MWC Keynote: Vodafone CEO says end app discrimination

BARCELONA -- Consumer groups and Internet services companies have led the charge for net neutrality over wireless networks, but today at Mobile World Congress the CEO of one of the world’s largest mobile operator joined them—with a caveat.

In his keynote address before the Congress, Vodofone CEO Vittorio Colao said operators can’t discriminate between similar applications in the same class—operators can’t favor one provider’s video application over its own or another’s, but an operator has a right to be compensated for it as if it offered the application on its own.

Speaking to a full auditorium, Colao gave the example of a VoIP application. If an operator partners with a particular VoIP provider, it can prioritize its VoIP packets over its network, but if a customer chooses to go with a third-party provider and agrees to pay the operator a premium to prioritize that service, there’s no reason the operator shouldn’t let him.

Ultimately such tiered services will be operators’ saving grace, Colao said: not only will they allow them to balance their revenues against network use, but tiered pricing, as opposed to discrimination against over-the-top services, will allow operators to walk that line between access provider and service provider.

“We need all players in the value chain to be open,” he said. And just as operators should be no exception, device makers and operating system suppliers should also relinquish their hold on development communities and app stores, Colao said.

Developers should be able to deal directly with service providers so they can partner to create partnerships and revenue-sharing deals. And even though fragmentation in device platforms can’t be avoided any longer, the industry needs to redress the problems it creates for consumers and carriers by allowing customers to port applications from one platform to another. ”If a customer paid for an application on one application environment, he should be able to use it another,” Colao said.

Operators have increasingly been trying to take back some control of the wireless application market.

On Monday, 24 global operators, including the US Tier 1 carriers, agreed to create the Wholesale Applications Community with the goal of creating a common application development platform for widgets on their networks and handset portfolios.