After an extended break to refresh the senses the subject of congestion and "bandwidth hogs" is back on the table.
A recent article by Ericcson ( recipe for mobile broadband profitability.pdf ) points out that the difference in cost per bit between HSPA and digital voice apparently is not registered in the discussions, nor in the profitability calculations of several services. With potentially devastating effects on policies and Net Neutrality discussions.
In the current software release for HSPA, there is a difference in capacity (spectrum efficiency) of roughly 10 to 12 times when comparing the voice and HSPA bearer on a 5 MHz carrier. This means a voice byte is about 12 times more costly than a mobile broadband byte. This relation will change as high-speed data evolves, and even more so if voice is moved over to packet networks. If this cost uneven relation is not taken into account - and in most current studies it is not; the cost allocation is done on an equal basis - mobile broadband will be overloaded with cost by a factor of at least 10 times.
The effect is quite substantial as the graph shows, potentially leading to serious mistakes in making policies and business decisions.
Ericcson shows also that bandwidth hogging is not an issue, even with P2P traffic or mobile IP-TV. The network management facilities allow for a fair Congestion Neutrality methodology.
The algorithm lowers the priority of users that have consumed a lot of bits in the recent past (days). If there is no congestion, nobody notices anything. If congestion if imminent, the low prioity users get reduced bandwidth allocations, favoring high priority users (aka the ones that did not use much bandwidth earlier on).
Seems fair to me, and illustrates the point made in earlier posts that there is plenty of technology available to manage congestion without resorting to data caps.
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