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Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan
Pickens writes
"Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'"
Build more towers. Increase capacity. Uncle Sam has doled out a lot of money over the last couple decades to build infrastructure. Build it. Cut dividend payouts a little bit, and build the infrastructure up. Maybe cut executive and management pay a little bit. DUHH. And, while you're at it, maybe you can get that "last mile" built so that all Americans can get online. Tiered pricing isn't the solution. Demand is going to increase every year from now on. Get used to the idea that you need to keep adding to and improving the infrastructure. You can't take a snapshot at some arbitrary point, and say "We need this much more infrastructure, then we'll be on easy street." Invest your earnings back into the system, where it belongs - in the business.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I've had an iphone since June. Total data received is just a under 1gb, data sent is around 80mb.
Gone!
AT&T also scored lower than any other U.S. carrier in a recent customer-satisfaction survey—the first time it has ever claimed last place.
That's not the iPhone users fault: that's AT&T fault.
What's this horseshit of blaming the customer for shitting customer service, or service for that matter?!
They sold a service and an amount of bandwidth and now that they can't deliver, they're blaming the customer.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
How would you handle the passenger texting then? The driver isn't the only one in the car.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
ATT offered users an unlimited data plan, no wait, they required one with an iPhone. Now the problems with ATT's network are the fault of those selfish users who took ATT's offer seriously. Give me a break. ATT is rolling in money from iPhone, they should use it to build out their network.
Given that WiFi routers in urban areas with DSL backhaul can take a lot more data than 3G, maybe AT&T shouldnt consider their network as solely GSM-based.... and start getting iPhone and any other WiFi smartphone users to use wireless networks more..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
As a great man [allegedly] once said, 640kb should be enough for anyone.
Modern users with their demands for eight, sixteen and thirty two megabyte options are just needlessly draining the world's silicon supply so they can listen to a few songs. Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that.
Alternatively, time moves on. Just because 640kb was once enough for anyone, doing what they did with the limitations of that era, just because 40-80mb/month was once enough for anyone... That doesn't mean time doesn't move on and it doesn't mean it's appropriate to only support what once was the norm.
AT&T have made a metric assload of money from people who bought the iPhone for, well, being an iPhone and not "some other" smartphone. AT&T's network sucks, just about everyone seems to gripe about it. They suck it up, when they'd never have gone with AT&T in the first place, because it does come with a more able phone, because it does come with unlimited data access, because it does come with an interface that makes using 5-10x as much bandwidth as before a practical reality.
To play bait and switch, to get users to buy $600 phones (yes, I'll claim full price in a world where you either pay inflated monthly rates or a fee to cancel), to get them to sign up for those contracts, to get them to leave companies with more reliable service, all with the promise of an unlimited phone and then to say... yeah, we don't feel like paying to support that so, instead, surprise! we're capping the unlimited service we sold you and charging overage fees is obscene.
If AT&T can't really roll out coverage to support iPhone users using an iPhone as an iPhone... perhaps the real answer is for Apple to say, "OK, you can't meet your end of the agreement - we'll sell it to Sprint/Verizon/whoever instead."
AT&T entered in to an agreement with Apple to provide a network that supported Apple's product. AT&T entered into an agreement with the customers to provide a network to support that product in a certain way, too. If they'd like to acknowledge they can't honor that, I'm sure another company would like the opportunity.
I rarely use my iphone internet because the speeds suck and I live in an edge network. I would like to see an alternative to the $30 unlimited plan and instead have something like $10 X amount of time/data plan that roll overs unused data to the next month like roll over minutes.
Apple will be forced to drop that exclusivity deal, once Android starts kicking ass and taking names in 2010. With Sprint and Verizon both rolling out multiple Android phones Apple can't afford to stay tied to a crappy network.
Go Illini!!!
Really, how could AT&T not have seen this coming? Having attempted to surf the web on other phones, on an iPhone, while it is not perfect, it is at least functional. And guess what? More people will surf the web when they get an iPhone. When AT&T promoted that phone, more users that will tax their infrastructure. Unless someone at AT&T was praying that people would get the iPhone and not use one of the most useful features about it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
While the logic is sound, his basic premise is quite flawed. His article is based upon the idea that these "iPhone Users" are something so different and special from other phone users, that the world has never seen anything like them before (sounds like a bit of Apple propaganda to me). However, that is patently wrong. Just look at Japan. A very large percentage of the Japanese population uses their cell phones in ways that would put iPhone users to shame. That is not even mentioning that Japanese cities have much higher population densities than American cities, and you don't hear stories of how the Japanese phone network is falling apart. Between these two points, his conclusion that we will never be able to build enough network capacity to support iPhone users is clearly false.
iPhone is just the most visible because it can be equipped with all sorts of apps that actually work as advertised most times, and people actually use them. If [fill-in-the-blank-other-carrier] supplied an equally useful product, their network would get hammered too.
Personally, I would say the topic of this article hasn't really affected me and I travel a lot. My iPhone on AT&T works at least as good as my previous Blackberry 8830 and Treo before that did on Verizon. The aircard for my laptops consistently works better than the Verizon one did. The only time I've seen crappy data rates is usually at/near an airport where a zillion other people are connecting to the same tower as me. Not too surprising and not worth the effort to whine about.
