Mobile operators such as Vodafone have long been content to fly solo as they make the costly push beyond voice calling into data. Many European carriers reckoned they didn't need to form partnerships to make good on upwards of $100 billion spent on the government-issued licenses needed for delivering advanced wireless services such as Internet access.
They may be singing a different tune, judging from a spate of recent announcements. Vodafone, for example, announced on Nov. 14 that it was forming a partnership with Yahoo! (YHOO) to put advertisements on mobile phones. Then, on Nov. 16, Hutchison Whampoa's British wireless operator 3 unveiled its X-Series, which bundles wireless broadband applications including Google and eBay for a flat fee, an effort aimed at encouraging customer adoption of data services
Is this the same as the fees that content providers are upset about in the US? If so, why the change? Is there a relationship between the content provider's interest and the carrier's?
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Network Neutrality, 3G, mobile, Vodafone, Google, Ebay
1 comment:
On theses days, there are many arguments between network providers and content providers in terms of network neutrality. Content providers claim that network providers tend to discriminate services from some providers.
In the case of these wireless operators, it can be considered as the network neutrality issue. Although the flat fee is an extra charges for data service usage, but it seems to be a special charges that content providers are being upset. Typically, google and ebay will directly receive all revenue from users without sharing to any operator. But, in this case, I believe, there will be revenue sharing per transaction between the wireless operators and the content providers. That means the content providers do not gain all the revenue from their services.
Definitely, there is relationship between content and network providers. They can be business joint ventures together; the wireless operators allow only particular content providers to sell services on their networks, and block other providers who providers the same kind of application.
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