Mixed Reception To AT&T's New Data Pricing Scheme 514
Several readers have sent in followups to Wednesday's news that AT&T was eliminating its unlimited data plan. Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics defends the new plan, writing, "Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted, with an incentive to use as much as you could. That brings price stability to the end user, but it's a horrible way to manage electricity load." Others point out that this will likely engender more scrutiny from regulatory agencies and watchdog groups. A Computerworld article says that one way or the other, AT&T's decision is a huge deal for the mobile computing industry, influencing not only how other carriers look at data rates, but how content providers and advertisers will need to start thinking about a data budget if they want consumers to keep visiting their sites. AT&T, responding to criticism, has decided to allow iPad buyers to use the old, unlimited plan as long as they order before June 7, and Gizmodo has raised the question of "rollover bytes."
Last byte? (Score:4, Insightful)
No AT&T?
No Apple iWhatever?
NO PROBLEMS!
Re:Last byte? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Last byte? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the question that guides the economics of text messaging: Is it worth 20 cents for me to send a message to my friend?
Yeah, no, it's not worth 20 cents per, but over the course of the number of messages I send/receive, 20 cents multiplied by all those is a good deal more than my flat plan for texts, so I go with the plan. Really though, that doesn't affect me. Who it does affect are the people who barely send/receive any. They want figure they might as well get a plan for $5/month instead of risking paying the 20 cents per if they start getting a bunch. If they only send/receive 10 messages, that's $2 right there, and the phone company is making $3. It's trying to nudge people into buying text message insurance
It frankly amazes me that with all the alternatives on most newer phones, SMS is still used and abused.
What other alternatives are there? Yeah, I could use Google Voice, or Gtalk, or Skype, or any other messaging service, but how do I get people who are not on a smartphone to use anything but my Google Voice number. Also, everyone already has my regular number, so getting all my contacts to send me messages there instead of to my phone is damn difficult too.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easy to get people to use your Google Voice phone number instead of your real number: Just change your real number to something else.
I've done it. It's not so hard, but I didn't have a choice: My employer provides my cell phone service, and during a phone shuffle to save money, I got a new number.
Fortunately, I had already been using Google Voice (then Grand Central) for awhile, and a lot of my personal contacts were already up-to-speed with it, and the rest were just a quick phone call or SMS away.
Re:Last byte? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's suppose firms and consumers respond to incentives. Also suppose firms wish to maximize their own profits, while consumers wish to maximize their own utility. If AT&T effectively increases their price for data plans, then what do you think competitors will do?
AT&T's plans will effectively CUT costs for 98% of their user base.
Only 2% who slurp down porn flick after porn flick on their mobile phone will ever exceed 2gig. You know who you are...
Verizon will announce similar tiers soon, they have been hinting since march.
Sprint probably won't initially, but they don't have the network capacity to pick up the top 2% of AT&T's bandwidth hogs. They will be forced into some defensive tiering.
So all carriers will end with tiered pricing, just like the rest of the world.
With enough noise, and bad press, AT&T may raise the top rung to 3 Gig, maybe even 4, and they might raise the bottom rung up to 400meg. These caps seem to be laid out to allow some movement to a level that would engender less grousing.
But tiers are here to stay. There is not a glut of infrastructure out there anymore.
Rent (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine, for a moment, if we bought real estate the way we buy electricity. We'd have a punch card at the door to record when we go out, and when we go in...
Re:Rent (Score:4, Insightful)
That's analogy makes no sense. All your shit is still in the place whether you're there or not. Your rent is based on two things - location and space ("amount used"). If you want a 5 bedroom house, 4 baths, etcetera, it's going to be a damn sight more expensive than 1 room studio. To make your analogy work, hotel rooms would have to be used and it still breaks down.
I think the A&TT change sucks. If you're work and home have wifi, you'll likely be below 200MB per month... but if not, you'll seriously need the 2GB plan. But there are still people who want unlimited. Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited data like someone posted comparing it to an unlimited electric plan. Unlimited in this case means you could download 24/7 on the limited bandwith on the phone. In analogy to electricity, you could easily have an "unlimited" plan, because even the 100/200 amp wire into your house has a "bandwidth" limit of the amount of electricity it can pull at any one time. From there, the electric company just has to figure the average people on unlimited plans actually pull down and adjust their rates to profit from that.
It's not unfeasible, although it will incentivize everyone to switch to electric heat and leave the AC running 24/7 as well as the lights and TV. Of course, if the unlimited electric plan was $499 per month, most people would opt per kwh. OTOH, I dont see that much of a big deal about having a data pipe open 24/7.
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Depends on how you use real estate. Personally, I don't want just anyone in my house any time, so this is how I pay (I pay for each hour I use the house, that is, every hour of the month). But if you would be willing to let anyone else pay an hourly rate to use your house with the stuff, then, yes, this is how it would work, and I think that would be ideal actually!
If you want to compare it to electricity.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortunately my power company doesn't rape my wallet if I use a few extra watts. At 25 dollars per 2gb then they should only charge you
Re: (Score:2)
My electricity company ramps up charges as you use more. Sort of like how taxes work.
Re:If you want to compare it to electricity.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The big difference between electricity and cellphone data charges though, is that if I see I'm going substantially over my limit - very easy to do in the summer - then I can self-regulate, by not using power hogs like air conditioners. Or I can split my load to partial electricity and partial propane (which is ALWAYS prepaid in these parts). That's very hard to do with data consumption. I mean, say you visit a specific news site every day. Not unreasonable. But how do you know what's going to be on the page from one day to the next?
