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Apple Wants Patents For Crippling Cellphones
theodp writes "Evil is in the eye of the beholder, but there's certainly not much to like in the newly-disclosed Apple patent applications for Systems and Methods for Provisioning Computing Devices. Provisioning, says Apple, allows carriers to 'specify access limitations to certain device resources which may otherwise be available to users of the device.' So what problem are we trying to solve here? 'Mobile devices often have capabilities that the carriers do not want utilized on their networks,' explains Apple. 'Various applications on these devices may also need to be restricted.'"
$18M is pocket change. A few million dollars doesn't solve anything; how about you stop buying the occasional order-out pizza, because $18 for a meal one night a month is outrageous when you could make some chicken soup to last the family a whole week for twice as much (making it $5 instead of $18)! That whole $216/year saved is MASSIVE!
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You don't seem to understand the flawed business model that communications providers have been running with since the beginning.
The business model since the beginning has been to build networks with business users in mind, and then selling unused capacity to consumers at bargain rates.
At one time, a buck a minute was normal, and for business users, still a bargain compared to the "mobile phone" that Perry Mason used.
Since the networks grew at an amazing rate, eventually reducing costs to commodity levels, that model was hardly flawed.
They never had enough capacity for their customers.
There have always been areas where use has jumped fast enough to outstrip network expansion.
If you mean network resources have never been unlimited, I'll grant you that.
So as it stands today, there just isn't enough network for us, which is why when there are city/county/state-wide emergencies many calls do not go through.
YOUR calls don't go through - the important ones do.
That's by design.
Cell operators are required by Federal law to interrupt consumer cell service to prevent the network becoming unavailable to emergency responders.
Comcast (unfortunately my home ISP) is perhaps one of the worst offenders of this. Having resold the bandwidth I paid for multiple hundreds of times. Eventually instead of providing me with what I have been paying for (unlimited broadband, as in no bandwidth cap), they reneged on their deal and put in a hard cap of 250gb/mo.
So...what you are saying is that your monthly charge should cover 25 terabytes of transfer or more?
The fact of the matter is that you didn't buy ALL their bandwidth - they aren't reselling YOUR bandwidth - that's pure rubbish.
The question is how to strike a balance between use and cost.
There is a certain cost per byte that has to be recovered, or no one gets to play.
I probably come pretty close to the cap at times, but have never heard anything from Comcast.
On my business accounts, I shatter that barrier every month - that's why I have business accounts that aren't subject to it.
You should stop whining and do the same.
Comcast COULD have simply limited your speed so that you couldn't exceed the cap.
It would still be unlimited.
That was rejected as a bad compromise for obvious reasons - most people don't use bandwidth at a sustained high rate.