Sandvine's Caputo and Alcatel-Lucent's McDonald agree that wireless carriers are acutely aware of the fact that too much information (TMI) can be a problem when it comes to detecting activity in the network. Carriers know that a subscriber may deem their monitoring of a single device and its browsing habits as an invasion of privacy. They also realize that you can't learn much about usage demand by watching just one user.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. For billing or security reasons, carriers may associate the device with its owner through something called "IP to subscriber mapping." This involves mapping the IP address of a device to the subscriber account that it's registered under. Doing so can be necessary if, for instance, a connected device becomes infected with a virus and begins to abuse network resources so heavily that it begins to compromise other users' network performance. In that case, network engineers may detect the device running the bad app and either suspend or limit its access to the network until the device is fixed or the offending app terminated.

The operator can easily detect such problems at the level of a device, but isolating problems at the app level is a little more difficult, though still possible, McDonald says. He adds that carriers have detected apps from every major mobile OS that have abused network resources, and says that wireless carriers have been very active in minimizing the adverse effects of these flare-ups.