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Most electricity suppliers have a "connection fee" you pay before you use a single kilowatt. My supplier (Pedernales Electric Coop) has a particularly bad connection fee of $22 per month. Your point is partially valid though. A reasonable base fee (say $10/month) plus an appropriate per gigabyte usage fee (say $2 or $3/GB) would be great.
Re:If you want to compare it to electricity.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, do you have to buy a separate electrical plan per each appliance, and then get locked into a 2-year deal with your electricity plan?
Oh, and also electricity is heavily regulated because it's a utility. Are cell phone carriers prepared to be treated that way?
Re: (Score:3)
Per the ToS:
Should a customer exceed 2 GB during a billing cycle, they will receive an additional 1 GB of data for $10 for use in the cycle
While it would be nicer if they billed in smaller chunks, they charge you 0.0100 dollars per megabyte over. The overage actually costs less than the first two gigabytes.
Though even that seems impossibly high for bandwidth in the middle of a city. Who would pay $1 to watch a clip on YouTube, or $5 to watch a video on Hulu? Who would pay $30 a month to listen to Pandora for an hour a day? Cheap or unlimited data plans spur the invention of new services. They expand the boundaries of the Inte
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone pre-pay for electricity?
I do. I'm signed up with powershop [powershop.co.nz], which provides various specials that you can purchase in advance to save a bit of money.
For example, they had a "winter" special, offered three months before the start of winter, and I could purchase blocks of 150 units of electricity over three months of winter (50 units per month). Now that New Zealand is experiencing winter, electricity prices have risen by about 3 cents per unit, so I've saved a bit of money by doing that (about $4 saving, where I could have made abou
If by that you mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Mixed Reception To AT&T's New Data Pricing Scheme
That's true provided your definition of "mixed reception" encompasses the pitchfork and torch carrying mob ready to storm AT&T headquarters.
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Oh, I thought they just mean that you couldn't get reliable reception with the AT&T data plan.
Re:If by that you mean... (Score:4, Funny)
Incidentally, "mixed reception" is the perfect description of AT&T's service.
But imagine this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine, for a moment, if you bought infrastructure equipment, and sold only the capacity you could actually deliver at any given time? Regardless of whether your equipment is fully utilized or underutilized, you still have to pay the cost of the electricity to power it, and the real estate in which it is housed.
This is why flat pricing models are a good idea. Imagine for a moment if AT&T charged by the byte, and people stopped using all that bandwidth to save money. AT&T's income would decrease, but not their cost of business (hey, they've already bought the equipment, might as well use it...)
If AT&T charges a flat rate, they can predict their income and plan accordingly. However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next. Not only this, but there are perhaps a sizable portion of their customers who will instead try to minimize their costs. With a fixed rate plan, they have no option. But with a pay-per-byte plan, users like me could use their services for pennies a month. AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month. The reason why people pay so much for data plans is because they have to, not because they want to. Give the people the ability to save money, and they will take advantage of it.
These kinds of plans have been tried before, and they always fail. Email is cheap, bandwidth-wise, and movies can be had from Netflix for less than the cost of the bandwidth used by the net.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
These kinds of plans have been tried before, and they always fail. Email is cheap, bandwidth-wise, and movies can be had from Netflix for less than the cost of the bandwidth used by the net.
What are you smoking??? Gasoline, Electricity, and (utility delivered) gas are all charged per-usage! Where I live, gas has a small monthly fee to keep up the pipes, but the vast majority of the bill is usage!
These kinds of plans work well when customers need an incentive to conserve, and everything I hear from the telcos is that they want us to conserve bandwidth because we use it as fast as they can build it.
Give them your money! (Score:3, Insightful)
What's special about "infrastructure equipment"? When your grocery store decides how much perishable food to stock, they have to make exactly the same kind of prediction. And yet few stores insist on monthly milk-buying contracts.
The truth is that a recurring fee is the ultimate wet dream of anybody designing a business model. Harder to do when there's real competition. Which there is in the grocery business.
And also in the wireless data business almost everywhere outside the U.S. Which is why, contrary to
Stupid comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity and other limited resources are NOT like data. The only limitation on an internet connection is bandwidth, which is a rate, rather than an absolute quantity. The comment in the article comparing unlimited data plans to unlimited electricity is just stupid, and shows a complete lack of understanding of basic physics.
If you burn 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity (which equals 3.6 billion joules of energy), that energy had to come from a specific quantity of oil, coal, natural gas, or some other limited resource. Generally speaking, if you hadn't wasted that power, the power company would still have that much in natural resources left to use. So every unit of energy carries a dollar cost.
Data isn't like that. If the connection is present, it costs no more for the internet provider to transmit at maximum bandwidth versus transmitting nothing at all, for a given period of time. You might as well use it. The only limitation is bandwidth, since the "pipe" is only so big, so if everyone is trying to transmit/receive data at the same time, they're going to be limited as they have to share.
If the ISPs are worried about people hogging bandwidth, there are other ways of dealing with that, such as by limiting their individual bandwidth. For instance, those found to be hogs during peak times can have their bandwidth limited to less than others who are more occasional users. Limiting people to a specific quantity of data is just stupid and greedy. If someone downloads tons of stuff during off-hours, making use of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused, this does not cost the company anything, nor does it inconvenience other customers.
There is absolutely no reason data providers cannot place transparent bandwidth limits on hogs during peak hours so that everyone can get along, without having to add on any extra fees or hard limits, or causing any inconvenience to other customers.
