Cell Phones Presage Future of Non-Neutral Internet

An anonymous reader writes "The US cell phone network has no network neutrality. This story on NewsForge takes a look at the obstacles to getting a third-party application running on cell phone networks, and explains why the same obstacles could ruin a non-neutral Internet." (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)

Comments

Re:O2 blocks TCP & UDP

[Nos.]

HTTP runs over TCP.

Re:Competition

[Pirogoeth]

If I want access faster that 56k, I have exactly one choice for (reasonably priced) connectivity, cable, as I cannot get DSL in my area. Time Warner is also the only cable provider here, so I don't even have a choice that way.

Re:Competition

[LordKazan]

and in most places if they have more than one company they really just have one company - the others - the "local ISPs" still buy from the big Phone/Cable Cartel company

Re:O2 blocks TCP & UDP

[LFS.Morpheus]

Like one of my siblings, you basically want TCP over HTTP, aka just put your traffic inside an HTTP packet. We like to joke about TCPoHTTPoTCP at work but I guess it has a use. ;)

To one of the other siblings: TCP is not blocked, but a firewall can look at the first line of the packet and if it is not HTTP it will drop the packet - I've dealt with firewalls that do this - quite irritating if you're sending a POST request through the firewall only to have any request larger than a single TCP packet (typical MTU of ~1500 bytes) get blocked by the firewall.

Re:Outrageous!

[Tony]

You mean to tell me that a company that builds a networking infrastructure actually gets to set the terms by which others are or are not allowed to use it?

Considering they built the networking infrastructure with a large amount of public funds, then no, they don't get to set the terms.

The companies themselves invested quite a bit, that's true. But they certainly accepted hundreds of millions of tax dollars to work on this new-fangled intar-net thing, and that puts them in poor negotiating position when it comes to public access to the 'net.

The problem started when the government got involved, and let the telcos string wires on public land, and gave the telcos money to build the infrastructure. That should *never* have happened. Just like the US freeways should've been built exclusively by private industry, and every citizen should have to pay a toll to the company owning that portion of the road for every mile driven. And the toll collectors should be able to charge you more if you are going to work than if you are going grocery shopping, for instance. It's their road, after all.

Re:O2 blocks TCP & UDP

[x2A]

Are you sure? The reason I ask is that I thought the same was true with my network (vodafone), but found that actually it was the default phone settings that only connected to a proxy, and creating a new connection on my phone allowed me full tcp/udp access (over 3G/GPRS). This basically involved changing the user/pass from 'wap' to 'web'. More information:

http://www.filesaveas.com/gprs.html (O2 settings at the top, but this is UK information, I don't know about the rest of the world, but it's worth looking in to).

After that I also had to contact the network to get them to lift the blocks on certain ports. This involved them doing an age verification check for some reason or another, maybe to stop kids running up huge data bills using such services).

Incidentally, I had to find this information out for myself on the web, speaking to vodafone without being armed with the information did not yield results.

Re:WTF???

[Leon da Costa]

No it doesn't "closely mirror the technal functionality" of the internet. It may seem like it to the user, but cells are nothing like backbones. Technically there are few similarities.

This is arguable. Except for the bearer medium and the connection-oriented principle of phone-to-GGSN, 3G technologies like UMTS have a routed IP backbone at the core of it just like a "traditional data" network does.

Because a cell phone has a two inch screen. DUH.

I'm seeing loads of people on the subway and at the airport that use PDA's which function on cell-phone technology, and use this "two inch screen" to browse the 'net. In fact, while I was on safari in South Africa we kept track of the worldcup scores by using a GPRS-enabled PDA to browse to a website that provided us with the scores in real time. Keep in mind that this website was owned and operated by the cell phone operator since we apparently couldn't get to fifa.org. Web-on-the-go may have been useless a few years ago, but ever since European providers advertise with a picture of Google on their PDA's I think the world is ready for a mobile ebay/craigslist/etc.

Re:Separate the network from the application

[mikael]

There is some guy who's name escapes me (and who is also I believe famous in geek circles) that said that if you take away features from a protocol, you'll increase innovation.

Could be Richard Stalllman

Freedom, Innovation, and Convenience: The RMS Interview

Nonfree software is controlled by its developer. The developers often implement malicious features--for example, to spy on the user or to restrict the user. Sometimes they keep the malicious features secret. But they also figure that people will be so desperate for the software that they will accept it even with malicious features. Users can't remove the malicious features, because they don't have the source code.

This cannot happen with free software, because free software is controlled by the users. If ever a free program had a malicious feature, any programmer could remove the malicious feature and release a modified version--and all users would choose that version, including nonprogrammers. You won't have to make this change yourself, because someone else will have done the job for you before you get it.