Internet interconnect - a new revenue source?
Whilst we have been concentrating our efforts on working out how CSPs, and mobile operators in particular, can cash in on the data explosion by charging customers for usage rather than offering unlimited, flat-rate plans The Financial Times, no less, has come up with a brilliant idea.
The FT report focusses not on the customers but those companies that generate the majority of that booming online traffic. Top of the list came none other than - Google and its data hungry YouTube service.
What’s more, it claims that Telefónica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom say “Google should compensate them for carrying content like YouTube on their networks, because video is rapidly filling up their fixed-line and mobile infrastructure.”
Stéphane Richard, the new chief executive of France Telecom, says: “There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let Google use our network without paying the price for this.”
FT claims that “In taking aim at Google, some network operators look at the internet search and advertising company with a mixture of fear and loathing. They object to Google’s dominance of the online advertising market, which is starting to spread from the fixed-line internet to the wireless web. Telefónica, for example, is keen to secure a big portion of the revenue coming from the nascent mobile advertising market.
Other operators, such as France Telecom, accuse Google of eroding the relationship with their customers. Google’s popular Android operating system for smartphones highlights how consumers increasingly attach more value to the functionality of their handsets than the networks they run on.”
This anti-Google sentiment was also pre-empted in a previous blog that reported on Google’s growing global backbone network that links its data centres. Unlike the the internet’s “peering” arrangements were originally intended to allow networks with roughly equal needs to hand off their traffic to each other at interconnection points, with no money changing hands.
However, these arrangements have become lopsided as the traffic Google passes on to other networks has swelled. Of course, any attempt to introduce and even negotiate infrastructure agreements with Google could backfire, and in a big way. Google may reciprocate and charge operators for traffic traversing its own infrastructure. Oops, that could get nasty. Worse still, it could follow-through and roll-out its own FTTP network, an area it has recently been experimenting in.
But worse may be yet to come. In countries already rolling out National Broadband Networks the essence of which is to provide a wholesale distribution structure offering all Retail Service Providers equal access and standardized pricing then Google could easily jump into his level playing field and offer countess services direct to consumers, without even traversing any fixed-line operator networks. How long before they start dabbling seriously in Wi-Max or even 4G delivery as a virtual network operator?
Posted
04-13-2010 4:45 PM
by
Tony Poulos