VoIP and ENUM

In yesterday's Financial Times: AT&T chief warns on Internet cost:

Ed Whitacre, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, warned on Monday that internet content providers that wanted to use broadband networks to deliver high-quality services such as movie downloads to their customers would have to pay for the service or face the prospect that new investment in high speed networks “will dry up.”

“We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network,” said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T’s annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. “We have to show a return on our investments.”

“I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.”

Ok, Ed has learned something since his last statement - he has been told not to blame his customers, so he is turning around blaming the other side.

I always thought the customers are paying and Internet is end-to-end. IMHO a content provider is also a customer somewhere to an ISP. Content providers are not connected to the "so-called" Inrernet cloud by magic.

The traffic is assymetric? Ok, this is the problem between AT&T and the other ISP, and I also assume AT&T is serviing some content providers having customers in other networks.

Consider Walmart blaming customers buying too much.