Re: (Score:2)
Plus, with electricity you have more control over how much you use and consumption is more predictably related to what you do. Whereas the iPhone uses data for all kinds of things without asking you, and it's not predictable.
Ever travelled overseas w/ an iPhone? It's a *nightmare* to stay within a data budget (like if you pay for a fixed amount of roaming data). Even just receiving a voicemail that you don't listen to uses data. Basically you can either turn data roaming off completely, or play limit ro
Re:Stupid comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Data isn't like that. If the connection is present, it costs no more for the internet provider to transmit at maximum bandwidth versus transmitting nothing at all, for a given period of time. You might as well use it. The only limitation is bandwidth, since the "pipe" is only so big, so if everyone is trying to transmit/receive data at the same time, they're going to be limited as they have to share.
You're wrong. Radio spectrum is a finite resource; there's no more untapped frequencies. It follows the same economics of energy, which is constrained by how fast we can suck it out of the ground. Radio spectrum is constrained by how smartly we can divide it up.
If someone downloads tons of stuff during off-hours, making use of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused, this does not cost the company anything, nor does it inconvenience other customers.
Again, there's still more demand then the bandwidth can handle. What happens as soon as a bunch of people decide to batch up their less-time-sensitive stuff and send it at night? Then nighttime will become constrained. We're already seeing bandwidth peaks at night.
Re:Stupid comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
You're wrong. Radio spectrum is a finite resource; there's no more untapped frequencies. It follows the same economics of energy, which is constrained by how fast we can suck it out of the ground. Radio spectrum is constrained by how smartly we can divide it up.
No, you're missing the point. Radio spectrum is just like internet bandwidth: the absolute amount is infinite, it's only the rate that is limited. Haven't you ever taken a calculus class?
If I transmit some information over a radio, it only uses up that spectrum during that time. It doesn't reduce the spectrum forever.
Again, there's still more demand then the bandwidth can handle. What happens as soon as a bunch of people decide to batch up their less-time-sensitive stuff and send it at night? Then nighttime will become constrained. We're already seeing bandwidth peaks at night.
It doesn't matter. It can all be handled by prioritizing traffic, and giving higher priority to those who use the least bandwidth. People who batch it up and download all at the same time will have the same effect as if they did it during the day: they'll be deprioritized in favor of people who have very low BW utilization.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
yes, but the radio channel, like the analog long distance phone lines of old, can only carry so many transmission at a time (new ways to vode the data onto the channel keeps upping that number tho).
end result was that a long distance call was payed by the minute to get people to keep their calls short so the telco didnt have to dig one trench for every person in the world.
this is so they dont have to set up a cell pr square meter of city.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, you're missing the point. Radio spectrum is just like internet bandwidth: the absolute amount is infinite, it's only the rate that is limited. Haven't you ever taken a calculus class?
If I transmit some information over a radio, it only uses up that spectrum during that time.
Don't criticize people about calculus when you screw up dimensional analysis. Both the radio spectrum and Internet bandwidth measure rates. The total amount of data transmitted is unlimited (essentially). (It's silly to say it's infinite, since that's only over infinite time scales, but it's true that, essentially, no finite resource is consumed by the transit of data.) However, they don't measure the total amount of data transferred, they measure rates. The term "bandwidth", even, comes directly from terms
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I find it interesting that people on such supposedly tech-savvy place like slashdot have so much trouble understanding the fundamental issues involved with this.
Anyway, I'm not going to go into full rant mode, I just want to say that the network I used to connect from home does pretty much exactly what you suggest. The standard rate was 1650/825, and once you go over 200MB withing a short period of time, you'd be dropped to 70% of that, and 50% after another 200MB or so. If you laid off the torrenting for 3
Mmeasured cs. Flat rates.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I woud LOVE it if at&t and, in fact, all phone companies, just charged me a fixed cost per text message, per minute call, per 1M data. A rate that was competitive. This works just fine for the water works, the electric company, the postal service, the toll system on the highway, to name a few.
I would be OK if they tiered a bit - first 500 minutes talk at $0.05/minute down to $0.03/min till 2000 minutes, etc.. Same with texting, same with data - essentially switching on bulk mode as you "earn it."
Right now, through "fear" and published horror stories about giant bills, they manage to talk most people into "flat unlimited rate" - show me the person who uses exactly 200M of data, or exactly 900 minutes of talk time. Rollover is sorta nice, but the rules around it are petty and serve to lessen the usefulness (expired minutes, resetting when you change plans, etc..)
If everyone paid exactly for what they used - you and everyone of us would win. Flat unlimited rate is a great idea, except that it doesn't really save anyone money - unless the resource is unlimited - which bandwidth cannot claim to be - in fact, mathematically and economically speaking, it can't.
Like electricity? Not quite. (Score:4, Insightful)
When you pay your electric bill, you typically pay a flat rate (a connection charge) to your electric company for the transmission system, and a per kwh rate to them to buy electricity from any number of generating plants. Use 1 kwh or 1000kwh, your payment stays the same. Now if you want to jump to the next level (1ph 120v to 3ph 480v) then you pay a higher connection charge, but still don't pay more for your usage for the /transmission/ of the power.
If you want to follow that model then I'll gladly pay AT&T $5/month for their network transmission services, and a per MB rate that they can pass on to the webmasters and hosts of the websites that I visit.
Data = Electricity, Network = Powerline (Score:2, Interesting)
Two people pump x amount of gas each from a fuel pump at the same time. The hose is split so that they can do this simultaneously. This goes relatively quickly.
