Can someone tell me what the point is of offering blistering fast mobile Internet speeds that support high-bandwidth services like full video, streaming data services and file sharing, if you’re just going to tell people they can’t use it?
Sprint-Nextel Corp. on Tuesday set itself up for getting slapped with the scarlet H — as in “hypocrite” — when it was discovered in the XOHM WiMAX mobile broadband T&Cs that the carrier reserves the right to cap bandwidth usage on the network, including, specifically, file-sharing. Considering it’s been playing pretty loose with the open access talk (“a brave new world of open Internet and applications innovation blah blah blah”), it makes one wonder: What is this, Sprint listening to its little buddy Comcast?
It could easily be chalked up to backhaul concerns if it weren’t for the citation of specific applications, which raises the hackles of net neutrality and P2P fans everywhere.
This is all shades of last week, when T-Mobile USA also bandied around the open-access talk pretty extensively during the launch of the G1 Google Android made-for-the-Internet device. Then it was found in its terms of use that it plans to cap people using 1GB or more of traffic on its devices — throttling them back to the let’s-watch-paint-dry speed of 50kbps for the remainder of the pay period. After appropriate market outcry, T-Mobile removed the cap — but only for the G1.
Open access, net neutrality, open ecosystems (looking at you, Podcaster-blocking Apple Inc.) — when will we see true movement on this from our industry?