The writer builds his entire argument on the idea that, like highways, building network capacity produces a phenomenon called "induced traffic". The more roads you build, the traffic they attract, producing an unending(but not really) cycle of expansion and congestion.
Setting aside the obvious dissimilarities between network traffic and highway traffic, what he fails to mention is that there's an upper limit to induced because, as usual, there are a finite number of people and cars. If it really was the case that highways inevitably congested no matter how many you build, all of our highways - not just the ones outside of major metro areas during rush hour - would be chronically congested, at all times. But they aren't. This is because there is an upper limit on how much people drive no matter how many highways are available for them to use, and there is an upper limit on how many people drive to begin with.
Similarly, the Internet would have grinded to a halt long ago if building out capacity wasn't at least a partial solution, if not a complete solution, to the problem. Most broadband users have unlimited access as well, and while some tax the network disproportionately, the Internet's infrastructure is able to support it.
Why the author thinks the same principle doesn't apply to iPhones is beyond me. Yes, people will do more data-intensive things on a faster network. But there's an upper limit to how much data can be transferred by a single iPhone user in one month anyway, even if the user is transferring data 24/7, 7 days a week. if the network is built to handle the upper-limit of the most data-intensive users even in a hypothetical "induced traffic" scenario, this won't be a problem.
The whole traffic analogy belongs in the "The Ted Stevens Dumptruck of Bad Analogies," and Slate should stop publishing articles about shit it doesn't know about.
source: http://www.companypay.com/executive/compensation/at-t-inc.asp?yr=2008
Total compensation of the five active execs listed for 2007 $59,359,833.00
Source: http://www.celltowerinfo.com/faq-4.htm
cost to build a tower $100,000 - $300,000
so I'll take 200k as an average
source: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=59359833%2F200000&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
number of towers that builds if they take NO PAY AT ALL- 296.799
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_states_of_america
surface area of the US 3,794,066 sq mi
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site
range of a cell tower gsm 25miles otherwise 30-45 miles..
lets say 40 miles-- be generous
source http://www.onlineconversion.com/shape_area_circle.htm
area of a circle using 45 as the radius= 6361 miles
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=6361%2F3794066&aq=f&oq=&aqi= .00167656546
6361 into the size of the USA
you've taken away 100% of their compensation, and added 1/10 of one percent of the towers needed to blanket the nation
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A company is selling an "unlimited" plan and can't handle unlimited usage? How dare you suggest such a thing. That is blasphemy against Capitalism at its highest. No company would ever stoop to such lengths as offering more than they can handle in the hope that people won't use it. That just wouldn't be proper, even if it did increase profit in the short-term.
Next thing I know you'll be telling me that all of those "unlimited" broadband connections aren't unlimited, and that my $2 per month "unlimited" hosting account won't really let me host unlimited files with unlimited bandwidth!
iPhone is just the most visible because
It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media. I mean seriously - I used to joke about daily Iphone stories, but today we have, what, at least three on the front page? Where's the coverage for the big names like Nokia? Of course it's the most visible - but sales figures show a different story. And a good thing too, as I for one don't want the future of mobile computing to be a monopoly like we ended up with Microsoft, but worse one that's locked down to the extent that you can't even release an application without Apple approval.
Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones, without needing me to recompile it especially for each make, or getting corporate approval from the companies. I don't see why this is so controversial - and why Slashdot of all places is supporting the Iphone all the way.
Once upon a time, this was a place to support open and alternative solutions, not to give coverage and free advertising solely to large companies with locked down products!
Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.
I'm not a hater. That's just another deceitful trick put out: that if someone uses another phone, disagrees that the Iphone is the best phone ever - or disputes claims that the Iphone is the best selling phone out there - they must be doing so out of an irrational hatred (e.g., the story about Japan hating Iphones).
By all means let's have a sensible debate about which phone is the best, or argue about how many phones are sold by which company. But please, let's have a fair debate, with evidence - rather than resorting to the usual tactic of branding people "haters", or modding people down out of sight simply because you disagree with them, and can't respond to their criticisms.
You're ignoring population density- the vast vast majority of iphone users are urban. Blanket those 300ish towers in the op 20 metropolitan areas and your problem is 99% solved.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Your math is totally off.
3,794,066 sq mi / (6361 sq mi / tower) = 596 towers
596 towers * 200,000 $/tower = $119,200,000
So the top five would have to go without pay for two years in order to theoretically blanket the US. Of course, since the coverage of a tower is roughly circular, and circles don't tesselate, you'd actually need a lot more than 600 towers. However, for the pay of the top five execs, you could build about 300 towers.
I don't know if iPhone users really cause anything to run slower, or if this is just a myth put out to shift blame. My iPhone runs plenty fast over the cell network. What I do now that iPhones users pay for the bandwidth.
If a change is to made, then it needs to be made simpler. Realize that the iPhone may not be used as a phone, and therefore selling a voice plan as the basis may serve the customer. Or combine voice and data. One MB and one minute are perhaps the same thing. Sell 1000 units at the same cost as the basic package now. Get rid of charging for texting. I bet more people would text and not email if texting were cheaper.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why not upgrade the infrastructure to support the usage they have been advertising and people have been using?
Simply ridiculous.
"People are using the phone in a manner consistent with how we told them they could use it! Upgrade the network to meet our promises? Wrong. Change the pricing structure. This problem is clearly the consumers fault."