One hundred people pump x amount of gas each from a second fuel pump at the same time. Again, the ho
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah....BUT if you have 200 people on one hose you should be able to afford a bigger hose.
It's not like electricity (Score:2, Interesting)
FTS:
"Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted, with an incentive to use as much as you could. That brings price stability to the end user, but it's a horrible way to manage electricity load."
That analogy doesn't work, because the main constraint for electricity isn't network capacity, it's the fact that most current methods of production consume
Electricity? well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, if we talked about how we bought wired data until recently, the comparison would be that you'd be sold an unlimited electrical plan, but if you used more than 90 volts you got an angry letter from the ISP and executives claiming that you were hogging the wires while congressmen pontificated about tubes.
At least with metered billing we can discuss limits and such in a sane and rational matter.
"Smart" phones? (Score:2)
BS like this keeps me from graduating from my pay-as-you-go phone where I average ~$10/mo to something snazzier that would immediately jump to ~$100/mo. The plans don't scale well at all to really light users like me who would enjoy the niftier phones, but had the gang rape every month when my 30 minutes of calls and couple email checks would still cost me ~$100.
Sadly sooner or later AT&T and the like will eventually find a quiet way to collude and make pay-as-you-go suck bad enough, or drive the price
The new plan is a really bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The plan is just a way for AT&T to get rid of its least profitable customers. These are the ones who actually *use* the network capacity that they pay for. Most people are light users. They pay a lot of money but don't actually use much capacity. AT&T loves these people, because it's essentially free money. The ones who actually use the service are not very profitable, because AT&T has to provide capacity for them. (Capacity isn't needed if you don't use the network!) So rather than expanding capacity to match demand, they're making it economically infeasible to *use* the capacity that you pay for.
AT&T claims that most people use less than 2 GB/month. That's great, but that's partly because of the lack of good applications for most smartphones. (iPhone users use much more than half the data on the network.) Imagine if AT&T had imposed a cap based on what most people used in 1993. The web would have no pictures. You couldn't afford them. If they based it on what people used in 1996, the web would have no audio or video. You couldn't afford it. Same with most applications used today, network based software distribution, Skype, and many other things we take for granted. The cap makes higher bandwidth applications unaffordable for most users, and will seriously stifle the development of new technologies for mobile device.
This is a truly bad idea...
I kinda like it (Score:2)
I've had an iPhone for a year and a half. I love it, but for the last six months (the months I could review) I never even got up to 100MB per month. I use the phone all the time, but often within WiFi range.
I'd rather pay half as much to get what is still more than double my normal usage. It would also discourage casual youtube streaming and thus probably improve network speed for everyone.
The one thing I'd REALLY want from AT&T (and Apple) is an app that reliably monitors billable bytes in a billing pe
Re: (Score:2)
Me too! Part of that is the slow speed of AT&T 3G, which makes anything other than email or simple browsing painfully slow. But I will be happy to save the $15/month with zero impact on my usage. Most of the heavy users I see posting on forums about this say they do stuff like continuously streaming audio all day, using their phone as a radio. Whatever floats your boat.
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Upgrading the network would improve the speed while actually letting you use the service you pay for. Casual youtube streaming is why you pay them. Bandwidth is not some resource that must be conserved.
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Download the AT&T app. You can log in, pay your bill, and see how much data, minutes, and texts you've used in this billing period.
Everyone Will Move To This (Score:2)
Plugging toasters into the wall (Score:3, Interesting)
Some early toasters didn't come with the traditional two-pronged plug. Instead, you had to unscrew a light bulb and screw in the toaster's plug. Why? Because the electric company charged more for general-purpose outlets! Prior to metered billing, people paid for electricity by the number of fixtures and their estimated electric use. Everything became sane once the electric companies introduced metered billing.
Anyway, AT&T's $20 / month tethering plan is just going to make me switch when my contract is up. Charge me for the bandwidth that I use, not for the device!
Charge for tethering is a complete rip-off now (Score:5, Insightful)
The ridiculous part is that they're still charging a fee to enable tethering. That sort of makes sense with an "unlimited" plan. Presumably, the plan price was based on an estimate of how much data you'd use. Since tethering will obviously drive up usage, that assumption is no longer valid. (This highlights the absurdity of so-called "unlimited" plans that aren't really.)
But now that you are paying for actual use, there's no excuse to charge anything for tethering. You've paid for 2 GB (or whatever), and it shouldn't matter how it gets used. If you use more, you pay more.
I'd really like to see a regulatory authority question that charge.
App$ (Score:2)
Curious to see if app revenue goes down, since many of them require bandwidth usage to function. Also, in the case of my Backflip, if AT&Twill still charge high monthly fees for bandwidth heavy apps like Navigator. If I'm paying extra to download maps, I sure as hell ain't paying $10 a month for a GPS app.
American phone companies charge too much (Score:5, Informative)
Now I'm in Palo Alto, that barely buys me a voice plan. And even if I give them 2x what I did in Hong Kong, I'm still capped. And AT&T's reception in cities (like San Fran) sucks - yet it's Hong Kong that has more frickin' high rise buildings to block the 3G signals - and in Hong Kong 3G fucking works. I really, REALLY have no idea how any of you guys can try to defend AT&T over their crap service.
