of connectivity in the sales price of content. That model likely will become more popular over time as more devices emerge that require occasional connectivity, but are unsuited to the traditional monthly or prepaid billing plans.

At the same time, assuming regulators do not outlaw the concept under the guise of "network neutrality," more operators may start experimenting with priority access and other quality of experience measure.

3UK, for example, gives users on  more-expensive plans access priority access when the network gets congested. Tiered service levels are one obvious way to allow users to match their preferences with their payment plans.

Application stores might offer another approach that is akin to the way Kindle now works. It might be the case in the future that some applications are sold in a way that incorporates the cost of bandwidth in the sales price of the software.

Some users will want to pay less, and take their chances with  YouTube viewing quality. Alternatively, a user might be able to buy a service that includes quality of service mechanisms for YouTube consumption.

In principle, that isn't much different from selling access plans offering varying bandwidth at varying prices, or different buckets of voice minutes of use or text messages or data consumption. The concept might be especially attractive for users at two ends of the usage spectrum.

Very-light users might prefer the lower overall cost of paying for just enough bandwidth to support their use of particular applications. "Power" or business users might be willing to pay much for the best possible quality for business conferencing or voice quality, especially when the network is congested.

Yes, that is a combination of network management and bit discrimination. But there is no good end-user focused reason to give consumers a choice of consumption options.

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