New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices 68
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"
A bit too specific isnt it? (Score:1, Insightful)
Isnt that news a little bit too specific for a global tech site?
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We are discussing mobile plans from a specific country
Isnt that news a little bit too specific for a global tech site?
That's paid spam.
Re:A bit too specific isnt it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if this is the first of its kind and could be copied around the world. That's the hope right?
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Only, it's not the first of its kind.
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/dataSharing?setLanguage=en&setProvince=ON [rogers.com]
Just off the top of my head. They were flogging that as a great new feature a year ago. Not that I would ever buy from that particular company, I think they're evil incarnate. But they did offer data sharing a long time ago. Putting it on an "unlimited" data plan is new, but the main reason Rogers doesn't do that is that they don't have unlimited data plans. I imagine that if they did have unl
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The optimist is me says they will if people in a sizeable manner starting taking Ting up on their offer.
Btw I said 'if' in the previous post. I live in the UK so I didn't make to make a sure statement as I didn't really know. But thanks for letting me know.
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I'm not the target demographic, either, even though I'm in the US. I live alone and seldom have more than 3 devices sending/receiving data and have unlimited plans for both wired internet and mobile. But the concept is worth discussing, just as stuff BT pulls is.
Data, minutes, SMS (Score:1)
"Minutes" is an antiquated concept. It's all data. VoIP is here to stay.
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No, they are not. There's a dedicated line from the phone to the local exchange, and at least if you can get DSL, the circuit ends there. The digitization of the phone network was the reason why 56k modems worked: The fastest mode was quasi-digital instead of modulation/demodulation.
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The physical circuits are long gone in most places but on conventional digital phone networks keeping a call open keeps a reserved slice of bandwidth (a "virtual circuit") for the length of the call. Afaict on the landline side while telcos are starting to roll out VOIP there is still a lot of conventional virtual circuit based network around too. On the mobile side afaict virtually all phones in use today are still using circuit switched voice protocols (LTE is supposed to change this). IIRC circuit switch
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On the other hand about 95% of all telephone calls (fixed or mobile) use at least on one segment virtual circuits over various TDM transports, even if in some parts of the world the SS7 signaling has migrated to the SCTP/IP based SIGTRAN. Very few calls are converted directly to VoIP or other packet based vo
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"Minutes" is an antiquated concept. It's all data. VoIP is here to stay.
People still would prefer to know how much of the final product they are getting, rather than something that can be used to estimate the quantity of the final product. If your primary use for a cell phone is conversation (mine is not), then you don't request 1gb worth of usage. You want to know how much talk time is available. Just as someone at a restaurant wouldn't want to request $3 worth of hamburger, or chicken measured by the amount of feed needed to produce that quantity of meat.
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Do you really think anyone is going to wonder how many minutes they get out of their data plan when loading a typical web page is equivalent to 5 minutes of talk time?
4 megabytes or so seems insanely high for one web page to me.
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Average is approaching 1 meg for pages these days.
Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? (Score:2)
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page
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People are stupid. I've had internet on my phone for years, but sites still act as if their traffic all comes from computers. Duh, if your pages are a megabyte and won't display properly on their phone of course they'll stay away and all your traffic will be from computers. Kind of like the sites that used to greet you with "You need Internet Explorer to visit this site" and when you wrote them they were like "well, 90% of our traffic is IE." Did web developers all ride the short bus to school? Or are norma
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How in the hell are they making pages four times that size?
I can think of a few causes:
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Are web developers instructed to leave their brains at the door, or are they all using bad tools?
These are not mutually exclusive answers.
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Do you have a source for that claim? (i'm not nessacerally saying it's wrong but the handful of pages I took a quick look at all seemed to be much smaller and I'd like to know how the number was arrived at and what assumptions were made)
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http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-why/ [pingdom.com]
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ [websiteoptimization.com]
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http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ [websiteoptimization.com]
"Charzinski's 2010 paper shows the beneficial effects of caching on performance. Table 1 shows that the average top 500 home page goes from 507K and 64.7 requests upon initial cache-cleared load to 98.5K and 16.1 requests."
As I suspected it seems like the "nearly a megabyte" headline figure you quoted is for loading a page with nothing in cache and the average pageload is likely to be much lower.
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800KB is way too high. Mumble only uses about 40kbit(300KB/min) for high quality VoIP. That assumes you're talking the entire time. Anytime you stop talking, it about drops to 0.
Web pages are in KB, not MB. Heavy everyday browsing on my smart phone, even media sites like YouTube, is only a few hundred MB at the end of the month. Based on your estimates, I would reach my average monthly download usage in a few hours instead of 30 days.
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A minute of talk time consumes about 200kB per minute full duplex for typical mobile phone quality. Let's add 100% packet overhead and another 100% for better quality, so we end up with 800kB per minute. Then a gigabyte is 1250 minutes with excellent quality, or about 3000 minutes at normal quality. Do you really think anyone is going to wonder how many minutes they get out of their data plan when loading a typical web page is equivalent to 5 minutes of talk time? SMS makes this even clearer: Do you worry about the number of instant messages you can send with your data allowance? No, you know that it's "enough".