Re: (Score:2)
I really, REALLY have no idea how any of you guys can try to defend AT&T
But... but... the population is more dense there so it's cheaper to run the wireless wires because everyone is closer together</defaultbandwidthapologistexcuse>
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it is a "cultural thing." In American culture we accept some kind of divine rule of kings for large corporations. We don't boycott or complain. We take the shiny and pay out the nose. Our markets are based on brand identification and our purchasing moves are dictated almost purely by ads and marketing. In other cultures, money has value, and demanding good service for exchange of money is not seen as being 'cheap' or 'crass.'
It's about budget all right (Score:2)
The issue with per-unit data plans is that there's a big difference between my data usage and my electricity usage: who's in control. With electricity I know how much my appliances use every month, and I can control that by controlling my appliances. If my electricity bill's too high, I can elect to turn off lights more or switch to lower-wattage or more-efficient bulbs. I can turn my computer off when I'm not using it. I control how much electricity I use and when, and I have a fairly fine degree of contro
The goal-post moves. (Score:2)
I can sort of relate to this... (Score:2, Interesting)
Back when we ran a small, dialup ISP, we charged everyone the more or less standard $20 per month. Then we did a little number crunching and found that most people used less than 100 hours a month, but there were a handful that were online pretty much 24/7. In at least one case, it was a family that had mom on ebay during the day, the kids gaming until late and then dad on during the wee hours. They complained bitterly when we raised the fee for "unlimited", but calmed down when we explained that it cost us
Expensive per MB (Score:4, Interesting)
What really bugs me about the rate changes is how much they are charging per MB when compared to a standard DSL or cable connection at home. Comcast now has a 250GB / 250,000MB data cap and my service runs around $43 per month. So my cost runs around .017 cents per MB assuming I use my full 250GB allotment.
With AT&T's model the cost per MB on the $15 plan is 7.5 cents per 200 MB and the $25 plan is 1.25 cents per 2,000 MB. This is roughly a 440% and a 73% respective increase of the cost of my home bandwidth.
Yes I know it's not quite a apple to apple comparison, but the cost of the bandwidth and wireless support can be no where near the prices they are charging. Unfortunately in the states this goes for the biggest two wireless carriers ATT and Verizon.
I have no problem paying for what I am using, but the pricing of there data is way out of the ball park.
Note: Yes I know my numbers are not exact and I also know I didn't use the standard 1,024k when doing my calculations from GB to MB.
where is the content lobby? (Score:2)
Why is there no content industry trade group which lobbies congress to protect their business.
This will hurt the bottom line at apple, netflix, hulu, xbox live, PSN, steam, every MMO, and a lot of websites.
Where is their lobby? Why aren't they up in arms about this proposed attack on their business?
Remember "Right of way" (Score:3, Interesting)
People invariably react badly when they read a news story about some industry and containing words like "government" and "scrutiny." I don't because I can appreciate what things would be like without government protection and regulation. Without government protection, there would be no power lines, telephone lines, data lines or protected radio frequencies. Power company pisses someone off and someone decides to take down a few power polls... someone doesn't like what AT&T wireless is doing and then sets out jamming devices to block wireless signals. Government protection is pretty much a requirement for services like these. But government protection comes with rules and regulation. After all, the government should not afford special rights and privileges without those who benefit from them giving something back to "the people" in some way.
Increasingly, we are seeing a LOT less giving something back to "the people." Increasingly, companies like AT&T whose "right of way" comes from the government of "we the people" abuses the people with all sorts of unreasonable pricing and increases. And then when the government starts looking at what they are doing, both the businesses and people who are pro-business quickly forget where their right-of-way privileges come from and get indignant about government scrutiny, oversight and regulation.
If anything, we need to use the power of "we the people" to threaten such business with increased regulation and oversight including but not limited to pricing structure regulations and the like. This works quite well for other government regulated business such as electric power. They all have limits over what they can charge and not a single plant has gone bankrupt as a result of government regulation. In fact, in places where deregulation has occurred, prices went up and quality/reliability went down. The people NEED government regulation of such utilities. POTS is considered a utility and so should wireless service these days. Their current limit-pushing behavior is simply screaming for a government slap-down with imposed limits that benefit the people... the people whose government has granted these companies right-of-way protection in order to operate.
Data should be priced by the byte (Score:3, Insightful)
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Wait, how is this a problem? Bosses who insist the .mobi should run Flash won't have many ATT customers in the first place... I don't see the problem here.
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I don't see the problem here.
Because it won't be long before other carriers follow AT&T's lead.
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I think the GP means that developers who already have to struggle to keep flash *off* the .mobi site are now going to have to struggle to minimize the bandwidth consumption of their main site.
Of course, that flash content on the main site won't load on iPad anyway, so the point is a bit moot.
Re:Data Budgets (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bad thing exactly how?
I think if you WANT lots of stuff to download, go for it. I also think that a website that requires 1Mbyte of stuff downloaded just to view it is a waste of bandwidth. Web developers that do things like force you through a huge flash animation just to visit the rest of their site are an abomination. I've lost count of the number of commercial vendors I DO NOT deal with because I couldn't get to their damn text web page. (I have flash deliberately disabled on my browser because it screws the CPU and wastes my time.)
If you can say it in ten words and choose to use a 300k animated GIF instead, you should be shot. If AT&T's actions help eliminate web-bloat, I'm all for it.
Now get off my lawn.
Re:Data Budgets (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget about Flash. If I'm going to be paying by the byte, then I don't want to see any advertisement.