I think the real solution here is to end phone exclusivity entirely. At the moment, all AT&T has to do to attract customers is to simply be selling the iPhone. There is no incentive for them to do anything else. If phone exclusivity were to end (I'm talking about ALL phones, not just the iPhone) then carriers would be forced to compete based on their *gasp* service rather than the devices they've paid enormous amounts of money to have exclusive (and of course pass those costs onto us). Of course this is never going to happen but it would be beneficial to everyone involved.
I personally have never had any trouble with AT&T's network though I've heard lots of horror stories in more populous areas like New York City or LA. At the moment I'm still using an original RAZR since no cell phone manufacturer seems to want to make a good smartphone for AT&T seemingly because they'd have to compete with the iPhone.
Back in the old days of dialup my provider offered an unlimited plan. Here is how it worked.
At the start of the month everyone started off with the same traffic priority. For the sake of argument, lets call that number 1.0
As you used more bandwidth your traffic priority dropped proportionately to other users on the system.
Those who used less bandwidth got higher priority when they did decide to use the system. Those who used more got bumped aside on the network.
Why not do this here?
As a Brit now living in the USA, it continually amazes me how Americans 'understand' or even even agree with corporations consistently crappy service (20 minutes on hold anyone?) even when they aren't getting what they clearly paid for up front.
Yet more costs to customers? No! The blame lies with AT&T. The proper solution is for AT&T to spend some of their massive profits gained from iPhone sales and contracts on better infrastructure and provide what they already promised as a part of the contract.
That /would/ be the Apple way, just like OS X on laptop. "Latch on opportunistically to any Wifi network in range, regardless of any authorization to be using it or not". Sounds like a plan - instead of you and AT&T figuring out a solution to the "problem", the rest of us can just subsidize it for you. Yay us!
I've had an iphone 3G since launch, I stream radio every day, I browse, have push exchange email, use a ton of data apps, even used PC tethering in a pinch, and I have never gone over 300MB/mo. I have a 6 GB/mo plan, so there's no reason for me to skimp. I just simply cannot break 300MB/mo no matter how much I use it.
How in the hell is everyone else going over 400MB/mo?
What so many people seem to be completely ignoring is the fact that AT&T is focused on the NEXT generation of networks... the "4G" if you will.
I attended an AT&T sponsored "lunch and learn" session on "The future of wireless", several months back. (I got a free invite from our AT&T business sales rep. at my work. It included a free lunch at a nice hotel, and it's not often AT&T gives you ANYTHING free, so I figured "What the heck?" and went.)
They made it abundantly clear at this session that AT&T sees "smartphones" as the future of their business. The speaker even made a point of emphasizing that they feel the idea of a "telephone" is outdated. The future they see is everyone carrying around pocket computers, essentially, which do happen to allow making/taking voice calls, but will be used just as much, if not more, for data-related purposes.
They went on to say that they were pretty much getting behind the iPhone as *the* premiere device for this future, with the Blackberry being supported strongly as well, as the "alternate". They felt that a large display screen was an essential component to making all of this work, and right now, the iPhone is the only "smartphone" in widespread use with a big enough screen. The Blackberry, by contrast, they felt was a big player for other reasons. (Some people prefer having a real keyboard, if they're going to do a lot of data entry from their device, and the Blackberry has obvious advantages right now from corporate standpoints, where secure communications takes precedence over all else.)
AT&T has some interest in expanding into selling software and services related to all of this. (They mentioned a partnership, for example, with a company that makes development software that allows someone to code an app once, and have it support many different smartphone devices, without the developer having to concern him/herself with details of the screen resolutions and input limitations of each specific device. They also wanted to move into the space of selling tools to companies, to enable the remote use of their internal databases from mobile devices.)
Although it was more implied than stated, I came away with a pretty strong "hint" that AT&T really doesn't want to spend TOO much on improving their admittedly sub-standard 3G data network, because they feel the future is with migrating people to the next generation of data networks instead. They have goals of rolling it out by some time in 2011, at least for trial use and testing. If they make any moves like eliminating "unlimited" plans for iPhones to get more revenue, you can bet the extra profits WON'T improve your 3G performance. They'd simply funnel that into future R&D and rolling out of the new network (which won't even be compatible with the current crop of iPhones anyway). Any improvements you'd see would ONLY be from people leaving AT&T for other networks, or people reducing their usage of their iPhones to try to save money.
Oh, and for what it's worth, another "key point" they made (in response to a question from someone in attendance) was that AT&T still feels the "bread and butter" of the Internet should/will reside on land based connections. At the end of the day, they don't think much of the idea of everything "going wireless" to the point where T1 circuits and such cease to exist. They view the "wireless cellular network" as never being more than a "bridge" back to a wired network someplace nearby. (I happen to largely agree with them here, and think that's probably "common sense". Yet others would say that just reflects AT&T's long-standing mentality and interest in copper wires and land-lines ... and that they're incapable of "thinking far enough outside the box". Some might envision high-speed wireless comprised of everything from satellite to wi-fi repeaters placed all over as a future that would take the whole Internet into the wireless realm....)
3. Feds establish rate limits for services. Data access would not be unlimited, but rates should be limited to $.05 per megabyte. Voice access rates should be capped to $15 per 1000 minutes per line.
Data is not a commodity, data is a service
When I go and buy a jar of salsa, the manufacturer had to pay a specific amount of $ to manufacture that specific jar. If I do not buy it, he can keep it around and sell that jar to someone else tomorrow.
