Cellular carriers may be looking into the data equivalent of 800 numbers to lighten the financial burden of data on customers, the Wall Street Journal reported today. A representative from AT&T said at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday that a new feature would allow app makers, rather than customers, to accept responsibility for data, so that the data usage for that app would not be reflected in the customers' bills. While this would provide some relief for users, it's also an attempt to deflect calls to raise or do away with data usage caps.

John Donovan, senior executive vice president of AT&T's technology and network operations, told the WSJ that the system would be similar to the way toll-free phone numbers work. When customers call an 800 number, long-distance charges and other fees don't apply to them, and costs of the call become the burden of the service called. With this new data system, which Donovan hopes will roll out sometime next year, companies with data-heavy services could assume similar responsibility for the data their customers use.

Data offloading to companies could be a boon for streaming music services like Pandora, Rdio, or Spotify, which have loyal customers who use their apps regularly to play multiple gigabytes of music per month. When asked about the prospect of paying for customers' data usage, an Rdio representative told Ars, "Rdio’s solution is for users to mitigate their data usage by using the app offline or using WiFi."

There are yet bigger data hogs that might benefit, too. If video streaming services like Hulu Plus or Netflix assumed responsibility for data charges, customers wouldn't have to be cautious about their movie- or TV-watching while on the road with only a 3G or 4G connection at hand.

The customers who could take advantage of such offloading are definitely the minority: as research by Tested has shown, most day-to-day apps don't consume all that much data, with most taking up a few dozen megabytes per month.

Still, even being able to offload a single frequently-used app like Google Maps (about 60MB a month) could be the difference between scraping by on the lowest data tiers, like AT&T's 300MB per month for $20, and having to spring for the larger data chunks—AT&T's next tier up is 3GB per month for $30. It could also help prevent overage charges, like Verizon's $10 charge for every gigabyte beyond the monthly allotment, and help customers holding onto unlimited plans avoid the throttling carriers have started to apply for the heaviest users.

Of course, Google's Maps app is a tool that most people would willingly give up portions of their data to use, but competitors offering different services might be interested in drawing attention their way by offering offloaded data. Tested estimates that streaming music from Pandora for an hour each day amounts to about 1.8GB a month; another music service that promised it would let you stream all the gigabytes you wanted but would never send a bill for those gigabytes to your carrier might win over more than a few customers. (Update: A representative from Pandora contacted Ars stating that at 64kbps, an hour of streaming would use 872MB per month. Tested's estimate includes album art and advertisements.)

WSJ also raises the question of net neutrality with regard to data offloading, saying that it would "shift the playing field" toward app developers that can afford to foot customers' data bills. The system decidedly favors the finally secure over the unstable; whether it amounts to a "restriction" of the less financially capable companies under the net neutrality rules would be open for debate.

As always, carriers are not proposing a new plan just to accomodate people who want to listen to Pandora while they make dinner. On the part of the carriers, shifting the responsibility for data costs would help them keep the data caps that they've been so fond of lately. Dealing with customers who use lots of data by throttling them, particularly on unlimited plans, has proven to be an ineffective strategy; by turning around and charging someone else for that data, carriers can keep earning money without having to raise caps.

Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, notes that carriers have declined to prove data caps are anything other than an attempt to create artificial scarcity. "Letting [app] developers pay for overages allows AT&T to monetize scarcity and hide the true cost from consumers—reducing their willingness to switch to providers that actually invest in networks," writes Feld.