AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, is complaining about those darn bottleneckers. Representatives of AT&T claim that network usage of iPhone owners has been increasing. The primary culprit – streaming. Streaming is when a user plays media from the Internet instead of having the media stored locally on their device and playing it from there. If you play songs from your iTunes library, that’s local audio. If you play songs from Pandora.com, that’s streaming audio.
AT&T now cites streaming audio and video as the top bandwidth usage of their network. Furthermore, they say not everyone is streaming, but some users stream a lot. And because streaming takes up so much bandwidth, it appears that 3% of users are utilizing 40% of the bandwidth (Associated Press, 2009).
As a result, AT&T wants to change the way bandwidth is managed. There has been speculation about intentional bandwidth choking, or charging based on the amount of bandwidth being used. AT&T has not made any official statement about what they are going to do aside from saying that they will “give high-bandwidth users incentives to reduce or modify their usage.”
What AT&T does not state is exactly how much bandwidth is currently being used. Granted, a small percentage of users are consuming a majority of the pipe, but if the overall bandwidth usage is only 60% of what is available, then it isn’t a problem. That does not mean that we shouldn’t plan for the future, but hopefully AT&T considers all the unintended consequences before implementing a plan that wasn’t well thought out. The worst thing AT&T could do is use this as an excuse to oppose Net Neutrality. If you are not familiar with Net Neutraility, you can read my article on it here.
Until AT&T decides what to do, it will be business as usual. But keep in mind, consumers have some control in the matter as well. If you want to listen to music on your iPhone and you don’t have the songs stored locally, then by all means, listen to streaming audio…that’s what it’s there for. But if you do have the songs or playlists stored locally, then play them locally instead of streaming. It will take some of the burden off the network and maybe AT&T won’t have to do anything. So help a brother out, think of it as e-conserving.
Associated Press, . (2009). At&t: tighter control of cell data usage ahead. New York Times, Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/09/technology/AP-US-TEC-ATT-Data-Usage.html?_r=1&ref=technology
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