On Tuesday Truphone is unveiling its first shared plans for business. Companies can now buy big batches of minutes, texts and megabytes and pool them across not just multiple devices, but also multiple nations. For instance a $500 plan includes 5000 voice minutes, 5000 text messages and 1 GB of 3G data, all of which can be used anywhere in the U.S., U.K. Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong. Germany, Poland and Spain will join that list later this year.

Those prices will definitely seem high to most of us since we’re accustomed paying only for the for the domestic-only voice and data buckets offered by our local carriers. But if you’re splitting your time between countries in the Truphone “Zone” those rates look like a bargain. Anyone who has ever opened their mobile browser overseas can attest to international data roaming rates being practically criminal — $20 a megabyte isn’t uncommon.

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Its $60 and $70 prepaid plans still aren’t exactly cheap, but you get a lot more data value out of them. The $60 plan now includes 2 GB of data (up from 500 MB), while the $70 plan includes 4 GB (up from 2 GB). Both includes unlimited talk and text, but as with the previous plans prepaid customers don’t get access to the LTE network. If you want a 4G connection, you’ll have to sign a contract.

I’ve noted before that Verizon is getting a lot more aggressive in the prepaid space – a market it has historically ignored. But Verizon has always been all over the premium smartphone subscriber, and increasingly those customers are moving away from contract plans to prepaid services. In the first quarter, nearly one-third of all smartphones activated landed on a prepaid plan, according to The NPD Group.

While the bigger data buckets are only available to current prepaid customers, Verizon said it will extend them to new customers on June 6.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney-owned ESPN is negotiating with Verizon Wireless to let the operator’s customers partake in unlimited quantities of ESPN content without incurring any additional data charges. In essence, ESPN would pay Verizon to exempt its content from its data caps.

The Journal reported that no deal is imminent and ESPN isn’t even sure that the economics will work, but the fact that it’s entertaining the idea is significant. It turns the notion of a neutral mobile internet on its head. The hierarchy of the internet is pretty simple: customers pay for access in the form of data plans, leaving internet players free use of the mobile airwaves to deliver their content either for free or as paid services. If ESPN and Verizon strike a deal that hierarchy gets flipped, and there would be consequences.

The mobile internet has problems, but it works best when it remains neutral

Mobile operators have chipping away at the principle of net neutrality for years, banning certain apps here and restricting competing over-the-top services there. In Europe, carriers are battling with Google over carriage fees. But in this case, a carrier appears to be challenging net neutrality with the complicity of a content provider. I can understand why ESPN might be eager to take the plunge into subsidizing mobile data. In fact, I’m surprised a big name player like Netflix or Hulu hadn’t done it sooner.

One of the biggest obstacles to widespread video consumption on the mobile internet is overage fees. Who’s going to watch a 3-hour sporting event on their mobile phone or tablet if it drains your monthly data plan in the process? If ESPN wants to make consumers as comfortable using its mobile apps as they are watching its cable programming and using its web services, then it has to get around those data caps.

But there are enormous consequences to such a deal. The biggest and most obvious consequence is that it favors one provider’s content over another. If all access is created equal, then no content has an inherent advantage over another — which is the whole idea behind the wireline network neutrality rules the FCC established in 2010. But if consumers know they can get ESPN’s content without incurring any additional charge, they’ll naturally gravitate toward that content.

There’s an even bigger risk that ESPN’s competitors won’t just get penalized in the eyes of the consumer. Their traffic flow could be penalized as well. Embedded deep within Verizon’s network are policy servers that can distinguish an ESPN packet from any other packet. Not only could Verizon use that technology to exempt ESPN traffic form data plans, it also could use that technology to prioritize ESPN’s traffic from all others. The Journal’s story didn’t mention anything about traffic shaping, but you can bet its high on the list in any negotiation.

Do carriers really want to go down this road?

I suspect ESPN isn’t the only content provider interested in bargaining with the carriers. And I’m sure the carriers are thrilled at the prospects at an additional mobile data revenue stream. But there are risks for the carriers, too.

