Sprint Begins Punishing Customers For FCC's Net Neutrality Rules 272
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: A few days ago Sprint announced their intent to stop throttling certain customers' bandwidth in the wake of the FCC fining ATT $100,000,000 for doing the same. Sprint has now begun circulating an internal memo to their front-line reps that the 12-month warranty on non-branded accessories, a featured selling point, will be eliminated. Additional rumors are emerging that Sprint may increase prices on unlimited data plans and stop offering wireline long distance service.
TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no such thing as a free lunch. - Various Economists and Heinlein
Same types of things happened after the regulations around credit and debit card fees. The money comes from somewhere and ultimately you aren't punishing the big players in the industry with the regulations, but their customers and their smaller competitors.
Another case of people who don't understand regulatory history being doomed to repeat it.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why we have to turn them into public utilities and abolish all exclusive franchising. They only get away with this because they are a protected monopoly.
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Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn an
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Like everything else, as good as we want it to be.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Like everything else, as good as we want it to be.
And you base that on what? The people just vote how they think it should be, so that's exactly what it becomes?
Wrong.
There's actually a long established history of why it's wrong too. If history teaches anything, it's that when private industries become nationalized, the service quickly turns to shit. The reason for that is simple: It becomes a monopoly so the people who provide the service don't have to worry about competing with anybody else. Worse than that, politicians often hold it for ransom so that they can promise to fix it later if they get re-elected.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
The government often does it better, but those examples are ignored by the ignorant and dumb.
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And there's a long history of governmnet run utiities that do well. Dallas Water Utilities is a surprisingly good operation. And TXU was much better before "deregulation" and privatization.
Running a water utility isn't anywhere near as complex as running a telecom service. How often do you have to call their tech support because your faucet isn't working? Oh that's right, you call a plumber.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
EVERY time a government service is privatized, all that does is add an entire layer of costs to the service... businesses call it profit. Medicare plan B was touted as going to be cheaper, with better service over what the government could provide. Within 3 years the costs were more, even with government subsidizing the private companies.. and the companies were cutting services. Why? THEY COULDN'T MAKE A PROFIT.
I was in the army when the Reagan/Bush base closing started happening, and one of the things that they were saying was that by shifting some non-essential functions to private contractors, money was there to be saved. My $600+ a month was dwarfed by the pay of the civilians they brought in to serve chow, which was once simply another thing we had been cycled through taking care of.... thing is, those civilians served chow only, they didn't also have the skill to call arty onto the threat. End results... way more cost. Why? PROFIT.
It truly fucking amazes me that people don't actually have even a beginning inkling of how the fuck businesses work.
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And what you say may well be, however you're creating the same stupid as shit argument that dipshits made about the ACA being a government takeover of healthcare.
No, I didn't. The government doesn't own the means of production in that case, making it VERY FAR removed from anything I suggested. And I'm not going to read any further into your post if you're going use straw man logical fallacies right out the gate.
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True, but that's not the same thing as saying net neutrality rules don't affect cost structures for telecoms.
Telecoms could only offer "unlimited" data because it was never truly unlimited. You can't provide unlimited anything in the real world. I don't necessarily think the FCC's ruling is a bad thing, but we're seeing pretty much what you'd expect to see as a result - higher prices for (still not real
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Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me fix that for you: "Telecoms could only offer "unlimited" data because it was never truly unlimited, BUT THEY WOULD LIE ABOUT IT SAYING IT WAS."
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True, but that's not the same thing as saying net neutrality rules don't affect cost structures for telecoms.
Selling an unlimited service and then limiting it is fraud. People should go to jail for that. Requiring vendors to tell the truth about their product and adhere to their product claims in not an unreasonable intrusion into their cost structures.
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Are you really that much of a fucking moron, or do you just play one on slashdot?
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Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
The government is almost always more efficient. The only times they are obviously not, is when the things being compared aren't equal (like schools, where a non-profit church school with free land and no administration is compared to the total cost of a public school, including facilities and administration), but for apples-to-apples, in-class spending, public schools are more efficient than private.
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never seen any evidence this is true. The Catholic high school I went to was far more efficient with money than the local public school. The land wasn't free and we had administration. Not only did that school spend a fraction of what the public schools spent on students, our college acceptance rate was higher.
There are all sorts of areas private companies do better than public. While it's true you pay more for mobile service in the US than other places, that's mostly the result of stealth taxation. Last time I looked Verizon alone had paid seventeen billion to the government just for spectrum.
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College acceptance rates might be higher but a huge reason for it is that private high schools are selective. Does that stat also include community colleges and regional universities where have a pulse and a HS diploma pretty much the only requirement?
