most of my customers use cricket’s prepaid mobiel broadband; they slow things down after the first 5GB each month. but my customers really do not seem to mind waiting many hours or even days for downloads to complete. i also believe that many of these people would not have broadband at all if not for mobile. they do not have landline phones or cable TV and the credit checks and long term nature of a wired contract makes it unfeasible for them. before they subscribe to cricket the only other options was the possiblity of an open wifi router that could jump on.

with virgin mobile now offering prepaid dongles and t-mobile with flexpay options on their dongles i see things about to really pick up. but i really feel like everyone will be much better served if the operators use any technolgical advances to increase capacity and bandwidth caps instead of peak speeds. we can live with the slower speeds but i do not see how the customer base can grow without increasing the number of possible simultanous users.

So, what is it? Is P2P killing mobile networks, or is it plain old e-mail? It really depends on what you look at. The volume of data transferred is one indicator, but the way applications utilize the network is another.
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