What they do is traffic shaping / policy management / caching to reduce the amount of traffic delivered to the device via the mobile network. The issues here a

What they do is traffic shaping / policy management / caching to reduce the amount of traffic delivered to the device via the mobile network. The issues here are part of the overall network neutrality theme besides privacy & user experience issues. Key technologies used are DPI (deep packet inspection) and PCRF (policy & charging rule function) within their IMS and even on the edge of their networks (mostly caching plus location capture etc). There are whole application ecosystems around these providing specialized solutions depending on the infrastructure (provider) used by the TelCom. Leaders of the pack providing such technology are Sandvine, Ericsson, NSN, Cisco, Procera, Allot & Arbor Networks. CDN providers like Akamai or Level3 are tmk also active here. Beyond the above there are pure HW players that e.g. provide TCP/ IP processing equipment which allows real-time inspections of 10/100Gbps streams together with development stacks - typical development providers include Continuous Computing (they have some nice posters to familiarize you with normal TelCom infrastructure) and smaller ones like Cavium Networks. Besides all of the above commercial tools there is the so-called Lawful-Inspection where who-god-knows is peeking into the telcom traffic with special installations (now also in almost all western countries) so that even the Telcos don't know where the data is going to. To get an overview what is happening in that industry segment have a look at http://broabandtrafficmanagement.blogspot.com/ http://broabandtrafficmanagement.blogspot.com/ - be aware that the TelComs are using a special lingo and acronym soup!