When I want to park in a parking space for an hour, however, the city does not have to pay someone $ to create an hour in which I could park. If I do not park there, then the city cannot keep around the hour I was going to buy and sell it to someone else.
In fact, if the city had magical parking meters that would safetly and immediately eject the car of any non-paying person immediately as soon as someone with a quarter wanted to park, the city could just let non-payers park there as much as they wanted, with the understanding their car might not be at the same location when they got back.
The city would be foolish not to do this, as the parking meter is just there to make sure that someone going to the store on that street (say, to buy a jar of salsa) can find someplace to park. While magical parking meters don't exist, this IS how bandwidth works on the internet.
Unless your ISP is a drooling moron, they are NOT paying per-kb, per-mb, or any real per-use fee at all. They signed an agreement with backbone providers to get a certain amount of bandwidth for a certain amount of time, and they don't pay any more for bandwidth on an hour when NO ONE uses their network than they do for the busiest hour of their year.
If AT&T really wants to keep bandwidth responsive, they want to decrease the effect that heavy users have on their network. The cheap way is to just lie and charge those heavy users more -- but that's not the right way. The right way would be to set a self-tiering structure, where so much network activity over so long just puts a heavy user's requests at a lower priority than the lighter user who pays the same amount.
Letting heavy users voluntarily pay more to get faster service would be a great revenue model, too. Especially since it wouldn't be in danger of the FCC declaring it unlawful.
Yes, seize it all and regulate it even more. This will be the key to our salvation.
/sarcasm
On the real though, they should get rid of the assignation of wireless spectrum and allow a truly free market for wireless voice and data service to grow. It's not that hard to make sure one's service doesn't interfere with the next. Rather than giving out monopolies over spectrum let the courts handle disputes where one company is directly interfering with another's.
ummmm...i like my CDMA rev A devices.... you can buy my new 800$ phone.
Doesn't make it any safer, the problem is the conversation with someone you can't see.
Our brains are geared to use visual clues in conversation and when you can't see the other person the brain over focuses on the audio clues and starts down filtering anything not related to the conversation.
If anything hands free makes it worse, because you THINK your being safer and not putting any extra effort into your driving.
On the phone OR on the road, not both.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Have you EVER done anything related to cell site design? 40 mile RADIUS? That wiki states the LIMIT as 25 miles for GSM. In case you've never driving along a highway, there are towers a lot closer than every 50 miles. Wonder what the reason for that is? Oh, maybe it's because the radius of each cell site ISN'T 25 miles.
Let's try this. The signal being transmitted by the cell site, regardless of carrier or technology, travels at a certain frequency. When this signal hits any obstruction (yes, even air counts) it gets degraded and weakened by a certain amount. Buildings, trees, and ground are the main sources of signal degregation. If your tower is in a valley, you ain't getting signal from that tower on the other side of the mountain. The sad reality is that almost every tower is too low (either the height of the tower or it's ground elevation) to provide a 25 mile radius of coverage. Some mountain towers or towers along large bodies of water (Great Lakes for example) can get substantial line-of-site distances where calls can be made at 25 miles or more. So to assume that you can build towers to cover 6000+ square miles is absurd. Do the calculation assuming a radius of about 2 miles (most towers on highways in New England are spaced about 2-4 miles apart) and see how many towers you need to blanket the US. You could even go with a radius of 5 miles, because your towers in the Great Plains and other flat areas will get much greater radius of coverage and mountainous regious would have much smaller radius towers.
Either way, you can't have a valid calculation with an asinine assumption like each tower can cover 25 (or 40) miles in every direction. Nice try, though.
Sprint has the Pre and Hero and it's damn near impossible to spend more than $70/mo. That gets you unlimited mobile calls, data, text, gps, tv. The only way to spend more is if you spend more than 450 minutes a month calling landlines before 7pm. AT&T's base iPhone plan is $70 with no texts, favorite numbers, or gps, and the free nights start at 9pm.
...is that 400MB per month is considered "heavy". We occasionally exceed 400GB on the wired connection at home, without running torrents/worms/bots/etc.
Are the wireless networks really so wimpy, or has the bandwidth just been massively oversold? OK, maybe it's both, and illustrates that wireless is not ready for prime time, as was mentioned here recently (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/08/2243242/FCC-Chairman-Warns-of-Wireless-Spectrum-Gap).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
...on the future. This future is the fully connected device, whether it be a smartphone, netbook or something completely different. Now I'm not saying that all data will live in the cloud like many vendors do, but enough will that an always connected device will pretty much be a requirement. And these carriers are all very quick to sell high end packages and lock customers into long term contracts. They also want to partner with manufacturers and offer devices and services to sell even larger packages. Unfortunately, I think they are unable to understand data use trends and still think of mobile devices as having the functionality of the cell phones of the 90's.
Now I understand that AT&T may not have been able to guess at the popularity of the iPhone and how it would be used when they signed the original contract with Apple, but if I was a wireless carrier, I'd much rather have the problem of too much usage on my network than not enough (think Sprint).
My advice to AT&T: Get to work! And remember that if you are going to build out your network, don't build it for tomorrow, build it for the next decade.
Seriously, if the iPhone is causing so many problems with AT&Ts congested network - Apple needs to start offering it through T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. Share the network pain, er, load.