Operators have long complained about being reduced to mere dumb pipes, but these kind of subsidy deals would only make their pipes dumber. If all the big destinations on the mobile internet starting paying network fees for the consumer, then operators won’t have much left to sell. Consumers basically would be dealing with the big internet brands to get their content and their access. That leaves carriers selling smaller and smaller mobile data plans to customers who will increasingly gravitate toward those big content providers. Operators will have even fewer ways of distinguishing themselves from their competitors.

What’s more, operators are making the very dangerous assumption that they will always have the upper hand in such negotiations. Last week The New Yorker published a very insightful piece by Tim Wu about the growing threat to net neutrality. While Wu was making his case for wireline neutrality, his points apply to the mobile internet as well:

An important aspect of the Internet’s original design is that many prices were set at zero—what have been called zero-price rules. The price to join the network is zero. The price that users and sites pay to reach others is zero: a blogger doesn’t need to pay to reach Comcast’s customers. And the price that big Web sites charge broadband operators to carry their content is also zero. It’s a subtle point, but these three zeros are a large part of what makes the Internet what it is. If net neutrality goes away, so does the agreement to freeze prices at zero.

If mobile carriers and content providers start negotiating over access the delicate balance of the mobile internet suddenly goes off kilter. Right now it’s teetering toward the mobile operators but that might not always the case. ESPN, Google, Facebook and HBO are enormously powerful brands and their consumer influence is only growing. Meanwhile carriers are becoming increasingly less significant.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when ESPN asserts itself in mobile just as its done in the cable industry, turning the tables on the operators. One day carriers may have to pay ESPN for the privilege of delivering its sports content.

Featured photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Lane V. Erickson; Verizon photo courtesy of Flickr user slgckgc

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According to a Los Angeles Times article about Monday’s bomb attack at the Boston Marathon, the FBI has collected 10 terabytes that it’s sifting through in order to seek out clues about what exactly happened and who did it. Maybe I’m just a techno-optimist, but I find this very reassuring.

According the Times, “The data include call logs collected by cellphone towers along the marathon route and surveillance footage collected by city cameras, local businesses, gas stations, media outlets and spectators who volunteered to provide their videos and snap shots.”

Lots of data means lots of potential value

It’s reassuring because I’ve spoken with so many smart people over the years who can do amazing things with data. Ten terabytes isn’t a huge data set by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plenty to work with if it’s of high quality. It’s very possible there are some needles in that haystack of call logs, and I’m optimistic the analysts within the FBI — possibly with some outside help — will be able to find them.

Techniques around video analysis and facial recognition are better than many people think, too. If there’s a way to stitch together hundreds — maybe thousands — of videos into a single truth of what happened, then I’m confident it will happen. By tracking faces and objects over time and place, we can recreate a crime and track down suspects without relying on after-the-fact accounts by witnesses who weren’t paying any attention until the bomb actually went off.

It’s not that witnesses are lying, it’s just that an attack like this might artificially color certain observations as being more nefarious than they really were. A Middle Easterner standing nearby might seem suspicious in hindsight, for example, but a witness might not have seen that guy cheering on a friend beforehand, stop to get a soda, and then meander over to the area where the bomb went off.

I have no clue what really happened, of course, I just know that cameras — especially hundreds of them at different angle and shooting over different timeframes — don’t suffer from selective or incomplete memories.

Can we crowdsource some surveillance?

I also find all this now-surveillance data reassuring because — if it proves useful — it might actually help to preserve our civil liberties going forward. We don’t necessarily needs drones flying overhead and cameras on every corner if we can crowdsource (at least from densely populated areas or big events) relatively high-resolution videos and photos during the investigation phase. We don’t necessarily need all orders of mobile call and location-tracking if we can collect what we need from the relevant area afterward.

This does little to prevent attacks, of course, and intelligence agencies will no doubt continue to trace phone calls and generally do what they do. That’s fine by me. If airports want to use facial recognition to flag known threats as they walk in the door, I’m not sure I can take issue with that either.