Public schools have to take everyone, including those that will never even apply for college.
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Last time I looked Verizon alone had paid seventeen billion to the government just for spectrum.
Spectrum is a national resource. Are you saying we should give it away to whomever wants to use it? Maybe I want to use the GPS spectrum to run my 1kilowatt wifi base.
Re: TNSTAAFL (Score:3)
Private schools do an excellent job of dumping high cost students (ADHD, special needs, etc) on the public schools, and then babbling about how they're more cost-efficient.
Show me ONE private school that matches the public school's mandate to accept all "last resort" students, and then we'll compare efficiency. Good luck finding one.
Until then, it's just comparing apples to lying assholes.
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is broadband like that? If we turn it over to the government will we be happy if it is exactly the same 40 years from now (well perhaps a little less down time)?
Cars are provided by several different companies. In the last 40
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What isn't efficient is when you have byzantine laws micro-managing operations. Schools and the military are managed by Congress, not the department itself. Congress sets rules on what schools can and can't do, and how they do the things they must do.
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Do you seriously think you would have an octocore Galaxy S6 in your hand if it were all government?
Go look up a Trabby car, as governments tried to keep up with the free west. And if not for the west, they wouldn't have even bothered.
I can handle Government Should Do More types, who look to safety and safety nets and such, but your type is found exclusively in cloistered areas of the free west.
Re: TNSTAAFL (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, because I'm sure that everyone loves their local BMV. Everyone wants it to be fast and easy to deal with, but I will tell you a secret: in most places, the BMV sucks, everyone bitches about it, and it isn't getting better.
Shall I mention the VA or the IRS? I bet we all want those to be good too but, uh, yeah. They suck.
Government agencies, on the whole, are pretty shitty in part because they don't have to be good in order to stay in business.
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Pick the teleco that has committed the most fraud and other criminal activity (bill stuffing, false advertising, slamming, reneging on various voluntary agreements, etc) and nationalize it. Leave the others to compete as they do now.
If you really believe what you say, you should be fine with that as the national service will be relegated to a service of last resort and the rest will prosper.
Telco and cable routinely end up at the bottom when ranked for customer satisfaction. Apparently they don't have to be
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Nope, the regs are designed to keep the competition out. And so are the very contracts that grant exclusivity. You got it completely backwards.
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Not quite - the cost of building out infrastructure is a huge barrier to entry, but it is not insurmountable for an individual, organisation or corporation with deep enough pockets - see Google's Fiber initiative as an example. Other obstacles exist too (lack of expertise, reputation, existing customer base to determine asset value, and so on), but as with the cost of infrastructure these can be overcome with sufficient up-front investment.
The single biggest thing preventing the launch of a new wholesale c
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The problem is that whole "deep pockets" part. The cost of building out the infrastructure isn't insurmountable, but the payoff is over such a long period of time that no bank would give you a loan to do it. That means it is only possible for a company with enough money that they ca
Re: TNSTAAFL (Score:2)
All the people who haven't died of polio, smallpox and whooping cough would like to disagree with your statement.
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The one about hanging fustakrakich on a lamp-post with his Che Guevara T-shirt stuffed in his gaping mouth? I don't see a connection...
In fact, I don't see a connection between anything I said in the last week and people (not) dying of whooping cough...
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
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You need a citation for the value, to everyone including business, of public highways and streets?
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Hey, if you don't want to pay for infrastructure maintenance, don't blame the crooks your reelect to steal the money for themselves. It's time to cut the government loose from the corporate politburo that owns it.
And keep on trollin' brutha! You the man!
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And when a particular service-provider disappoints me, I want to be able to switch to a competing one in a matter of hours...
Doesn't happen that way, the protected monopoly does not allow you a choice. So, first off you have to ban exclusive franchises. And then you might have to weasel out of the contract you signed with the service. Rights to access are paramount. Only a public utility can provide that.
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Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
And there's nothing stopping them continuing selling the same plans at the same price, they just have to be honest and tell their customers that they aren't unlimited.
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Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:4, Interesting)
And that would be accurate if we were actually talking about a limited resource for free.
But we aren't.
You left out the part where the profit margin is flexible. The consumer costs will only rise because Sprint wants to keep the profit as high as it was. Bandwidth is NOT a limited resource in this case.
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First, it's not an unlimited resource, because infrastructure is required to provide it. That infrastructure has finite limits.
Second, those greedy corporate fat cats at Sprint haven't managed to make any profit at all since 2007.
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That would suggest that the CEO is making 256 times what the position was making in 2006. The CEO was making a lot more than $200,000 in 2006 (referring to the last CEO, Dan Hesse, and his $49M salary package, not the new guy and his $29 million salary package).
