I still remember a time when dial-up Internet was billed using credits that needed to be bought upfront. I must admit that I was bit schocked first when I heared about AT&T plans to kill the all you can eat data plans. Back to the stone age I thought. While the plan received lot of support from the media and tech community there were also other opinions. As an good example from December 2009 this Business Week article: AT&T Possible Price Moves May Backfire
The above mentioned article was brought to my attention on December 12th and I replied to the email that was linking to the article like this:
"""I agree with Business Week article about problems of tiered pricing models and trying to educate the users. Both just backfire according to my opinion. Let me ask how many of us are willing to have “usage based” pricing for our home broadband or like to receive letters from ISP stating that you use too much network, cut back or else…?
Luckily there’s (easy to implement) technical solution to the problem that allows provider to control “the bandwidth hungry few” without them knowing it. True win-win.
Actually we had exactly same problem in fixed Internet in a past (starting from university campuses where P2P traffic started to eat all the available bandwidth) and solved it by dynamically allocating bandwidth to all users in fair round robin manner. Staselog is the company I have worked in a past to solve those above mentioned problems."""
Well, to be honest I thought that AT&T is on the other side of the Atlantic and that the European Providers would not go that far. Never say never: O2 in UK followed footsteps of US-based AT&T: Death of all you can eat data, says O2
Now you might wonder why the title of this Blog is saying that All you can eat Mobile data will prevail.
This week Finnish Provider Elisa issued the press release where they explain new Quality of Service (QoS) implementation, developed by NSN, being live first in the world (In Finnish, Sorry).
While the article still talks about challenges that need further attention I still believe we are in a verse of starting to see similar news all around the world soon. Let's see how long AT&T and it's followers are able to compete with the Providers that offer All You Can Eat Buffet.
