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: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

[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.