Bandwidth is limited over the air. (Score:2)
It's the whole Shannon-Hartley theorem. The data rate you can get is limited by the frequency range and SNR you have. Well with stuff over the air the SNR is fixed by transmission power (which needs to be kept low to keep battery life up) and background noise. Frequency range is licensed since not all frequencies are created equal and everyone wants a piece. So the throughput you can get is limited. You can't do like with a wire and just add more wires, in a given area everyone has the same bandwidth to sha
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You left off "at that profit level".
If Sprint refuses to build out their infrastructure then that is their issue. In other words, they are attempting to artificially limit a resource in order to maintain their choke point in order to maximize profits.
I guarantee that if a competitor started moving into their market and offering services for less, Sprint would suddenly find it very "feasible" to build out their infrastr
Re:TNSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Those people advertised and sold unlimited plans.
They caught for lying. Pure and simple. And now those assholes as acting like the victims.
We need MORE regulations on these people - and every other business. You advertise "unlimited" anything, it better be unlimited and fuck them if they don't deliver.
In a fair World, I should be able to NOT pay if I do not receive the services I paid for but these assholes rigged the game so that _I_ go to collections and get screwed with they fuck me.
More regulations. If they don't like it then they can give back all the tax breaks and incentives that we - the taxpayer - gave them to do what they were supposed to do.
They owe me, you and every other taxpayer who helped them build out their infrastructure.
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They owe me, you and every other taxpayer who helped them build out their infrastructure.
There is a flaw in this statement. It assumes that infrastructure never changes. Sure the wires do not get replaced often but the switches, software, etc does. Then there is the cost of new technology required to push more data through old wires. New technology, upgrades, etc can only be funded through profit,
No Excuses! (Score:4, Insightful)
They owe me, you and every other taxpayer who helped them build out their infrastructure.
There is a flaw in this statement. It assumes that infrastructure never changes. Sure the wires do not get replaced often but the switches, software, etc does. Then there is the cost of new technology required to push more data through old wires. New technology, upgrades, etc can only be funded through profit,
NO EXCUSES!
YOU sell unlimited plans, you deliver unlimited access. PERIOD.. No Excuses. Period.
Otherwise YOU are a liar. Period. No Excuses.
WTF is so hard to understand about that?
These people deserve the fines and more. They deserve to be sued and more. Because they are LIARS! Period. No excuses!
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You advertise "unlimited" anything, it better be unlimited and fuck them if they don't deliver.
There are reasonable and understood limits to "unlimited" in most situations.
Imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet. Within reason, eat all you like... to a point...
I imagine you can't go there for Breakfast and sit there all day working on your laptop while eating slowly all day long. I also imagine you won't have much of a case when they ask you to leave. They might even refund you, to avoid issues, then ask you to not come back.
There has to be some level of reasonable to the whole thing. Besides, "unlimi
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Imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet. Within reason, eat all you like... to a point...
Or maybe they could, you know... not lie and not call it unlimited when it isn't? Or in your world is not lying too great a burden on business?
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Nothing is unlimited... by your definition, nothing could ever be called unlimited...
Reasonable people are not so black and white...
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then you don't advertise unlimited without a clear explanation of those reasonable limits.
In every other country I have been in, that is what they do. Buffets set a time limit on the table (usually 90 minutes or so, else people actually come in there and can sit all day).
When I get a cell phone plan, they say unlimited data usage but if your data usage goes over X in any rolling window (was 3 days on my last one) your speed will be throttled from whatever the network can handle to Y. Once that period of h
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Ahh well that's all right then. The solution is clearly to just let industry do whatever they way, right? That will clearly benefit customers. Sure regulation does have unintended consequences. But no regulation is surely worse. We've learned that the hard way in Alberta with the privatization and deregulation of utilities. None of the promises of such action came true. There is not more competition and prices for electricity and distribution have more than tripled since we embarked down this road. No
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This is nonsense. Data throttling had nothing to do with profitability of the warranty program. If the warranty program was found to be profitable for Sprint, they would keep it. They certainly wouldn't kill a money-maker right at the same time that they lost another money-maker.
That's all there is to it. This was coincidence, nothing more.
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1. Sprint makes a profit from offering things like extra warranties, either directly, by selling the accessories for a higher price, or indirectly, by gaining customers that they otherwise wouldn't gain. If Sprint is making a profit, then they would continue offering these benefits and continue making a profit.
