Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IEEE Vet: Carriers Capping LTE Services To Avoid Fixed-line Cannibalization

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-the-way-of-the-house-phone dept.

alphadogg writes "Roberto Saracco isn't buying carriers' claims that they need to put data caps on their LTE services due to excessive traffic causing massive engineering challenges. Saracco, a senior member of the IEEE and the director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre, said during an interview Tuesday that the major reason carriers are placing data caps on their LTE services is to prevent users from going exclusively with wireless data services and ditching their landline connections. 'You're always going to want to make the maximum amount of value,' he said. 'And you don't want to have your fixed-line network being cannibalized by mobile.'"

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. collusion? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    there's no guarantee that a wireless carrier would also be a particular customer's landline carrier..

    so, if tfa is even partially right, there must be some level of collusion among them all

  2. Re:Video Streaming by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please explain, then, why some countries (European and Asian) are able to give 100Mbps UNLIMITED access to the home for vast swathes of people and have been doing so for years.

    Are those companies somehow "cheating" on their backend? Are they in bed with Netflix and other large content distributors?

    Surely, if you put a 100Mbps line to someone's door, you'd expect them to use 100Mbps at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but surely before they move up to any other product they will max it out. If all your estimates that you made when you install it are unchanged five or ten years down the road, surely that's naivety?

    And if you are properly planning for everyone to expand over time (which, surely, must have been a lesson learned by now), why is the associated amount of backend peering not in place in time? Why aren't your costs reflecting what it would cost you to do that? What, precisely, have you been doing with that percentage of profits that you set aside for future planning?

    A lot of UK ISP's have a similar "problem" with BBC iPlayer. My last ISP said it alone consumed 50% of their traffic at peak times (far outweighing anything done by P2P programs by a factor of 5 or 6 - and yet they limited P2P but not iPlayer!) and that had been a growing trend since the day it was introduced.

    So why haven't your growth estimates taken into account that people want more data, people buy more data, people will eventually start to use every ounce of the data they have already bought, and all these lovely increases in traffic will have a knock-on effect on all your infrastructure?

    And then, why have other countries and their ISP's not struggled similarly when their customers are connected to the same "Internet" as you are? And how have they been able to offer 100Mbps+ services for the last, what? Decade?