Wireless Carrier knows

Consumers use phones and tablets to access everything from work email to bank accounts, but can users be sure that the data on their devices is for their eyes only?

Without physical access to the device, reading personal data on a smartphone is very difficult. the one party that has constant access to the data running to and from your phone, however, is your wireless carrier. How much does your provider know about you? Quite a lot—but for the most part, the carrier sees the information in an aggregated form that is not associated with individual users.

Hardware: Wireless carriers need to know what kinds of devices are connected to their networks so that they can provide the appropriate amount of bandwidth. For example, if the carrier knows that its users’ smartphones typically have large screens, it can conclude that those devices will probably consume a large amount of streamed video.

Alcatel-Lucent, for one, makes analytical equipment for learning what devices are connecting to a specific radio, and from how far away. Operators can then gauge where to point the antennas, and how much power to supply. Operators don’t use network intelligence equipment to find any one device’s physical location on a map. Instead, they focus on the position of devices relative to the cell tower.

‘Metadata’ about data packets: each data packet sent has a “wrapper” that includes the origin and destination, the protocol (Ip), whether the packet holds data from a real-time service such as VoIp, and the amount of data. the operator uses the information to get a rough idea of the content’s purpose, without discovering details about the content itself. Besides measuring the broadband usage of subscribers with metered plans, the wrapper helps the carrier prioritize time-sensitive data, like VoIp packets, over other packets,
such as mp3 downloads. Network intelligence data also lets carriers identify where bandwidth-hungry applications are heavily used. For instance, if mobile video chat becomes popular in a downtown area during business hours, the carrier might increase the bandwidth available to that area during that time period.

Deep Packet Inspection: DpI software captures a few packets of data flowing to or from a device, and then quickly analyzes the details of the content. This practice allows the carrier to quantify which websites users are visiting, plus what kinds of services they’re using.

DpI intelligence can help the carrier identify revenue opportunities. If, say,
subscribers are spending a lot of time on Facebook, they might be willing to pay for a higher-priced data plan if the service could guarantee them unlimited use of the app every month.

On the dark side, carriers might use DpI software for “lawful interception”—that is, to capture data for law enforcement from the data streams of “persons of interest.” And critics have cited DpI as a tool that operators may use to detect and then inhibit or block certain kinds of content—bittorrent downloads, for example—a violation of the principles of network neutrality.

Targeting individual devices may not always be a bad thing, however. Carriers might map the Ip address of a device to the subscriber’s account if, for instance, a connected device becomes infected with a virus and begins to abuse network resources. In that case, network engineers may either suspend or limit its access until the device is fixed or the offending app is terminated.

A Wealth of Information
Clearly, wireless operators can look pretty deeply into their networks. But carriers are far more interested in the habits of large groups of users than in those of single users. Carriers are looking to see if something is changing in a bad way; they are looking for trends, he says. When a wireless carrier gets a general sense of what’s going on under its umbrella, that means your service could become a whole lot smoother.