But by and large, it seems there’s precious little that surveillance — especially video — can do to predict crime unless an agency already knows what it’s looking for and has the means to act fast enough to make a difference. (IBM Fellow and general identity analytics guru Jeff Jonas wrote a great blog post in November about what’s actually possible to predict given the data on hand.)

So to the extent anyone thinks additional surveillance is going to help solve crimes that we didn’t see coming, I think I’d rather leave the data in the hands of hundreds or thousands of individuals and businesses rather than a handful of city, state and federal governments that might be tempted to overstep the bounds of what’s acceptable.

Really, though, the notion of how to prevent terrorist attacks and other mass-casualty crimes is a complex issue, and I’m not sure there are many ethically right or wrong answers. But when we get past the tragedy and criminality of what happened in Boston, we have to look at it as part of the bigger picture that’s shaping up around all the data we’re generating, collecting and analyzing. If terabytes of geospatially targeted call records and crowdsourced audio-video surveillance can help solve this type of crime and save all the time, money and privacy concerns of more-intrusive and expansive government efforts, then maybe there’s something worth considering.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Faraways.

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Invariably those companies have targeted the mobile carriers that run those networks, but a new startup called Wandera is focusing its MDO technology on the people who get stuck paying those data bills: enterprises. Wandera has attracted the attention of Bessemer Venture Partners, which lately has been investing heavily in the telecom and mobile infrastructure space. Bessemer is the sole investor in Wandera’s Series A round, forking over $7 million.

Wandera was founded by Eldar and Roy Tuvey, two brothers from London who created security software-as-a-service company ScanSafe and sold it to Cisco Systems in 2010 for $183 million. After working for Cisco for two years, the Tuveys decided to return to the SaaS model with a new startup, this time selling optimization rather than security software to their enterprise clients.

Eldar Tuvey said Wandera has built what is in essence a cloud proxy server through which all phone-bound HTTP traffic is routed on its way to an enterprise’s mobile devices. During that traffic’s brief stay in that cloud, Wandera applies any number of optimization and compression techniques intended to reduce the amount of data that flows over the airwaves to those devices – and ultimately reduce the mobile data bill the company has to pay each month.

But Tuvey said Wandera is providing more than just a megabyte-culling data grinder. It’s developed a sophisticated set of monitoring and control tools that allows an enterprise to keep tabs on what apps, webpages and services its employees are using and to apply specific policies on that use.

For instance, an enterprise could set strict limits on social networking use, banning it outright or imposing caps on the amount of data an employee can consume in the Facebook app. Or it could prohibit video streaming when employees are roaming internationally, but allow it when they’re on their home networks.

Tuvey said enterprises can even go so far as to apply specific optimization features depending on the app used. So a company could let employees consume as much video or social networking content as they please — as long as they’re willing to put up with choppy frame rates and pixelated images.

“They can implement whatever policies they see fit,” Tuvey said. “It’s completely up to the company.”

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Subscribers of AT&T’s 300 MB or 800 MB international data plan will now get free access up to 1 GB of Wi-Fi data primarily  in airports and public places in major European cities as well as in select cities in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Japan and New Zealand. (You can find a complete list on AT&T’s site.) In February, AT&T inked a similar deal with The Cloud to give international customers access to 16,000 hotspots in the U.K. To access those networks, customers subscribing to a global data plan only need download AT&T’s international app.

That may sound like a perk, but it’s really not much of one when you consider what AT&T charges for these international plans: $60 for a 300 MB bucket of data and $120 for 800 MB. If customers know their primary mobile data use is going to be over Wi-Fi they can by a much cheaper Wi-Fi-only plan with no restrictions and access to much bigger hotspot footprint. For instance, Boingo offers its own $35-per-month plan that covers two devices and provides unlimited access to 200,000 hotspots in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Still, AT&T certainly isn’t alone in charging exorbitant rates for mobile data roaming. All of the U.S. carriers have pretty much priced global data plans beyond the reach of ordinary travelers – at least travelers who want to use their smartphones as they would ordinarily. Adding Wi-Fi access is a nice touch, but it doesn’t fix the broken global data roaming system.

