Are data caps a way to manage network congestion or another way to extract more money from consumers? Guests from Light Reading and news blog BGR join us on the program.

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Matron's Diary, Friday, February 10th. This week the codgers are ruminating on 'all you can eat' mobile data - most telcos are waving it goodbye but one (there's always one) is going the other way. HTC has learnt how difficult product continuity is in the smartphone market - and has suffered a huge profit drop to prove it - while Qualcomm and Ericsson have demonstrated call continuity between 3G and LTE. In india all the (relatively recently awarded) GSM licenses have been revoked because of skullduggery.
But the big news concerns my new movie role. There's a good chance I'm going to be on the silver screen (rather than behind the folding one). Oscar here we come...

Codgertations is filmed in front of a semi-conscious audience in a home for veteran technology journalists. Inmates Martyn Warwick and Ian Scales cogitate and ruminate on the week's best, worst and most amusing stories under the watchful eye of the home's redoubtable 'Matron'.

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Unfair COPs and a text tax
Why oh why oh why? COP16 has upset the codgers because ICTs - the main route to avoiding the primeval soup of a collapsed, over-warmed ecosystem - have been ignored again;  3 UK is dishing up all-you-can-eat mobile data; in the US they want the right to look at old email, and in the UK one of the more rabid union leaders would like to introduce a taxt (text tax). What a pantomime.

Codgertations has been specially designed as part of a palliative care programme for industry veterans (old codgers) Martyn Warwick and Ian Scales who, with the caring assistance of the occasional guest codger, cogitate and ruminate on the week's best, worst and most amusing stories in telecoms.

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Global Headlines: 'Caps Off' to 3 UK; LTE slow on the uptake; Sprint admit WiMAX Whoopsie??

Including:
Asia Report: Growth Creates Opportunities for Companies and Criminals Alike
Americas Report: Broadband, 1860s style…

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Jonathan Dharmapalan, Global Telecoms Leader at Ernst & Young argues that the emergence in the telecoms market of OTT companies such as Google and Facebook means established operators and service providers will have to rise to the challenge by abandoning the "all-you-can-eat" offers that consumers have got used to.

He says the reality of the situation is that, in a world of burgeoning data traffic, different levels of services and differences in usage patterns are already evident and a natural and inevitable corollary of this is differential pricing.

In short, the business model has to change - and so does the menu - if the old guards are to stand a chance against the upstarts.

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SECTION 3: Neutrality rules are somewhat inevitable, but what are the principles underpinning the regulation of applications?
 
For network neutrality proponents it's simple: the Internet is what it is because it's open. The outlawing of traffic discrimination based on source, type or destination keeps it that way. Everyone pays an ISP to connect, ISPs peer and traffic roams free  - no whitelists, no blacklists, no arguments.

But many network operators say this model won't cut it. If third party players are to dominate in network services and applications, then extra money has to find its way back to the network operators to compensate, especially in mobile.
So, do we need to identify the 'providers' on the Internet and have them pay more?  Discuss…

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SECTION 2: Regulation and network management - is a code of practice the answer?
 
For network neutrality proponents it's simple: the Internet is what it is because it's open. The outlawing of traffic discrimination based on source, type or destination keeps it that way. Everyone pays an ISP to connect, ISPs peer and traffic roams free  - no whitelists, no blacklists, no arguments.

But many network operators say this model won't cut it. If third party players are to dominate in network services and applications, then extra money has to find its way back to the network operators to compensate, especially in mobile.
So, do we need to identify the 'providers' on the Internet and have them pay more?  Discuss…

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SECTION 1: Under a truly neutral system, are telcos getting the return on investment they should be getting?
 
For network neutrality proponents it's simple: the Internet is what it is because it's open. The outlawing of traffic discrimination based on source, type or destination keeps it that way. Everyone pays an ISP to connect, ISPs peer and traffic roams free  - no whitelists, no blacklists, no arguments.

But many network operators say this model won't cut it. If third party players are to dominate in network services and applications, then extra money has to find its way back to the network operators to compensate, especially in mobile.
So, do we need to identify the 'providers' on the Internet and have them pay more?  Discuss…

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