14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile internet usage is surging worldwide and, despite the big advances in wireless technology, the carriers are increasingly feeling the burden of all this traffic.
After getting accustomed to making a tidy profit from voice calls and charging a significant amount of money for text messages which don't cost them anything to send, having to actually deliver the service subscribers pay for is quite an effort.
Clearly, more and more people will use their mobile devices to go online and they are going to have an increasing appetite for data. This isn't exactly something new either, so one way of preventing network meltdown would have been to invest in bigger capacity to keep up with demand.
Another way would be to ask other people to pay for what subscribers pay already, the big web companies who are at fault for creating all this new traffic in the first place. Not surprisingly, many carriers chose the latter, with little success so far.
But that may be changing, Google is once again getting cozy with mobile carriers and is said to be working with several parties, including carriers and phone makers, to decrease the network load its services are creating, YouTube for example.
Google is said to be talking with France Telecom, owner of the Orange brand, on ways of reducing traffic, according to Bloomberg. While it doesn't seem to be a financial deal, the telco is known for asking companies such as Google and Apple to pay up, to share the burden.
Google has actually confirmed that it's working with all the major carriers and phone makers on ways of getting YouTube traffic more efficiently to consumers.
Mobile video usage is on the rise, but even the low quality clips streamed to smartphones are big bandwidth hogs, so, perhaps it's a good sign that the players involved are talking.
While asking Google to pay for bandwidth it already pays for is more than unfair, the carriers do face a real problem and a technical solution would be the best outcome for all involved.