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In theory, data from mobile phones lets us do things like map traffic patterns, while web-behavior data can be a boon to researchers and others trying to make sense of how people conduct their online lives. The thing is, it’s damn hard to keep that data anonymous. Perhaps all we can hope for is to keep potentially sensitive data out of the wrong hands.

The latest proof of how hard it is to anonymize data came earlier this week, when a group of MIT researchers published a paper based on their analysis of 1.5 million cell phone traces over 15 months inside a “small European country.” A press release highlighting the paper’s publication nicely sums up the findings, which are somewhat startling:

“Researchers … found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of them.

“In other words, to extract the complete location information for a single person from an ‘anonymized’ data set of more than a million people, all you would need to do is place him or her within a couple of hundred yards of a cellphone transmitter, sometime over the course of an hour, four times in one year. A few Twitter posts would probably provide all the information you needed, if they contained specific information about the person’s whereabouts.”

And assuming you’re concerned about protecting privacy, it gets worse:

“[T]he probability of identifying someone goes down if the resolution of the measurements decreases, but less than you might think. Reporting the time of each measurement as imprecisely as sometime within a 15-hour span, or location as imprecisely as somewhere amid 15 adjacent cell towers, would still enable the unique identification of half the people in the sample data set.”

All it takes to get started is a few pieces of data against which to compare the anonymized mobile data. “For re-identification purposes,” the authors write in the paper, titled Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility, “outside observations could come from any publicly available information, such as an individual’s home address, workplace address, or geo-localized tweets or pictures.”

Have data, can track. Source: Nature Scientific Reports

We’ve been down this road before

From the Netflix paper. Source: University of Texas

This news might ring a bell to anyone who follows the world of web data. After releasing anonymous user data as part of its Netflix Prize competition in 2007, researchers were able to de-anonymize it using publicly available movie reviews from IMDB. In 2006, AOL released a bounty of supposedly anonymous search data for research purposes, but it was quickly mirrored onto public web sites and people began picking individual searchers out of the sea of anonymous identification numbers.

There are plenty of non-digital examples, too. The Unique in the Crowd authors point to one case where a medical database was analyzed against a voter list to discover a governor’s health records. In a 2007 post for Wired, security expert Bruce Schneier cited a couple of analyses of census data, including one using 1990 census data and proving that 87 percent of Americans could be identified using just their ZIP code, sex and date of birth.

And then there are those fitness-tracking devices. At out Structure: Data conference last week, Central Intelligence Agency CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt gave the audience — the whole world, really — a scare by noting that it’s possible to identify someone based solely on his gait. That kind of information might not get people lining up for web-connected pedometers and other fitness devices.

Any type of de-anonymization is only exacerbated in an era of social media. The University of Texas researchers who decoded the Netflix data were able to speculate on individuals’ political positions, sexual orientation and other characteristics, but we now give that information away for free on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, you name it. If you’re inclined to stalk someone, steal identities or engage in any other malicious undertaking, access to names, photos, interests, location, checkins and other information makes for a hearty personal-data stew, and it just takes one piece to get the rest.

A choice between privacy and a better world?

However, if we can get past the inherent privacy concerns, these types of anonymous, aggregate data sets can be incredibly valuable. Companies such as Google, Apple and INRIX are using smartphones and in-vehicle devices to map traffic patterns and how people move throughout cities in efforts to improve both commute times and urban planning. Social scientists accessing data from companies such as Google and Facebook could learn a lot about the intricacies of online behavior. And predictive analytics platforms such as Kaggle present an opportunity optimize everything from business processes to health care.

Source: INRIX

The holy grail of anonymous data lies in genomics and the hope that lots and lots of quality data will help researchers discover cures for diseases like cancer. Because of the relative uniqueness of each individual cancer case, researchers hope a massive pool of data on sequenced genomes will help them spot patterns and commonalities that no amount of traditional lab work will uncover.

Further complicating things is the fact that the companies delivering our favorite web services rely on our personal data to make money. Whether we like it or not, targeted advertising pays the bills for free services, and doing targeted advertising well requires a lot of personal data. One could argue that a major focus of the data science movement that has taken the world by storm is stitching together various pieces of anonymous data from across the web in order to create holistic images of consumers.

