iOS 6 Wifi Plus Cellular

So apparently Apple as introduced a "Wifi plus Cellular" option for data in iOS 6. The idea is that data can be sourced primarily via Wifi but if Wifi is spotty it can be backed up by using the cellular connection as well. While this idea sounds great I am not sure how well it will work in practice. Firstly, how many applications are designed to take advantage of such redundant connections resolving to different IP addresses and the like. Unless the switch over is transparent and instantaneous, more time may be lost with flipping and application recovery than is gained by the dual channel feature. Ideally I'd like to see the feature go further and say bind specific applications to either Cellular only, Wifi only or both. Consider the situation where you are using your phone for work, you'd like your work emails to come through immediately but you're probably not too concerned if Facebook updates slowly in the background. Secondly it will be interesting to see how the carriers respond to this, there are lots of efforts underway to push users off the RAN and onto Wifi, this setting will ensure that a user on Wifi still consumes cellular resources beyond those required for voice termination. This is particularly a factor in networks where voice is still circuit switched but data is packet switched.

Telco's starting to charge extra for VoIP traffic

TeliaSonera has declared that it will start charging users higher rates for VoIP traffic according to the WSJ. AFAIK this makes them the first ISP to do this. Now, I've said it before that I would really like to see ISPs start to introduce quality of service management for different traffic classes on their network. This will be an integral part of the NBN, but it is not seen in many residential offerings and I have yet to see it anywhere in mobile networks. Now, if TeliaSonera started to differentiate the voice traffic AND used packet marking and adjusted queues on routers etc. to optimise the call flows then they could possibly justify charging extra. However, it is hard to justify charging extra without some sort of service differentiation. In order for people to accept the charges you need to give them a carrot, otherwise you're just beating them with a stick and pissing them off in the process.

Priority Data Access: the one smart pipe feature I want to see now

Mobile carriers, even if they have the best network (e.g. Telstra in Australia), will always at some point suffer from congestion on their network. If you're a Telstra mobile broadband user that spends time in the CBD of either Sydney or Melbourne you may have experienced slow and unreliable data connections whenever you are near one of the (many) Telstra offices, particularly around lunch time. My suspicion is that this is directly caused by the large number of phones in the vicinity that are connecting to the available towers.

I would say that somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90% of my data access is for work, on a mobile plan that is paid for by my employer. This means that I am more than happy to have my employer fork out extra, say $10 a month more to have priority data access on congested nodes. This deviates from the current service offerings of a large number of ISPs that punish users of bandwidth hungry services, such as bit torrent, without giving anyone the ability to easily raise their connection priority above that of other users. Additionally, there is no reward for being a user that doesn't use services such as these.

Further refining this offering you could even pay a lesser amount, say $5 and have the priority access to only a selected number of sites, say your employers domains, thus covering business access as required. This solution would obviously be harder to implement than blanket priority for a given user.

What are your thoughts on this?