If our internet usage is going to be metered, that means all of a sudden we will be paying to view advertisements. I don't know about the rest of you, but all of a sudden any ad-driven site is suspect, any image is a potential waste of bandwidth. We might as well go back to gopherspace. Yes, I hate huge flash introductions to websites, too, but I'm not quite ready to return to the web being a text-only experience. Most Flash is wasteful trash, but I would miss a few baroque masterpieces like Tenacious D's website.
This changes the entire model of the Internet, making it a lot more like cable television, where you not only have to pay subscription fees, but you have to watch advertisements on top of it. Maybe some of you are too young to remember, but when cable television first came out, it was trumpeted as being superior to broadcast television because you wouldn't have to watch commercials. We see how well that worked out.
How much of your monthly internet bill are you willing to pay in order to see advertisements?
Apparently, AT&T didn't learn anything from the breakup back in the '80s. Maybe it's time for the government to teach them another lesson in manners. If we don't get strict Net Neutrality regulations in place, we'll be telling our grandchildren about how great the internet was way back when anybody could put up a website and some kid with an idea and elementary html skills could capture the world's imagination..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FTFY
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
OK, I'll pay that. But my point was that the ads are an integral part of the free internet. If you want to use it, you're going to need to pay twice.
Just like when I paid twice for the CD I bought; once to the store, and once to the petrol station that delivered the energy to propel me there and back.
Personally, I just tally it up to the total cost, and use that for comparison with other ways of buying CDs.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But if people keep using more and more bandwidth, someone will have to pay for more and more infrastructure to support the ever growing usage. If we charge for bandwidth used, people will have an incentive to use less, and the cost will be reduced for all but the heaviest users.
Re:I don't want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Apps and Browsing right? I mean, if the page I'm looking for is only a few K when I browse at home, but on my phone without an adblocker its going to be over a few megs, that hardly seems fair to charge me by the amount of data, right?
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Re:I don't want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure what you are so indignant about. The ads are what pays for the content in the first place, so not getting them isn't really "fair" so much as it is what you want.
Re:I don't want this (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly.
There are already posts about loading pages for a few k of content, which total up to megabytes - all because the page is burdened with advertising. Even though I have the slowest, crappiest, highest latency DSL in the world, no page should EVER take a minute to load. I upgraded from dialup just as soon as DSL became available in my area, and the advertisers sucked up every bit of bandwidth that I'm paying for!! Me, I'm PAYING for advertising! Why? I don't want to see ANY of it!
AdBlock Plus, and noscript are essential to browsing the web on dialup and any low-bandwidth plan, as well as for anyone living an hour or two from the big cities. That is just so WRONG, on so many levels.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But you do want the content, right? So how do you expect the content providers to pay for the bandwidth they use to provide you with it?
Re:I don't want this (Score:4, Insightful)
But you do want the content, right? So how do you expect the content providers to pay for the bandwidth they use to provide you with it?
Find a business model that works.
We are all ears!!!
The current model works. Simply suggesting it doesn't is not good enough. The evidence is all around you.
WE (yee olde web surfers, game players, and facebook fanboys) built the infrastructure in this country. We built it $30 per month, year after year. We added more dial-up lines. We added cable modems. We paid. We demanded faster connections so we could game. We paid. We tossed out old modems, bought new modems. We paid.
There is very little government money in our current infrastructure. Instead, you paid. I paid.
We accepted the ads, because those allowed us to read a blog, or visit a site for free, without having to open an account there. Could you imagine having to have an account at every site you visited? Could you imagine having a charge from Slashdot appear on each credit card statement, or watching your cable bill balloon each time you visit facebook?
The model works.
Re:I don't want this (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a business model that works.
Oh, bugger off. I've had it with people insisting that businesses trying to subsidise free content with ads need to "find a business model that works" because at the end of the day, someone needs to fund it. The problem is that these are the typical responses:
* Advertising: "I don't like ads. Find a business model that works".
* Paid content: "I don't want to pay. Find a business model that works".
* Merchandise: "I don't want to pay. Find a business model that works".
* Shutting down: "WTF? I visited that site! Why couldn't they find a business model that works?".
In short, stop spouting "find a business model that works" and offer some fucking suggestions.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But if people keep using more and more bandwidth, someone will have to pay for more and more infrastructure to support the ever growing usage.
People keep saying this like its a bad thing. What, I don't want my phone companies or ISP to upgrade their hardware? By encouraging people to use less bandwidth, you stifle growth. By having network speed as something to compare when considering a phone provider, it keeps them trying to beat each other at phone speeds.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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I don't see why charging for bandwidth use would affect competition over network speed.
People will browse less if they don't have unlimitted plans. At least thats the accepted theory anyways.
Re:I don't want this (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but airlines charge more money the fewer seats are left to discourage people from causing them to have to move to a bigger plane, and they discount the heck out of fares when they don't have enough passengers. The result is that the airlines are now constantly raising fares and whining about how they can barely afford to keep the lights on, all the while begging for government bailouts. If you want telecom to be in the same boat in ten years, this is where it starts.
Also, trying to compare telecom to airlines is a terrible analogy anyway. There's minimal additional cost to a telecom system for additional packets up to the point at which they have to increase infrastructure. With aircraft, the cost to the airline depends on how many people are flying. If zero people are flying, it costs zero dollars because they cancel the flight. If at least one person is flying, they have to pay the base cost of fuel plus an incremental fuel cost proportional to the number of people on the plane, the number of bags, etc. By contrast, with a network, ignoring minor fluctuations in power consumption, the cost of the capacity is almost entirely there even if the capacity is unused.