In fact, web companies have gotten so good at de-anonymizing data that the Federal Trade Commission has all but abandoned the term “personally identifiable information.” In a 2010 report on online privacy, the agency wrote that any guidelines it proposes will likely apply

“to those commercial entities that collect data that can be reasonably linked to a specific consumer, computer, or other device. This concept is supported by a wide cross-section of roundtable participants who stated that the traditional distinction between PII and non-PII continues to lose significance due to changes in technology and the ability to re-identify consumers from supposedly anonymous data.”

“Going forward,” the Unique in the Crowd authors conclude, “the importance of location data will only increase and knowing the bounds of individual’s privacy will be crucial in the design of both future policies and information technologies.” This rings equally true for every other type of personal data, especially given the relative ease with which they can be analyzed against each other to create a sum that greater than the whole of its parts.

One has to wonder, though, what types of policies and technologies will come about to keep data anonymous and available to the people who need it while still maintaining its utility. Privacy is important, but is it worth the opportunity costs of not trying to solve the types of problems that large, anonymous data sets are ideal for solving? If true anonymization is really that difficult, perhaps the best bet is just to double down on security and try to ensure that valuable data — anonymous or not — doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

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The new data-only plans, announced Monday, start at $30 a month for 4 GB and scale up to $335 for 50 GB a month. Consumers can add up to 10 devices to their plans – each tablet or gaming device costing $10 a month and each laptop or modem costing $20 – and small businesses can add up to 25. In addition to the new data-only tiers, AT&T plans to supersize all of its shared plans, offering 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB buckets to both consumers and small businesses.

When you compare the new data-only plans to its regular data share pricing plans, the differences are substantial. A 4 GB plan on a regular mobile share plan costs $70 a month, $40 more than the equivalent data-only plan. At higher tiers the discount is just as big: a 20 GB regular share plan costs $200, while the data-only version costs only $110.

AT&T justifies the differences in pricing through the inclusion of unlimited voice and SMS in its regular plans, while data-only plans, by definition, include no such benefits. But AT&T’s complex shared plan framework actually double-charges customers for those traditional telephony and messaging services. Connecting a smartphone or feature phone to the AT&T network costs anywhere from $30 to $45 a month, and you would assume that those premium rates reflect the cost of voice and SMS.

The good news is AT&T is encouraging the use of data-only devices on its network. It wants to usher in the tablet and mobile-connected revolution on its networks so it’s offering steep data discounts for those use cases. It’s a trend we’re likely to see throughout the U.S. mobile industry. The problem is AT&T seems to be inadvertently punishing the large majority of smartphone subscribers in the process.

Here’s an example: If you were a data-only customer with two tablets and a 4G mobile hotspot, you could get a data-only plan that would allow you pool 10 GB a month between your three devices for the very reasonable rate of $100 a month. Now if you were to add a single smartphone to the same plan you wouldn’t just be tacking on a $30-$40 standard connection charge. Instead, you would wind up paying $190 a month by moving to a mixed voice-and-data plan. Basically you wind up spending nearly double to add talk and text to single gadget in a four-device plan – that does not seem like a fair deal to me.

I applaud AT&T for offering cheaper data options and exploring the concept of a data-only mobile service. But in the process it’s also exposing the fundamental flaws of its regular shared plans. AT&T really needs to do away with the complex system of sliding connection fees, which ultimately charge different rates for data depending on the device you use. Instead, it should make it clear as day what it’s charging for voice, SMS and the cost of connecting a device. Then it should just sell us data at a set universal price.

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For a $3.49 a month, you can store up to 500 MB of unused data in a kind of rainy-day fund, which grow to a maximum size of 20 GB. The feature is available to all of its USB dongle and mobile hotspot customers, whether they pay for subscription tiers or indulge in FreedomPop’s free 500 MB plan (though if you enroll in the rollover plan, the service is obviously no longer free). Using FreedomPop’s social networking features, customers can also give portions of that banked bandwidth away.

