It is in the air

It is in the air
Last month the news that Bellsouth has plans to charge service providers for quality of service, was widely ignored. As I thought it was first to test the market reaction, I did not care about too much. Too stupid, the idea was in the air. It is very simple, and the idea was re-launched this week by AT&T. As incumbents generally have a strong network experience, good performance and respect the five nines, they are thinking to charge extra for quality of service (QoS). They target to mint this (strong) differentiating competitive advantage vs best-effort-based networks. Pay for QoS idea challenges the widely agreed idea of net neutrality, meaning that a carrier can decide to give priority (by means of packet inspection or traffic management) to paying content providers traffic over free downloads or games. And why to stop there and not decide which content is available for whom?

For the moment, Bellsouth and AT&T are looking for additional revenues and argue that content providers seeking guaranteed delivery of their high-quality content should be willing to pay. A little bit of magic Internet is vanishing.