Newswatch

The New Plan

Communications service providers and their BSS vendors have been talking about the need for sweeping changes to mobile plans for some time. Current plans have problems: for customers, they can be hard to understand; disastrous roaming and bill shock stories still make headlines and lead to bad public relations for the industry; billing needs to be converged from numerous silos into a single system in order to support future scalability and agility; dynamic catalog options or dynamic billing services are needed to deliver improved personalization; and possibly most importantly, current plans aren't setup to monetize services in the way that they are being consumed. In other words, mobile data billing needs an overhaul, and it appears the tide is beginning to turn.

Verizon unveiled its biggest change to subscriber plans and pricing in several years, ditching unlimited data plans for new customers, and offering “shared everything” plans, which feature a shared data allotment that can be distributed among as many as ten devices. While data is in fact shared, and text and phone calls are free, there is a monthly per-device charge in addition to the price of the plan. NTT DOCOMO followed suit later in the month with affordable flat rate billing plans for data communications that support multiple devices and make data use charging easier to understand.

World IPv6 Launch

On June 6, World Ipv6 Launch came and went with a bit less fanfare than you might expect for a game changing, next-gen internet protocol that will supply the world with a near-infinite number of IP addresses. Still there was quite an increase in participation compared to last year's World IPv6 day. More than 3,000 website operators (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Netflix), 65 service providers (including AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Comcast, KDDI), and five router companies were part of the event that proved IPv6 is well-supported and ready to roll. To view an excellent infographic prepared by the Internet Society (the non-profit group behind IPv6 Launch Day), click here.

The Internet Society also provided a wealth of measurement data as it relates to IPv6 traffic, global distribution, and latency. As a percentage of traffic, universities were at the top of the IPv6 tally, with nearly 60 percent of all internet traffic transported on the latest protocol at Virginia Tech. KDDI had one of the highest IPv6 traffic rates among telcos, at nearly 11 percent. In terms of latency, Microsoft's Bing took the cake, with latency numbers of just 7.4ms, compared to next-place Google at 15.8ms.