Of course I know a lot of iPhone users will then jump ship from AT&T - but the overall iPhone experience will improve (well, I won't assume that for Verizon customers, given what that company does to its phones' functionality), and I'd think that'd be Apple's primary goal. Plus the remaining AT&T iPhone customers will have a better experience.
#DeleteChrome
I pay ATT each month for a data plan. I do not use anywhere near what I pay for. Most of us do not, so we are subsidizing iPhone users.
I have considered dumping the plan, but the few times a month I use it, I need it.
I would be more than willing to sign up for a pay as you go plan, especially since I would likely be in the lowest usage tier. Let the heavy users pay the heavy freight.
Pay as you go is far more fair than the socialist model used now, where the greedy get a free ride on the backs of others.
Everything the FCC touches is inflated. The actual cost of a radio, in active parts, that is stable and doesn't produce spurious output and interference: In the hundreds of dollars. Antenna, less. It's just folded and formed metal, very few active components, if any. Sturdy tower, 2-5 thousand, including a stable concrete base and mount. How do we know? Because ham radio operators put up very similar gear all the time. On many frequencies, some similar, some not, using many modes of transmission, again, some similar, some not.
Cost of "FCC type-approved" transmit equipment: In the tens of thousands. To which, as someone else pointed out, you have to add the cost of lawyers, licenses, land, VERY expensive type-approved towers, surveys, antennae, inspections, the hiring of FCC-approved engineers... it goes on and on. The benefit of all these extra processes? Basically zero. Well, other than lining the pockets of lawyers and vendors of type approved equipment, of course.
This is the cost of handing the government control of the spectrum. They make using it many times more expensive than it needs to be. The same thing they do to everything else. Why? Because they have absolutely no motive to bring down costs or make a profit, and if they fail to serve the people's needs, the people have no recourse -- we don't have any control over the FCC or any other embedded government operation.
For instance, you want to put a 100 watt FM broadcast station up at your house? It can be done for well under $500. You want to do it with FCC approval? Maybe, just maybe, you could do it for $50,000.00. But I doubt it. The difference in reliability, signal purity, stability, transmit coverage and quality because of cost alone? Zero.
The FCC's job here should be limited to coming out to the site before it's powered up, being there when that happens, taking a look at the output spectrum, taking a ride around to measure the coverage, measuring the tower/antennae assembly height to ensure it isn't in the way of the local aircraft patterns, if any, and handing over a signed operating license. For the cost of about half a day's pay for the inspector. The rest should be none of their business.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Seriously. Why should the customer (who is already paying out the ass already) have to suffer and pay more money?
Why isn't the solution for AT&T to improve their network?
(and honestly, it's not that bad, especially with a 3GS), it's only on occasion if you are in small extremely dense areas ....I live in Philly, and when the Phillies won the world series last year there was a parade. The entire city was on Broad st - that is one of the only times where there was a major problem - and that seemed to occur with other networks too....Other than that there have been times in small densely populated areas on Saturday nights where the web is slow or there are issues, but it's gotten a lot better.
If AT&T did what the author is suggesting then I would expect most of the customers who have purchsed Iphones exactly BECAUSE you can go online anytime to feel screwed...and screwing people who make you so much money, especially people who are very comfortable using the social features of the web..that's a bad idea.
Also, we're talking about mobile web usage, NOT people downloading binaires from newsgroups or torrents - the most demanding use is probably from people streaming music for pandora or streaming videos from youtube....Having a network support this and doing what AT&T needs to do to support the products they've sold and make SO much money off of monthly is the solution, it's the right solution, and it's the only real solution....So as I said, this guy can STFU.
"Yes, seize it all and regulate it even more. This will be the key to our salvation. " - go ahead and tell me how well "the free market" is working to fix this problem.
Look, I'm all for consumer fairness. It would be nice to get better prices. But the fact is, whether you have a 5GB plan or an iPhone unspecified/unlimited plan, your averages are still well within the range of limits experienced by both parties. It hardly makes a difference.
The article is basically making the argument that somehow iPhone users should be punished because they're actually using the service AT&T has been selling everyone for a long time. This is pretty asinine. The real issue here is entirely different and entirely AT&T's prerogative. Let me enlighten you:
AT&T's "3G" network, which is actually 3.5G, HSPA... is on the tail end of its lifespan. The technology in all of these handsets depends on it, of course, but it's done. It's over. There is only one last stage of improvement to GSM tech and it's a stretch as it is. Why would AT&T want to invest in expansion of a dead infrastructure? They don't. They aren't going to any more than they have to. They will expand to the last stage of 3G in the largest markets just as they prepare to roll out the same LTE based networks that every other carrier is supporting.
That said, there's no reason to think bandwidth consumption is the primary concern here. The primary concern is one of density. The number of users each relying on the same cell is too great. It's not a matter of how much data they are transferring on that cell so much as that there must be more cells, or cells must be able to handle more concurrent users. That's just a factor of the proliferation of cellular phones and devices. You can't blame the iPhone for this. It's a problem that would occur eventually anyway as the trend towards data enabled devices existed before anyone even knew about the iPhone. Maybe the iPhone accelerated it, but that is no reason to punish people who like a good user experience.
