Should operators charge for network use? mBlox comments

IN THE light of Telefonica’s CEO openly discussing the possibility of charging internet search engines for the use of the telecommunications network, mBlox’s Executive Chairman, has given the company’s reaction.

Andrew Bud has highlighted his comapny’s work around the appropriate billing of data charges and how operators and content providers can learn from this. Last year mBlox launched Sender Pays Data to help operators monetise the data traffic on their networks and to ensure consumers do not incur unforeseen data charges.

“Mobile operators face mounting challenges as their networks carry ever more data generated by other people’s services and content in the cloud. As a result they forsee costs per user escalating without a corresponding source of increasing revenue. This requires a new business model, one that generates extra revenue, protects consumers and stimulates innovation. “

“We believe that the future lies with operators making key services available to content providers – at a price. These will encourage the essential partnership between operators, transaction networks and content providers. The most crucial of these is the ability for enterprises to pay operators to ‘zero-rate’ the data consumers use to access their services and content, in order to guarantee service price transparency to the consumer.”

“mBlox’s Sender Pays Data service in the UK does this. We believe it is the world’s first in a range of such operator services, which may extend to high throughput delivery, quality of service notification and handset profiling. What is important is that such services should add value to the content providers and facilitate better user experience. As long as new operator charges are transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate to the value they create, we regard them as beneficial to the entire mobile services eco-system.”

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