Will P2P Melt 3G?

The dirty secret of bandwidth is that companies offering lots of it do so under the assumption that you won't be using most of it. They get into trouble, though, when they start offering "unlimited" plans - and people start to come up with ways to actually use a lot more bandwidth than they did under previous low bandwidth solutions. That this happens shouldn't be a huge surprise - but it always seems to take the bandwidth suppliers by surprise. Now, suddenly, people are beginning to realize that high bandwidth applications like P2P file sharing might drag down 3G networks that had simply assumed a marginal increase in bandwidth uses as they fattened up the wireless pipes to the end user.

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