Imagine a world where every app has its own data plan

Imagine a world in which the applications on your phone all carried different fees.

Want to launch that Facebook app? It will cost you 2¢ per megabyte of data you exchange with the social networking site -- but launch Skype, and you might find yourself billed a flat monthly rate. And preferred apps would incur no charges at all, no matter how much data is exchanged. As for the money, it's paid not to Skype and Facebook and YouTube, but to your mobile data provider, who wants a piece of the action passing over its network (and who wants to avoid becoming an undifferentiated "bit hauler").

This vision of the mobile world is feasible today, thanks to deep packet inspection (DPI) gear and some robust policy creation tools. With the right hardware and software, carriers can exert fine-grained control over billing that goes well beyond the money-for-total-bandwidth-model seen increasingly today. Of course, to critics, "fine-grained" sounds like "nickel-and-diming," and they see it as little more than an excuse to turn an open Internet into something more like a cable system, complete with different access "packages." This vision was on display in a webinar given by DPI vendor Allot and billing company Openet. The topic was "Managing the unmanageable: monetizing and controlling OTT applications." OTT means "over the top," and it refers to apps that use the Internet to reach consumers. The problem (or "problem") for wireless companies is that many of the key apps come from extremely lucrative businesses; why shouldn't the operators be able to use the size of their customer base to charge these companies some money?