Foreshadowing For Future Fees? China Unicom Begins Tracking Data Traffic from Apps Like WeChat Separately

We’ve already written about how China’s telecoms are concerned about over-the-top (OTT) apps like WeChat, and last week China Mobile hinted at one possible way telecoms might look to get some of the money they’re losing back. Now, China Unicom is hinting at another possible approach by beginning to track mobile data usage from OTT apps like WeChat, Miliao, Renren, and QQ Mobile separately from regular data traffic.

To be clear, the company has not, as yet, announced any sort of separate fee structure for these services, and the new tracking features could simply be a way of letting users see in more detail where their data usage is coming from. In the screenshot above (which comes to us via TechWeb), none of the OTT apps listed is using much data, but for some users, such a tracking feature might help them to realize that WeChat is eating up most of their monthly bandwidth.

Given the ongoing brouhaha over how much these apps are costing China’s telecoms as people move away from texting and into mobile chat apps, though, it’s hard not to see this separate tracking as a possible precursor to some kind of separate fee structure. Research firm Ovum estimated that in 2011, worldwide telecoms lost about $14 billion in texting feeds to mobile chat apps, and that picture hasn’t been getting any prettier, especially in China where WeChat has exploded over the last year. If telecoms like China Unicom were looking to charge WeChat users and get some of that lost text message money back, separately tracking data used by OTT apps might be the first step.

For now, Unicom’s new OTT app data traffic tracking is basically just a helpful feature, albeit one that users who wanted it could already get from plenty of third-party apps. But it could turn into something a bit more sinister. We’ll have to wait and see.

(via TechWeb)