Of course, there's another concern not addressed and that is the exact same concern that effects cable internet subscribers. Cable internet actually works in a very similar fashion to cellular internet. In the case of cable modems, customers share a download node that has a set maximum bandwidth with its uplink. You are sold rates like 12mbps but there is only a maximum of 60mbps at each node. So if more than 5 people all try to use 12mbps at once you won't get what is promised. However, because most people don't use nearly the maximum pretty much.... ever... the cable companies overprovision the network. They get away with it because the statistics generally match up. However, if you're unlucky enough to live in a neighborhood full of download happy geeks, you're going to hate your internet connection.
The same issue exists in cell towers. A give GSM cell can handle a fixed maximum number of communication slots each functioning as a statically wide band of communication. When a device ramps up from basic voice to data, to higher speed data, it will consume more slots. Or it won't, if there are none available and it will just stay slow or not connect to data, or whatever. So basically if you have 1000 slots on a given tower, and full 7.2mbps hsdpa+ requires 12 of those slots, you can see that there's a fixed number of people who can possibly access the network at full speed. Add to this the already common problem of the actual backing internet connection experiencing the exact same kind of limitation and you can see that infrastructure is a problem of density, not of actual transfer totals.
So, the lesson here is that more uplinks are needed so that uplinks are not as central a point of failure as they are today. What you'll earn is that cells are relatively evenly distributed across all markets but not all markets have an evenly distributed level of usage from consumers. People in metro areas will note the worst performance because there's simply too many people in one place. You'll note the epic failure of networks during large technical conventions with a 1000+ simultaneous attempts at liveblogging the latest
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
You know, tiered pricing seems fair enough given the realities of wireless technology, but any tiered system has a top tier, and that really, desperately, needs to be unlimited.
"If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing."
I see both sides of this. You're right that if the metered usage is *reasonably* priced, then it's usually a pretty good deal. Right now, I'm doing pay-as-you-go "metered" wireless from T-Mobile for my phone (it's only voice, btw, no data). Before discussing the T-Mobile pricing, let me mention that before that, I was on a month-to-month plan with Verizon. I was paying $45/mo (the price was nominally $40/mo, but there were various bs fees, plus if you used 411 they charged you like $1.75 or $2.00 - something outrageous (thank goodness for 1-800-goog-411). That package gave me 300 'anytime' minutes, plus the normal 'unlimited nights after 9pm, and weekends'.
Thing is, my usage is not 'normalized'. That is, I don't make the same amount of calls every day/week/month, or talk the same amount of time every call. So, one month I might use 100 minutes, and the next month closer to the 300. One month I went 100 minutes over - 400 minutes instead of 300. That month, my cell phone bill ended up being something like $120 instead of the normal $40 (the extra minutes after 300 were billed at something like 45c/minute).
With the T-mobile pay-as-you-go, if I buy $100 of credit on the phone, I get 1000 minutes (or 10c/minute). The minutes last for a year (but only when you buy at least one $100 credit per year; otherwise they will typically expire after a month or three months, depending on how much you bought) Now, if I was going to talk 1000 minutes or more, every month, I'd maybe do better with an all-you-can-eat plan. So, that is one lonely example of a relatively *good deal* with metered payment. I never pay outrageous overage fees when I talk more than 300 minutes a month, I don't 'waste' minutes months I talk less, and I'm paying a relatively affordable rate for phone service (in my case, with the pay as you go, I'm paying an average of about $30/mo).
BUT, here's the important point here - T-Mo not withstanding, the mobile phone industry has a horrible track record with most 'tiered pricing' schemes. For the most part, with the mobile carriers, customers who wish to talk less minutes per month get charged *a lot more per minute* than customers who are in the higher tiers (I mean, you expect there to be *some* price difference, but sometimes the difference is astounding). Applied to data, I'm afraid the mobile industry really tends to screw their customers.
Check out this ATT page for laptop-dongle 3G data plans.
Notice how for a 50% increase in monthly cost, they give you an allocation that is approx twenty five times more data (200MB vs 5 GB, at $40/mo vs $60/mo). About a year ago, when I checked that page, they used to have one *lower* tier which was like $30/mo for 20MB or something. My point is, that the mobile industry likes to force people to spend more by making the 'lower' cost packages so ridiculously overpriced on a per-unit cost basis, that it's impractical. I mean, it would be *very easy* to go over your 200MB/mo allotment on your data plan. So, let's say you accidentally use 400MB one month (maybe some program is using your bandwidth and you don't realize). At $10/100MB, that means you payed $60 that month - the same price as the person who gets 5GB, but you only used 400MB. God forbid you use a Gigabyte one month, and end up paying $40 + (about)$80 = (about) $120 for the 1000MB.
To most of us, when you talk about metered pricing with telecoms companies, that's what we think of - getting slammed with unexpected phone bills that are God-aweful overcharges.
People "like" the monthly plans because, even though they are expensive, EVERY MONTH, it means that they are not likely to get any month that is 2-3 times larger than a normal month's bill. They can basically fix, budget for, and know what they will be paying.
I love this backwards idea, it will bring ATT one step closer to finally losing it's market dominance and allowing people to actually choose which company they use to carry their voice and data.
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From personal experience, I've seen none of these problems in the UK. Granted, our peak population density is about half that of big cities in the US (New York vs. London), but our national population density is an order of magnitude greater (1000 sq/mi (england) vs around 80 (USA) - or 650 sq/mi (UK) vs 80 (US)).
