Everyone expected Apple to be fretting over the impact of the newly-announced Spotify iPhone app, but it seems there could be wider concerns.

In a 'won't somebody think of the networks?!' type statement, NEC has suggested that Spotify - and other bandwidth-intensive streaming services like it - could impact negatively on other services.

Mark Taylor, the company's head of mobile backhaul, said today: “[Spotify] has grown in popularity over the last six months and it is great to see it entering the mobile market.

"This evolution in mobile usage is great news for application developers, and operators might be able to find ways of increasing ARPU, however, they need to be aware of the implications this has for all parts of the network. If resources or bandwidth are limited, then the user experience will be poor, leading to a potential increase in churn."

Naturally, NEC has a handy network backhaul solution that can take care of all these potential issues.

Advertisement

But it's fair to say that how mobile operators deal with all the extra data traffic that rich media content creates is a salient issue – one that has been written about here before.