Finally, as for whether charging for bandwidth would stifle growth, we need to learn from history. When iPhone came out, suddenly AT&T started offering unlimited mobile data at a reasonable price. Traffic from smartphones is now about 1/6th the total Internet traffic. Before that, smartphone traffic was basically inconsequential. Now part of the difference is that iPhone provides a better browsing experience than most or all of the craptastic browsers that came before it, but speaking as somebody who had a previous phone that was capable of doing mobile browsing, I can honestly say that I never even bothered to test the feature to see if it was usable. Why? Because they were metering by the kilobyte and I wasn't about to run up a thousand dollar phone bill. I took one look at the rates and said, "No way."
Now I'll grant that the two-gigabytes-and-then-you-lose-service plan is less of a screw job than AT&T's extortionate per-kilobyte rates from a few years ago, but there's really no question whether higher prices will stifle growth. It historically did stifle growth, and it stifled growth massively.
I'm a light iPhone user. I almost never use it to check mail, and only occasionally use it to browse the web. Even still, I rack up an average of 300 MB per month. 2 GB is not a lot of traffic. It's like loading Slashdot's home page about once every twenty seconds for a month. It's like watching about 36 minutes of high definition YouTube video (if you could actually do that over 3G). Let's put that in hard numbers. Somebody watching nothing but YouTube HD videos all day (assuming a 14 hour day with time out to sleep and eat) would spend a whopping $17,500 in bandwidth fees. Talk about a phone bill that can stifle growth.
Yes, this AT&T scheme is a bad thing. A VERY bad thing.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The airline industry has grown quite a bit in the past several decades despite this. I don't see why charging for bandwidth use would affect competition over network speed.
You wouldn't happen to have an employee named Dilbert, would you?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and if their business model makes any sense growing usage should bring the company more revenue which they can then use to finance network improvements. Anything else some CEO has to say about the matter is merely a diversionary tactic to draw the public away from the fact that they are raking in cash hand over fist and not facing any real reasons or pressure to improve their network. Look at the EVO 4G. Spring wants people to spend and extra $10 a month for the dataplan over the top of the rest of wha
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if you know this, but the money to upgrade has to come from somewhere. Despite popular belief, companies don't get money from the sky.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, there's no reason for this at all. All you have to do is identify the bandwidth hogs, and then deprioritize their traffic. A simple algorithm could be devised to rank customers by their bandwidth usage, and then give them priority in inverse order of this. Then, the hogs will get crappy bandwidth during peak hours, but still be able to download to their hearts' content during off-hours when no one else is using the bandwidth. There's no reason to increase the infrastructure capacity.
Charging for ban
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
the hogs will get crappy bandwidth during peak hours, but still be able to download to their hearts' content during off-hours when no one else is using the bandwidth
In science fiction circles this is known as "it was raining in planet X". The concept of "peak hours" only applies to your local time, not to the planet-wide internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but how do they make more money with that plan?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I propose to use token ring for all our mobile networks XD
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, off-peak usage shouldn't affect on-peak bandwidth significantly. However, I can see a case for on-peak bandwidth hogs being limited more than non-hogs during the same hours.
How about an algorithm that ranks users by their bandwidth usage versus the total BW utilization, only looking at the last 24 hours, and assigning reduced weight to BW use farther in the past? So, for instance, if we're currently in a peak usage time, and one user has been downloading ISOs for the last hour, he's ranked #
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You dumb "geeks" as you claim to be won't be burying fiber, because you won't have any jobs (burying fiber is a pretty shitty manual-labor job BTW, that any dumb monkey can do). Meanwhile, we engineers will be actually building networks that really work and are financially viable, while dumb "geeks" like you sit at home in your mom's basement bitching about ISPs not giving you the bandwidth you think you deserve at a price impossible to achieve.
Re: (Score:2)
The light users do pay more, per MB.
When you write, "The only fair queuing strategy..." you should have written, "My favorite queuing strategy..."
Re:I don't want this (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the billions the telcoms fleeced us for network improvements? Why would the government even subsidize profitable business? If they cannot afford to upgrade their networks, then something is dramatically wrong. Look at text messages. It costs them NOTHING to send them as they are sent over the control signal, yet they feel a need to charge upwards of .25 for one. This is all about fleecing the consumer and stifling innovation so they can get away with their rick shaw networks for another 5 years while the rest of the world outpaces us. How long did it take for 3g to come into america? Why are our cell phone plans so much more expensive than the european options? If they could get away with charging $100 for a 200 megabyte cap they'd totally try it.
I browsed the web for a few hours last night while listening to pandora via a 3g wireless tether to my G1. It didn't take long to break 100 megs. No multiply that times 30 and you start to see that it wouldn't take long to exceed a 2gig limit. 5gb or so seems fair, and I've almost exceeded that a few times with video and whatnot. I mean I understand that this isn't the same as a wired connection that has oodles of bandwidth available in the local loop. I understand that each cell site takes a dedicated connection and that costs a great deal. What bothers me is this whole bait and switch. A lot of people bought ipads on the premise of unlimited internet. Sure they are grandfathered, but for how long? It was the reason I decided to finally pony up the $100 a month a T-mobile contract costs me with android. If T-mobile went to a 2gig cap, I'd be really considering just paying the early termination fees and going back to the laptop+hotspot. Life wouldn't end necessarily.
To me it seems inevitable that in 5 years even 10gigs would likely not be enough. Especially at the 7-20mpbs the next generation of networks is supposed to start pumping out anytime now outside of new york and boston. Its like giving someone a Lamborghini with only a 5 gallon tank that you can only fill up once a month. I mean, what's the point really? Once android starts taking over the smartphone market with flash enabled those few gigs sure won't last long after you watch some 480p video or listen to some streaming music.
