Hang net-neutrality, it seems. Bharti Airtel has once again raised the issue of being paid by Internet companies like Google and Yahoo for allowing consumers to access these sites: Jagbir Singh, Director (Network Services Group) at Bharti Airtel has said in an interview with the Hindu Business Line, that it should be getting "interconnection charges" for data services, adding that content and services companies like Google and Yahoo are making money at the cost of telcos, which had actually invested money in setting up data pipes. He appears to be unhappy at content companies being valued at much more than telcos, and felt that setting up networks was more capital intensive as they pay for spectrum while voice revenues were on a decline. The report mentions that 40% of the total data traffic for Airtel was from service like Facebook, Twitter and Google. This is similar to what Airtel's MD Sunil Bharti Mittal had said at the Mobile World Congress, stating that "The fact is that nobody really sees it from the other way – that YouTube is consuming massive amounts of bandwidth on the network. And somebody has got to pay for that. If Google, Facebook and others are not going to pay for it, it will be transferred entirely onto customers,” he had said at the MWC. This comes at a time when VAS revenues are declining, an independent ecosystem around data is developing: as Vodafone India's Head of Data and Internet Services, Jonathan Bill mentioned at MediaNama's Monetization of Mobile Apps panel (on Saturday), the…
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