That's my point. Some people don't use their phone for web, ever. Why should they want to do this math? For many of them, they just want a straight and simple answer, even if it actually gives them less service. I can understand, for example, that a well-compressed data stream* will use a variable bit-rate compression, that if combined with efficient background noise reduction could result in conversations using a highly variable amount of data, based on how much of it is noise and how much is silence. Stil
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People are starting to equate data size with other sizes already. How many minutes of music does an MP3 Player hold? How many pictures does a 2GB SD card hold? etc. Most ISPs even have a handy little chart that shows you.
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Good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Why stop there? Why not pool everyone's data together, and charge us all the same price?
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
What would you prefer, being charged per megabyte or per device? Because most people are charged per device. $40/month for data on your phone, fine, but then you want a sim card in your iPad? That's another data plan at $40/month, regardless of how much you use.
The article is proposing a usage-based system that's independent of the number of devices. That's a much better arrangement IMHO.
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As someone who uses almost no data, I don't see why I should subsidize your mobile internet usage.
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I'm sure the early adopters feel the same way about you...
Cellular bandwidth is ephemeral... Pumping a GByte of data costs next to nothing. It's expanding the network to handle a large number of people doing that at the same time, which is expensive. And in that case, a technological solution is desirable and workable.. If a certain cell tower is maxed-out, throttle the highest bandwidth users until there's
'My hope is that family data plans come soon' (Score:5, Insightful)
The family plan will come to your carrier just as soon as they've worked out the necessary details, i.e. made sure you'll end up paying just a little more than you do now.
contracts (Score:3)
ahh, i can just see the divorce settlement arguments already, over who owns the contract, who owns the bill, and who's going to pay for little johnny's excessive Minecraft and Runescape usage...
Wow, "New"? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in Canada, with Rogers, and while they do suck, I have had a family data plan for 1GB (actually I share everything else too) with my wife for 3 years now..
I find it extremely odd that the US does not have this... it's like hearing they don't have wheels, or fire.
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The US? Forget that, as far as I know none of the other carriers in Canada do it either! I'm on Telus and they certainly don't although I'm not paying for a data plan at all.
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So, in Canada, a rate plan is considered 'technology'.
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It's not "fire" it's "sub-prime mortgages"... This isn't some fundamental feature, it's a billing gimmick.
Read TFA... You'd probably get a BETTER deal going with Virgin Mobile's normal (unlimited) plan, unless you have several devices you use, but barely ever.
Economics 101 (Score:3)
They will sell their services at the greatest price which the market will bear. In other words, the price will only come down when we stop merely gritting our teeth and forego the data plan or switch to a competitor with a better deal.
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the price will only come down when we stop merely gritting our teeth and forego the data plan
Virgin Mobile USA won't activate a voice-only plan on an Android phone, even if I have Wi-Fi everywhere I plan to use the data features.
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True, foregoing a data plan these days usually means foregoing a smart phone.
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Android has been ported to x86 (90%+ of Android apps are java-derivative based, and so, architecture agnostic), and the Android emulator runs on Linux and Windows.
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But you WANT data service on your smart phone. Being able to look-up something when you're in the absolute middle of nowhere is the killer app of smart phones. As a single example, practically all the driving-direction apps on smart phones are ONLINE apps, so when you take a detour, it needs to hit the servers for a new route.
Cheaper or Coverage? Pick one (Score:2)
A quickie check for my needs shows a about a $20/month savings, as I would get hotspot which VZW charges for...
BUT the big LOSS is COVERAGE. Like the adage says, location, location, location, and sprexhostgin has crap coverage, period. Where my VZW has full bars.
So huge loss of coverage in areas I need and might need it to save $240 year and get a feature that while it might be nice, if I have no coverage is useless.
Thanks, nut not thanks.
I like the plan idea to mix and match what I need, but first off you
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I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.
How nice, AT&T (Score:3)
At&T used to offer shared data on their family plans. Unfortunately, they changed it to individual shortly before we went to smart phones. Unfortunately, it's AT&T or Verizon in this area and at the time, the plans worked out slightly cheaper under AT&T. If there was someone who offered something with sane pricing, I'd be on them in an instant but there's that whole government enforced monopoly (quadropoly?)/cartel thing going on. I'm thinking of going prepay which actually seems to offer the better pricing model.
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Sprint does (free) roaming on Verizon, and they have cheaper plans.
Of course it does. Contracts have always been scams, hide the up-front cost, and charge 2-4X as much per month, oh yeah, and throw in taxes and hidden fees.
Why not allow competition? (Score:3)
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There are several more companies. Why aren't you using them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_the_Americas#United_States [wikipedia.org]
What's so compelling about GSM? Is it really so crucial to you to be able to use the same phone when traveling across continents?
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Perfect. So you're directly admitting that your requirement for GSM is one that "most people" don't have. You also implicitly admit that you know there are alternatives to that would eliminate that need. So basically you're ranting about nothing but the fact that the US market isn't designed the way you'd most like it to be.
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The original idea was not to have any "plan" at all, but simply charge customers for what they had used in the previous month. So if you used only enough to qualify for the $10 plan, you pay $10 at the end of the month.. If you used enough for the $25 plan, you would pay $25.
The focus groups hated it, because they weren't able to choose a plan like they were accustomed to. So they changed it to the current system where you pick a plan and if you go over it you pay for the next tier. It works exactly th
What does the T stand for? (Score:2)
I wonder if they have an option for downloading Trumpet Winsock onto your phone.