Huawei will help mobile operators build internet toll roads

CHINESE TELECOMMS GIANT Huawei is helping mobile phone companies to prioritise traffic, its CMO, Victor Xu told The INQUIRER today. He suggested that customers might need to pay more for fewer restrictions on their mobile internet connections in the future.

Equating mobile broadband to a toll road in Birmingham, Xu told us that if you want to get to work quicker then you might need to consider paying to use quieter roads. He said that Huawei is developing tools that will allow mobile operators to offer tiers of service to subscribers based on the hardware they are using, too.

According to Xu, the problems with mobile broadband aren't solvable without smarter management of the networks. There are, after all, only so many frequencies available and only a finite number of cell towers through which people can get online. While services like LTE will increase available bandwidth, that's only part of the picture, and although bandwidth is increasing, so too is the number of smartphones chewing through data.

Of course, in quiet areas there's every chance that operators could opt to allow unlimited access where demand is low. That is part of a more intelligent approach to bandwidth management that Huawei thinks is going to be increasingly important. It is, of course, highly unlikely that service providers will ever let consumers get something for nothing, not when they can charge through the nose for it.

Huawei also told us that it can do deep packet inspection on traffic to make sure that even encrypted data can be routed in an appropriate way. Xu admitted that in the UK and US this will be likely to cause some privacy concerns, but he told us that this won't necessarily be the case in other parts of the world.

If you're the sort of person who is currently frustrated by mobile internet access, then there's every chance you'll jump at the opportunity to pay a little more and get a more consistent level of service. The only question is, how much will you need to cough-up to see speeds that can rival home broadband? We'll wager it might cost more than most people will be prepared to pay. µ