2. Sprint is losing money from offering these benefits. In this case, it would be a net gain in prof
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decent lunch for decent price (Score:2)
that does exist. you're not getting it though.
in USA you can get a decent lunch for a decent price.. but only when it comes to jeans and food.
when it comes to 21st century things like mobile data plans and warranties on consumer goods americans are getting shafted.
like fuck, why can't you just have a 24 month warranty on it? do you really want to buy shit that the manufacturer thinks will break in 3 months? seriously? shit that you buy on a fucking plan that you pay for 2 years mind you!
in other parts of th
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Really? My monthly mobile data plan costs less than a family dinner at one of our better restaurants. Or two dinners at an average restaurant....
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in USA you can get a decent lunch for a decent price.. but only when it comes to jeans and food.
These jeans taste terrible.But they're free, Hurrah!
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If you want to change that so the companies must negotiate rights-of-way with every property owner whose land they cross, then you can argue that regulation isn't proper. But until then, regulation protects the public's interest in seeing that its resources are used efficiently.
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The regulations aren't punishing the consumer. The part you are mising is that they were never actually getting what they were paying for, Now they are. In theory, if they were happy before, that tier of service will be offered and they can then pay for what they are actually getting. It should cost what they were paying before the regulation came in to effect.
Net effect: A better informed and less fraudulent market.
Surely you aren't against a less fraudulent market?!?
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Maybe, but at least now they have to be HONEST about it. What they used to do is sell "unlimited" while at the same time limiting you. That's false advertising at best. Fraud at worst.
I don't mind a metered line. I don't mind paying a pretty penny for unlimited. But I expect to get what I buy.
:TANSTAAFL (Score:3)
its There Ain't no such thing as a free lunch
changing themeaning of 'unlimited' != 'free lunch' (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but a telco or commco changing the meaning of the word 'unlimited' to mean 'less than unlimited' is a free lunch. FCC just took it back.
All they have to do now, is actually specify the speed tiers. 10GB? full speed. after? 256kbps.
Meh. Not going to kill their business, nor is it a slippery slope to something worse that we're sliding down towards like socialism. This is simply defense of the english language against greed.
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There's no such thing as a free lunch. - Various Economists and Heinlein
Sure there is. Served every day at the local food kitchen. You don't have to be poor or anything -- no strings attached. And the quality is better than your average restaurant (on account of most restaurants get a huge "I hate waiting" penalty).
All I can say is.... (Score:2)
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This bubble has, at best, nine months left in it.
Really? Think so?
Might as well ... (Score:2)
Throttling phone plans vs Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
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So.. your "Unlimited Everything" plan has a limit of 10GB tethered data, and 80GB/month transfer..?
Good luck with that! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people use Sprint? Because it is cheaper than AT&T or Verizon. If Sprint increases prices, they remove that advantage, while retaining the disadvantage of poorer coverage.
This is just sabre-rattling. Sprint cannot increase prices significantly without giving up large numbers of customers.
How is this punishing customers? (Score:2)
This reads like a list (Score:5, Insightful)
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AT&T's Fine (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's FIne (Score:4, Informative)
Stop being childish, its not punishment. (Score:2)
Its business. It is the pathological version of business but that is who is in charge at all these corps. I've said it before on here: they are not going to operate at a loss.
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They're not losing money, it was never about that.
A Brazilian's experience (Score:2)
Now some guy started a small ISP and we are getting 20Mbps over fiber. It costs two times more than the Telefonica plans, but it is fast and reliable.
People talk a lot about the huge costs involved in starting on this area, but the guy here started serving a few n
No 12-month warranty? (Score:2)
As a person who lives in a country where a seller is legally obligated to provide a 12 month warranty on a product I am astounded.
As a person who lives in a world where electronics are getting cheaper and more poorly made every day I am astounded.
Why do I see this as a step towards hardware subscription payments? Force people to buy cheap shit without warranties, and charge for upgrades constantly.
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Point is the same regardless of branding. A company selling something locally should be forced to stand behind it's product in some form of consumer protection. Our laws didn't just appear they were an extension of the "fit-for-purpose" clauses and I would expect even an unbranded piece of garbage to last a year.
Remembering warranty typically covers manufacturing / design defects, not abuse. Is it unreasonable that we buy a product that actually does what it says on the box for only 1 year?
bah sprint (Score:2)
Sprint can do what ir wants ... (Score:2)
... as long as it meets or exceeds its mission statement:
"Our mission is to get you to pay us money and feel good about doing so."
If Sprint fails in that, it doesn't turn out well.
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Sprint is the only one that seems to work reliably in my house.
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Same here. Verizon only works near my front porch; Sprint works throughout the house. I also pay significantly less for Sprint than I would for Verizon or AT&T. I've no real complaints about it.
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but it does work flawlessly
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