SpeedGate: A smart data pricing testbed based on speed tiers

The explosive growth of cellular traffic and its highly dynamic nature often make it increasingly expensive or even infeasible for a cellular service provider to provision enough cellular resources to support the peak traffic demands. Some service providers have started exploring various economic incentives, including smart data pricing, to manage network congestion. We present SpeedGate, a smart mobile data pricing testbed that allows a service provider to experiment with different dynamic pricing strategies. SpeedGate maintains persistent VPN connections to smartphones as users roam between different wireless networks (3G, 4G/LTE, WiFi). The maximum available bandwidth per user session can be adjusted according to various data pricing strategies. We report preliminary results on two trials with a total of 29 users for assessing their willingness to pay (WTP) for various speed tiers. Preliminary observations suggest the challenges of QoS guarantees through speed tiers in the field, the limited dynamic range of WTP values from individual users for different speed tiers, and potential opportunities for auction-based dynamic pricing.