Sponsored Data Plan

Abstract

Data traffic demand over the Internet is increasing rapidly, and it is changing the pricing model between Internet service providers (ISPs), content providers (CPs) and end users. One recent pricing proposal is sponsored data plan, i.e., when accessing contents from a particular CP, end users do not need to pay for that volume of traffic consumed, but the CP will sponsor for this data consumption. In this paper, our goal is to understand the rationale behind this new pricing model, as well as its impacts to the wireless data market, in particular, who will benefit and who will be hurt from this scheme. We build a two-class service model to analyze the consumers' traffic demand under the sponsored data plan with consideration of QoS. We use a two-stage Stackelberg game to characterize the interaction between CPs and the ISP and reveal a number of important findings. Our conclusions include: 1) When the ISP's capacity is sufficient, the sponsored data plan benefits consumers and CPs in the short run, but the ISP does not have incentives to further improve its service in the long run. 2) When ISP's capacity is insufficient, the ISP and end users may achieve a win- win trade, while the ISP and CPs always compete for the revenue. 3) The sponsored data plan may enlarge the un- balance in revenue distribution between different CPs; CPs with higher unit income and poorer technology support are more likely to prefer the sponsored data plan.