Talk is rife with the stated wishes of telecom-based broadband Internet access providers such as AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to impose or negotiate surcharges for high-bandwidth content and services such as VoIP.
But rather than the looming battle over net neutrality that many (including yours truly) and I predict in Congress, the FCC and the Courts, the issue may be rendered irrelevant by data compression technologies.
I’m talking about new technologies that, in effect, will rearrange packet-consuming applications down to chunks of a size so manageable that big, established carriers might not be so insistent on extracting extra fees for carriage of those big, bad bits.
That’s the vision held by a key VoIP industry figure whose company churns out some of those bits that the big telcos want to charge extra for.