“It is no secret that OTT [over the top] Players consume humongous amounts of bandwidth, which puts tremendous pressure on the network infrastructure established by the TSPs, without contributing an iota to this cost” Reliance Jio had said in its submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s consultation on the regulation of over the top (OTT) communication services in July last year.
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Net neutrality advocates, like Barbara Van Schewick, have previously pointed out that networking equipment gets faster, cheaper, and more powerful every year. “Routers handle more traffic with less cost, high capacity fiber gets cheaper, and software-defined networking makes everything more efficient. Simultaneously, new network protocols like 5G drastically expand network capacity,” Van Schewick had argued in her submission to TRAI for the consultation on OTT communication services. She gave the example of a 2021 investor call conducted by Vodafone Idea where the company admitted that while traffic had risen significantly from 2017 to 2021, the cost of moving that data had fallen even faster.
- Date Published:5/14/2024
- Original Publication:Medianama