This is a really bad deal for consumers. One would hope that some of the other telcos don't follow suit and competition will hopefully sort things out. I won't hold my breath.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can control how far you drive or how many lights you have on. You can't control how much data an http request is going to send back to you. You can't stop an incompetent fool from resizing a 5MB jpeg with HTML attributes rather than cropping it down to size in [editor of choice]. And with the ubiquity of AJAX these days, even leaving a page open doing nothing can still cost you bandwidth - many widely-used sites continue to communicate with the servers so long as the window is open in order to keep cont
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You don't pay by the watt hour for electricity your telephone uses, your house power could be done in a similar way.
Instead of paying per watt hour... your electricity usage is capped at any given point in time, you use as much or as little for a flat rate, but a special regulator circuit stops you from going over the cap... there are 3 plans.. the Lite plan, which includes 45 watts usage (Power a light bulb!), $60 a month; basically, the equivalent to the iPhone 2GB plan. The Bronze plan, which include
But the analogy still fails completely (Score:2)
To make the analogy to electricity work, we would have to postulate a fantasy world where the power companies run no generators of their own, they just maintain the grid. Their customers pay them for access to that grid, and use it transfer energy around between them as needed. The problem is that the electric-power-line company isnt happy with the reasonable profits they are making, and dont want to upgrade their lines to keep up with demand. So they want to start metering the endpoints and charging for th
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the generators don't run all the time. There is great complexity involved to optimize the grid throughout the day. Natural gas turbines, for example, are expensive to run, but very easy/fast to bring online and offline so they get used during peak hours. Other plants (oil, coal, gas) reduce fuel usage and output during non-peak hours just as your engine uses less fuel idling than accelerating. Generally speaking you want those plants at 100% usage if possible, hence load leveling techniques lik
Re: (Score:2)
You are wrong, wrong, wrong.
The generators do NOT run whether people are using power or not. Electricity generation are meticulously and continously matched to power demand, because otherwise the grid, the generators, transformers etc. would take physical damage or voltage would drop below acceptable levels, damaging some sensitive appliances and through brownouts cause major losses in some industry branches.
Thermodynamics: the energy generated has to go somewhere or it is converted to heat - and nothing ca
Re: (Score:2)
That's something a lot of people don't get. When a provider puts in a line, it's a fixed size. It's always that size. It doesn't cost any more or less to maintain that line. Well, in trivial aspects, which we're not going to get into.
What a lot of people don't see is, the more bandwidth a provider uses, the cheaper it gets. I've seen 1 Mb/s go for pennies (like $0.12 to $0.15), because the contract was so large (several Gb/s). I'm sure AT&T maintains huge pipes, and th
Re: (Score:2)
of course. greed trumps rational thought.
however, the question of will it stick? the answer is no.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And I really don't mind the concept of making high-usage customers pay higher costs.
But this nonsense of a fee for tethering? Why?
Continuing with the Popular Mechanics analogy of buying electricity, why should I pay more just to light a bulb in my garage instead of my house? As long as I pay for the kilowatts what does it matter?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The tethering fee is due to the added value of the data going to your computer instead of your phone. It is far mare convenient to access the Internet on your laptop than on your phone so why shouldn't you pay for it? I'm not saying I like it but that's how capitalism works.
Re:it had to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, we have fees and inflated costs for services, because the network is wholly owned by a handful of companies which see fit to keep a relatively level pricing scheme between them. Tethering fees are only possible because of two things. 1) most consumers are too ignorant to know what they aren't getting. 2) monopoly control of what should be a public resource. That isn't capitalism, it's corpratism.
Re:it had to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism is a lot dirtier than people suppose, it will always move to a monopoly of some sort, because that is the most profitable position to be in. Likewise being a part of a de facto cartel is also frequently a desired position as it's easier to maintain and as long as you're careful you can get away with it for a lot longer.
Re:it had to happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. Utter bullshit.
If I buy something, I can use it however I like. You can't have it both ways. If you want to give me a limited amount of data, I should be able to do absolutely whatever I want with that data allowance. You're selling me 2 GB per month to use up in any way I see fit. THAT, is how capitalism works-you sell me something, it's mine now, and I do with it whatever in the hell I like without owing you another nickel.
It doesn't matter that there's an "added value". If I buy flour, you get money for the amount of flour you sold me at the price you asked, and that is the end of you having any say or interest in that portion of flour. You don't get to come back later and say "Wow, that's a nice loaf of bread you baked. That added some value to that flour, let's talk about what you owe me now...". The moment you got paid, you no longer should have any control over what you sold me or how I choose to use it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a rabid capitalism supporter, either. But capitalism involves a transfer of ownership being a transfer of ownership, period. Government-protected monopolies rent-seeking every penny they can get their greedy little mitts on is not a "free" market in any meaningful sense of the word.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If I'm going to pay for the amount of data I use, then I want the ability to completely filter ads on my iPhone. This includes the coming iAds.
Mod parent up.
The iPhone was never designed for tiered data plans. What are they going to do, have flags for what data connections are allowed? Are apps going to have a bandwidth rating? Or am I just going to have to turn the data off unless I'm in Wifi... ...I hope AT&T is listening. It'd be far cheaper for me to just get a regular phone and an iPod Touch. That idea hadn't even popped into my head until this came along.