The mobile company 3 will be pushing through plans for ad-blocking across its network in the UK for a one-day trial next month.
An analyst at Juniper Research has been reported to say other operators will be likely to follow suit. The network operators will be pushing it a consumer benefit but the truth of it is they will be secretly cheering as this will take a lot of data pressure from the network.
Telco announced the trial earlier this year after drawing up a deal with the Israeli startup Shine.
Roi Carthy, Chief Marketing Officer at Shine was reported by business Insider to say that the standard app or website pings an antennae up to 50 times a minute (background signalling). Obviously this is a massive drain on bandwidth; Shine estimates that, depending on where you are, ads will be using up 10 to 50% of users data
The Shine blocker aims to be blocking ads across all mobile display, apps and mobile video ads. What it will not do is filter out ads on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Buzzfeed.
The Network carriers themselves will have the last say in how they roll it out to the public. It could be a premium service, an opt-in, completely free, or, possibly even pre-loaded onto smartphones.
The carriers will also be deciding how much they charge publishers, developers etc to get their content and networks ‘unblocked’.
Three’s trial will “test the ability of the technology to filter out advertising that damages our customers’ mobile browsing experience without impacting their network experience,” according to its press release.
Three will soon be contacting their customers to ask them to agree to take part in the 24-hour trial, which is scheduled to take place the week commencing 13thof June.
Whichever way we look at it, the Network provider will be making more money so hopefully this will be a free service that, ideally will be an opt-in.