Mobile operators? Will they not learn? Charging Google & Facebook? Come on!

Ah dear. Time for a diatribe.

I had to knock out a brief comment on this Financial Times post. Here’s the first few paras:

Leading European telecoms companies want to levy significant charges on Google and other online content providers through an overhaul of the regime governing how data travel over the internet.

Operators in Europe complain that they are contending with an explosion of data on their networks, much of which comes from US sites such as Google’s YouTube video service.

It’s just shocking.

Shocking.

Tons of Youtube and Facebook traffic? You don’t like it? Think that demanding a load of cash from Google is a quick and easy fix? Oh dear. Oh dear me no, no, no.

First of all, what the hell am I paying you for, Mr Operator? That’s right — I pay you for this already. Now it’s your problem if you’ve got the model wrong and can’t afford it. Change your terms and conditions accordingly. That’s my first problem.

But as for charging Google or seeking to make it Apple’s fault and demanding they pay? Oooooooffff. OOOOFFFF!  Oh no.

You don’t want to have that conversation. You really don’t. Not with the Silicon Valley super-egos. Oh no. Not when — for example — Apple has $60 billion in free cash sitting there waiting for a problem to fix.

Would you, Mr Operator, like to be that problem?

Step into my office. Take a seat.

Here’s what we’ll do. You think carrying Google, Apple and Facebook traffic is a bit of a ball ache? Too much hassle? And you can’t be bothered to innovate your way out of the challenge? Fair enough. As of 1st of June, we’ll deny all traffic to your piddly little operator.

Well, no, actually. What we’ll do is this. Anyone requesting Facebook.com from your piddly little operator IP range will get a 500 byte HTML file in return, explaining that the content is unavailable from your bollocks network.

That’ll solve your data crunch nightmare overnight, won’t it?

Right.

And then we’ll do a deal with the number two in the market — or, better still, we’ll buy them. Or, actually, it’ll be quicker to do a deal with those LightSquared folk to move you into irrelevance in the next few years.

Actually yes — are you still comfortable? Good. Here’s what we’ll do. You can have some cash. Yes — you heard us right, we’ll pay you as you demand — we’ll pay you to sit there and play dumb, Mr Operator. You can have a few hundred million from us. You’ll think that’s a real result. It’s pocket change in the context of what we’re planning. It suits us to pay you to keep quiet whilst we sort out a better solution. We know you’ll take our cash contributions and spunk it up the wall anyway. You’ll take the cash and you’ll start thinking of it as a ‘revenue stream’ when actually, it’s a set of handcuffs.

Ah dear.

I think it’s reasonably fair to say that your average billion dollar mobile operator couldn’t innovate its way out of a wet paper bag.

Where’s all the smart thinking?

For the avoidance of doubt and for all the people sitting in the propositions and strategy teams trying to coax some kind of strategic-whitepaper into life for the utterly confused telephone men running your operator, here’s a few suggestions:

– Assign all standard mobile internet connections on your network a consumer grade 25k/second throughput. This means I can still do stuff with my internet connection, but that I’ll have to think twice about watching the T-Mobile Royal Wedding Spoof video in high quality, on the bus, for the 18th time today

– Tier your price plans according to speed (e.g. Everyone gets 25k/sec for free, £5/month gets you 50k/sec, £10/month gets you 100k/sec and so on — and these speeds will all be adjusted uniformly according to the available bandwidth on the cell)

– Tier your price plans according to application (“Do you want HQ video with that? Really? That’s £15 extra a month”) — give consumers the choice

– Charge me for the video, not Youtube. Pop-up a little note at peak times asking me to agree to a £0.50 charge to stream the video in HQ. Otherwise make me wait 30 minutes for it to finally arrive on my phone.

Here are some other related ideas I wrote back in December.

Some of those points above are contentious, yes. It’ll certainly stimulate debate. But that’s what we need. The consumer needs to be educated that cell access is a finite resource. Give everyone a basic service to avoid the net neutrality wonks choking on their beards. But since it’s a finite resource, price it as such.

Orrrr… refer everyone to Hutchison’s 3UK who currently offer proper unlimited everything on their data plans.