TSC Trusted Advisors’ Blog

Smashing Butterflies

I know you’ve seen the old science fiction B movies where the hero warns the antagonist that they should be careful because killing one butterfly in the past could alter the future in ways that can’t be imagined. But somehow the antagonist winds up smashing some poor defenseless butterfly and the hero has to figure out how to keep the world from plunging into some kind of history-induced destructive death spiral.

Well, that butterfly was smashed flat last week by AT&T and it’s going to alter the future for us all.

Last week AT&T announced that unlimited data was going the way of the Dodo, the Newton, and CPM. So why would AT&T change their policy especially in light of the new iPhone release and the iPad – both devices that are reliant on wireless connections to make them useful?

Survival and market perception.

Although there were only a few people that have been stressing the AT&T network, all of us have been able to feel it. AT&T knows that the number of bandwidth-hungry applications has been growing and would continue to grow as long as people didn’t have to pay the consequences – i.e., pay AT&T for the bandwidth that they’re using. So, in an effort to stave off the complaints and competition, AT&T decided to use behavior modification instead of technology to solve their problem.

Is this bad? I think so. Why is this bad? Well, to start with, the unintended consequences of smashing a butterfly flat.

In this case, the butterfly represents the present mobile market trend to just move larger and larger chunks of data. More video, flash, and even mobile devices designed specifically to replay television and movies have impacted the data network and created some pretty interesting support issues for AT&T as well as the mobile device and mobile application vendors. Who do you blame when you can’t watch the latest episode of Stargate Universe because the network has wedged? AT&T doesn’t want to hear it! Ignoring the obvious issue with charging more for more bandwidth (like, what’s my SLA buddy?) the application writers are going to have to think of a clever way to circumvent the band-limit controls in an effort to convince customers to buy and use their bandwidth-hungry applications. How is this going to be done? I’m not sure, but I wager the solution won’t enhance the security of those applications one bit.

At TSC we’re seeing more financial industry companies shoehorning their services into poorly architected and quickly written mobile applications that are tending to support smaller and smaller financial transactions. Some folks are getting on the micro-transaction bandwagon even as you read this. Sure, the amounts for each transaction are smaller, so you’d need a lot of them to make any money, but when there are billions and billions of them the pennies add up rather quickly.

So there’s this kind of schizophrenic behavior: on the one hand we have financial transactions that are moving to smaller sizes while the things that they’re buying are getting larger. A one-hour TV show for less than a dollar will generate a huge amount of data. For most people, you could chew up your monthly data allotment with less than two Stargate episodes. Perhaps that’s what AT&T is counting on – that folks will opt in for the cheaper plan and then pay the horrific penalties for overages. I personally find it hard to believe that any company would intentionally try to use human nature for their own fun and profit, but what do I know?

So where does this take us? Down a dangerous path because in their haste to meet an evolving market demand (more stuff for less bandwidth) application vendors are going to cut even more corners. We’ve seen in the past that the Big Guys are less inclined to ensure that their services are bulletproof than their smaller competitors are, so we’re going to see more security holes. Now they have a business motivation to cut even more testing corners.

So I guess that makes the score Butterfly Smashers 1, Future Security 0.