It has been talked about for some time among policy-management vendors, but now Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) is moving in the direction of leveraging network bandwidth in smartphone apps as a way to boost revenues.
The operator is expected to publish an API that will essentially allow customers to boost their bandwidth performance for a small fee.
Hugh Fletcher, associate director for technology in Verizon's product development and technology team, said Verizon expects that a subscriber running an app will have the ability to, in real time, add more bandwidth for the app if network congestion happens to slow it down.
Verizon expects to publish the app by the third quarter of 2012, and users will be able to pay for the bandwidth boost via a separate micro payment transaction API that Verizon is also developing.
"I think one of the things that you could do is guaranteed quality of service," Fletcher told PC Mag. "One of the things that we are right now is very democratic in terms of allocating spectrum and bandwidth to users. And just because you request a high quality of service doesn't mean you're going to get it. [The network] will try to give it to you, but if there's a lot of congestion, a lot of people using it, it won't kick people off... I think you could anticipate that maybe you'll have a Skype call that starts going bad," Fletcher said. "Wouldn't you like to be able to hit the turbo button and have that come back up to be a good call?"
For more:
- see this PC Mag article
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