Seems to me that AT&T's network is just a bit crap. We have a bit more experience of running GSM networks over here!
Having said all that, O2 have had some spectacular cock ups on their data network recently, although not related to coverage/dropped calls.
There are 2 key factors being ignored here. The average user may well be using only 400 megabytes but the "average" user hasn't had his/her iPhone for very long and quite probably hasn't discovered all the possibilities yet. Someday, he/she will. He'll start syncing his files via Dropbox, or he'll set up a Pandora station and start listening to streaming audio over long car trips. He'll pick up new podcasts, and update them over the air. The longer you have your phone, the more bandwidth you'll use as you slowly learn to do more and more things with it, get more and more apps, and so forth.
A large percentage of the so-called "heavy users" are merely early adopters, who've embraced smart phone computing to a higher degree. They aren't the norm now, but increasingly they will become it.
Moreover, the average user lives where, exactly? Some cities have ubiquitous WiFi, others, as of yet, do not. Some cities are dense and have many access points, others are spread out and suburban.
At the end of the day, tiered pricing would be a disaster. People would find their bill increasing 10 dollars every month and realistically, how long would they put up with that? I love my iPhone but I am absolutely not paying 200 dollars for data every month just because I go through about 2 gigs of data in that time frame -- nor, frankly, am I willing to cut back. I'll simply switch to another phone on another network that isn't heavily oversold and underserved.
Wow so people feel bad for AT&T that people are paying for an incredibly expensive plan and that its slowing down the network because even though their revenues are so high they refuse in infrastructure.
You'd think that, but I highly suspect you'd be wrong.
I fly small airplanes regularly, which means it's just me, I don't have a copilot to handle the radios. I do the most communicating with air traffic control during the most critical aspects of flight, which is takeoff and landing. While approaching the airport, I not only have to listen for radio calls for me, but also for aircraft around me to maintain situational awareness and ensure the controller hasn't just cleared someone onto the runway I'm about to land on. Often I'm not cleared to land until I'm on short final and starting the power and pitch adjustments to flare. I must acknowledge that clearance with a radio transmission. I'll often receive basic taxi instructions (asking where I'm going on the airport, giving me a ground control frequency) during rollout.
Pilots every day talk to ATC at the same time they are performing critical tasks in the airplane. "Dropping the airplane to fly the radio" is rarely cited as a contributing factor to a crash. Not to say it never is, but it is rare. Pilots receive NO training on how to split their attention between the airplane and the radio ... while we are admonished to always fly the airplane first, failure to acknowledge a landing clearance has the potential to have the FAA start enforcement action against you, so it's not optional.
I don't think the big danger in driving while holding a cell phone is because you're talking, I think it's because you've just taken a hand away from controlling the vehicle. Or you've got your neck in some weird position trying to hold it between your ear and shoulder. Sure, it takes some brain cells to carry on a conversation, and that DOES reduce safety somewhat, same as singing along with the radio or carrying on a conversation with a passenger. But I can walk and chew gum at the same time, I can land an airplane and talk to ATC at the same time, and I can drive and talk to someone at the same time, regardless if they're sitting next to me or I have a bluetooth in my ear.
Merde, il pleut encore!
You're ignoring the fact that the dense urban centers are already covered.
Uh, wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. I've used the iPhone in Manhattan and in San Francisco, two of the most densely-populated urban centers in the US, and there are serious coverage issues in both cities. I got better performance in Napa and Sonoma, even on the fringes of town. Towers don't just cover a physical area, they also support a population of users.
If AT&T took some of the millions it wastes every year in executard compensation and invested that cash adding a couple dozen more cell towers in Manhattan and San Francisco, they'd improve the user experience of tens of thousands of lucrative customers and guarantee themselves a healthy revenue stream for years to come. But like most boardrooms in this country, AT&T's is packed full of brown-nosing, greedy psychopaths hell bent on grabbing as much cash as they can today without the slightest concern regarding what happens tomorrow.
You can bet that when the iPhone becomes available via another carrier, there will be a stampede of customers away from AT&T and their financials will go straight into the toilet. Then they'll probably beg the taxpayers for a bailout.
Welcome to unregulated "capitalism", where a bunch of slick lunatics in $2,000 suits eat all of their seed corn in the spring, then piss and moan in the fall that they're starving, before demanding that the peasants come feed them.
One of these days, the peasants are gonna wise up, and our fatted executive class is gonna find itself on the dinner plate.
Fix the damn network, this argument is crap. if the amount of data use is killing the network then why the hell are the pushing broadband cards and netbooks which have much larger data usage than an Iphone.
I used to work for AT&T back before the SBC merger, and I can assure you, this is exactly what they said about 3G. While all of the other carriers were rolling out fast CDMA-based networks with associated data networks, AT&T was in the dark ages with its proprietary TDMA network. They spent a lot of time excusing this by saying that they were building a new 3G network. This may or may not be the same 3G technology they're using now, but I stress that it took them at least five more years (plus the transition to a completely different non-3G network technology --- GSM) before any of it actually happened.
GSM is garbage - the standard is old and outdated, which is why most US carriers, including the CDMA guys, are moving forward to LTE anyways. And they don't need government mandating anything - the industry is moving towards this on its own.
The rest of your post sounds reasonable, although I highly doubt your proposals are politically feasible. I do really like the "no roaming" bit, although I wonder if it will look like utility deregulation, where the benefits to the public never materialize.
