"The pricing structure is changing, has changed and obviously will continue to evolve," said Verizon Wireless CTO Tony Melone. But one thing that's needed is a way to make sure consumers understand how their usage is going to affect their bills. "You can't solve it on the back of consumers," he said.

To satisfy both consumers and the industry, there need to be both elegant and intuitive ways to deal with constraints on the network, Melone said. One example is switching the subscriber's connection to a Wi-Fi hotspot where it's available, without the user having to make a decision, and making the network adapt to changing coverage conditions by sending a smaller or larger version of a file, he said.

A content provider, MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman, told the panel that application and service developers already think about network capacity when building their products. MLB.com delivers online video and other media about Major League Baseball to about 10 million visitors a day, 37 percent of whom use the service on mobile devices, Bowman said. He expects mobile usage to surpass access on PCs next year.

MLB.com pays attention to file size, bit rates and other factors when building its mobile content offerings, Bowman said. For example, a high-definition video stream to a big-screen TV requires far more network capacity than a sharp-looking stream to a phone's display.

"(If) the user hits 'hi-def' on his or her iPhone, it's not truly hi-def, it just looks like it is," Bowman said.