Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
News Analysis  

Will Google & Facebook Trade Cash for QoS?

February 29, 2012 | Ray Le Maistre |

BARCELONA -- Mobile World Congress 2012 -- Facebook and Google have been approaching mobile operators to kick-start discussions about sharing revenues in return for a determined level of service quality when smartphone users access their apps and services.

Speaking during a closed-door discussion about customer experience management here in Barcelona, StarHub Pte. Ltd. CEO Neil Montefiore said one of his senior executives had been approached by the online giants about exploring such a relationship.

Montefiore, who added that no discussions had yet taken place and that he'd be interested to see if Facebook and Google would indeed be prepared to share their income, said many operators were waiting for LTE to be introduced before embarking on any such engagements involving guaranteed levels of service. But he said that StarHub can achieve this right now because it has traffic-shaping technologies it can use to enable QoS capabilities.

Facebook announced earlier this week (see this blog by developer relations chief Douglas Purdy) that it's working with operators to make it easier for mobile users to buy apps, using the operators' billing platforms to process the transaction. Bring QoS levels into the equation, and the news that Google is also looking to pin down mobile service levels takes the potential relationships a step further.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Application Programing Interface (API)
An interface that allows different elements of software to more easily communicate with each other