Not meaning to be argumentative, but I think it's important to bear in mind two things that may affect how well your parallel with flying aircraft works for driving whilst talking on a hands free phone. The first is that pilots are, well, pilots. You go through a lot of training to become a pilot, especially a professional one. I'm sure there are better and worse pilots, but they're all pretty qualified people. I'm not sure you can translate that to the general mass of car drivers. Pilots have had the bottom quartile removed in a way that motorists haven't. Secondly, in a similar sort of way, flying a plane is, well, flying a plane. You know you're in a serious situation and you're concentrating on what you're doing. A car driver should be doing that but typically, let's face it, is not in the same headspace as a pilot landing a plane. And the conversation that a pilot is having is about what you're doing as well. You're not talking about work or sex or plans for the night (I hope), you're listening for information that will tell you whether it's time to pull up or lower the landing gear or whatever. Your attention, even if monitoring different sources of information, is on the task.
I mean, you're the pilot, so correct me if I'm wrong, but these are things that occur to me. And don't base it on whether you can "walk and chew gum" at the same time, base it on whether you know anyone who can't - I think most of us do!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Fascinating how your sig refers to liberty yet you propose to take away the liberty of those who don't do things how you want them to do it.
It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media
It's most visible because it was radically different from other platforms and single-handedly changed the market. Go ahead, show me 3D gaming on phones before the iPhone. For that matter, look at phone interfaces, capabilities, and internet usage on them before the iPhone. The iPhone raised the bar, and very little has caught up with it yet. State of the art used to be Windows Mobile 6 and PalmOS - yes, Palm OS. Windows Mobile has blown it ever since, LiMo never went anywhere, and Google Android and Palm Pre very likely would not have been developed if the iPhone hadn't radically changed the market. It gets recognition for that, and it's well-deserved.
sales figures show a different story
Really? It's at 23% in the US, and 14% worldwide. And it only came out two years ago, with its famously limited capabilities at the time.
Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones
Yeah, that worked out so well on Windows and the PC world. Multiple vendors never makes things Just Work - it's the antithesis of it. Protocol incompatibilities, inconsistent hardware support, no platform direction.
Look at Apple. For example, they want to support something like OpenCL. They make sure their hardware has the proper GPU's, the OS supports it, GrandCentral is created, the compiler toolchain adds blocks, and oh yeah, they've been working on LLVM/Clang for years. NONE of that happens when you have a heterogeneous environment and no one is coordinated. Apple wants to get rid of legacy ports and bus systems - so they do it. In two years, Apple abandoned floppies, SCSI, ADB, serial, NuBus, etc. Here we are over ten years later and PC's STILL have PS/2 ports and serial ports, right next to USB 3.0. Such progress.
Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.
I'm sorry - you can't possibly compare Java Midlets to iPhone applications. Nice that it has two-billion phones. I'd bet that a fraction of a percent of those users have ever cared that it's there, and those that have used it (like I used to on my PalmOS Treo - KMaps and Opera Mini) can easily see what crap it is. Ugly, slow, non-native, battery-hungry, low-performance - that's Java on a phone, and one of the reasons it's not on the iPhone. Ditto for Flash, really.
Sadly, the only thing in your post that made any sense was that Apple should be more open. And it's "should", as in it would be nice. The market has shown that they certainly don't "need" to.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
In theory, Java Midlets are not so bad. The problem lies in the complexity of the ecosystem:
1) Lots of J2ME phones means lots of incompatible implementations.
2) The committees in charge of defining the technical specifications moves at a glacial pace.
3) Provisionning and payment systems are outside of the scope of J2ME, so everyone had to build their own.
4) The list goes on and on.
J2ME failed but I'm not sure that it ever had a chance to succeed. But don't blame Java. Blackberry phones are 100% Java (except the kernel) and they are doing OK. Why? Because a single company designs the phones, the OS and the APIs for the applications and came up with a relatively simple way to application developers to make money. Humm, it reminds me of someone, but who?
Nobox: Only simple products.
According to Harold Welte, some African operators are setting up their GSM equipment to skip every second TDMA time slot, resulting in an almost 70 Km (~43 mi) range at the expense of halving the capacity of a cell. It's an interesting "hack", although not the best solution for high-population areas.
And when you say "CDMA", you are presumably meaning IS-95. CDMA is just a multiplexing method that is used by IS-95 (2G), CDMA2000 (3G), and UMTS/W-CDMA; the 3G evolution of GSM. It's also used by GPS.
That actually brings up another good point, though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--I am not a pilot and you obviously are.
The communication with ATC, from what little I know of flying, isn't really much of a "conversation." They tell you things and you acknowledge. You tell them things and they acknowledge. Short, curt, direct, and to the point. Not a whole lot of "Hey, ATC, what are your plans for the weekend?" type of stuff.
So these are brief messages which are informational inputs. When ATC says that you are cleared to land on such and such runway, the response is "Roger." Not a lot of dialog going on.
I think there's a difference between doing alot of tasks simultaneously which accomplish a singular goal and attempting to accomplish two goals simultaneously. Landing an airplane means keeping up to date with a number of different things going on inside and outside your airplane. In the case of cell phones and driving, however, it's usually about accomplishing two different things (eg, maneuvering through traffic while simultaneously talking to someone about what's for dinner).