FreedomPop notified its existing customers of the service on Wednesday, and in 24 hours 30 percent of its free customers had enrolled in the service, a FreedomPop spokesperson said.

Why the interest? Well, if you think about it, there’s not too much too you can do with 500 MB a month if you’re regularly using a mobile broadband service. But there are many people who only need mobile broadband on occasion. I count myself as one of them – I really only need a mobile hotspot service when traveling.

While I’m completely unwilling to pay $30 a month for a hotspot I use only every few months. I would be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a hotspot that I would allow me to consume hefty amounts of gigabytes at specific times without incurring massive overage fees. It’s a concept that FreedomPop competitor Karma is also latching onto, selling a gigabyte of data that never expires for $14.

The subscription model only works if you’re a regular user of a service. In the case of mobile broadband there is a huge potential for casual users who don’t want to be locked into pricey monthly plans. It’s good to see that companies like Karma and FreedomPop are starting to tailor their pricing to target just such users.

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According to a new report from Chetan Sharma Consulting, data accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. operators’ service revenue in the 4^th quarter, and the rapid transition from dumb phones to smartphones is driving that number upwards. Meanwhile, unlimited talk plans are proliferating even as voice plan pricing is falling. That’s causing average voice revenue per subscriber to drop.

Eventually the rising data line and falling voice line will intersect on the industry’s revenue graph. Sharma plots that meeting point in the 4^th quarter of 2013, at which point operators will start to look more like ISPs than phone companies.

I wouldn’t expect an overnight transformation once they pass that halfway mark, but it’s fair to say carriers will start behaving differently as the economics of the mobile market shift. Operators will most likely attempt to accelerate their gains in data, while de-emphasizing voice even more.

Voice revenues are actually declining faster than data revenues are growing. For every 48 cents in new data revenue operators raked in the fourth quarter, they lost 64 cents in voice revenue, Sharma found. To make up for those losses, they will try to upsell their customers on data plan tiers and — in the case of AT&T and Verizon at least — try to force more of their customers off grandfathered unlimited data plans. They will also try to swing more of their customers toward smartphones and tablets and migrate more subscribers to new LTE networks — both of which will drive more data use.

Carriers won’t have to prod their customers too much. While the 4G-connected tablet market is still slow, smartphones accounted for 84 percent of fourth quarter handset sales in the U.S. In just two years, Verizon has moved 21.6 million subscribers over to its LTE network. Simultaneously the typical consumer’s hunger for mobile data is only increasing.

“The smartphone data consumption at some operators is averaging close to 1 GB/mo,” Sharma wrote in the report. “Some devices are averaging close to 2 GB/mo. As we move into 1GB range along with the family data plans kicking in, you can expect the data tiers to get bigger both in GBs and dollar amount.”

The swift decline in average voice revenue per subscriber will matter less and less to operators as data takes over, as voice will account for far less of their overall revenue. In fact, you’ll probably see a complete shift in the way operators treat voice and data in their pricing plans from what we saw five years ago. When voice and SMS were king and queen, operators had variety and sophistication in their pricing tiers, while data plans were a commodity — for an additional $15 to $30 a month you got as much as you wanted.

Now voice and SMS have become the commodity, increasingly available only in unlimited packages, while data plans have become more and more granular. Verizon and AT&T have taken the ultimate step toward commoditizing voice and SMS, making them unlimited-use features standard in their family plans, just like voicemail. I suspect that this trend will not only continue, but voice prices will drop further as carriers put all of their chips into selling data.

We won’t just see more and increasingly larger data tiers, but operators will begin creating specialty plans to differentiate between different types of data, just as they created nights-and-weekends and friends-and-family plans in the boomtown days of voice. Customers will be able to buy plans that give them unlimited access to IP communications services or social networking. They could choose to pay extra fees each month to access faster speeds than their neighbors.

If there is a way to slice and dice data into an appealing tiered plan, operators will figure out how to do it. Once they pass that halfway mark, there’s no looking back. They will become mobile ISPs with voice businesses on the side.

Eclipse photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Igor Kovalchuk; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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