"Initially, we thought they'd have it in for us, obviously, but it's a lot more complicated than that," he said. Carriers want to both offer better pricing for data roaming and reduce the number of bits going over their domestic networks.

For its cloud infrastructure, Onavo is using Amazon EC2 because it had to go to a third party to scale up fast enough to keep up with demand, Rosen said. Without detailing how much capacity Onavo is using on EC2, he said the company has so far saved its users more 9 million megabytes of data through its compression service.

"Essentially, we can scale indefinitely, and we're not seeing any limits at this point," Rosen said. "What we do would not be possible for a startup without the cloud."

The IDG News Service