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Decoding Mobile Carriers' Latest Push For Profits
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users. From fake 4G salespitches, to mobile payment systems that hide text-messaging payment confirmation fees, to the inevitability of tier pricing for mobile data usage, no facet of smartphone use is beyond providers' latest profit-engineering push. Even IT's concerns over the invasion of mobile devices at their companies has become 'a great excuse to sell warmed-over management tools to fearful IT and security execs.' And make no mistake, mea culpas, like AT&T admitting to falling short on relieving 3G congestion, will result in additional opportunities to pad providers' bottom lines by, say, buying a $150 femtocell from AT&T to help AT&T 'solve' its problem. 'Of course, in typical Big Brother fashion, [AT&T] told the US government to stay out of wireless — meaning don't regulate prices or impose Net neutrality — while also asking the government for more spectrum. You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services but bad when it tries to impose regulation to prevent abusive behavior: doublethink ungood.'"
"You know the contradiction: The government is good when it gives you free or cheap services but bad when it tries to impose regulation to prevent abusive behavior: doublethink ungood.'"
Sounds like corporations really are just like individual [meat] persons.
Not quite as fast as AT&T, but it's worth it not to deal with all the BS from the larger carriers.
This has to be the most biased write-up I've seen in a while... sure, most carriers are probably Lawful Evil, but this makes me want to avoid the whole article like the plague....
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I do not think this [phrase] means what you think it means.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
"InfoWorld's Galen Gruman sifts through the 'doubleplus ungood' of this year's CTIA and Mobile World Congress to spell out 'Big Brother' mobile carriers' true designs for IT and smartphone users."
This sentence does a good job of informing the reader that article in question is an insightful and objective look at new mobile telecom strategies.
A corporation wants to make profits? *gasp* I've never heard of such a thing!
BTW, if you check out the submitter, snydeq, you can easily see that he is a mouthpiece for Infoworld, the corporation that is publishing the article in question. What sinister plans does Infoworld have for its latest push for profits?
Let's not over-characterize a company trying different ways to make profits as being "Big Brother". That term has a specific meaning related to the government, go read some George Orwell if you've forgotten exactly what it means. Yes, some companies may use slight-of-hand and other tricks to get more money out of you but it's far from being "Big Brother".
This is especially true when you spread your article out a few paragraphs at a time across 4 different pages. We know that trick, it's called padding your ad revenue with additional page views. Oooooh, who's the Big Brother corporation now Infoworld?
Sapere aude!
Unfortunately, we're falling victim to the mindtrap that the government "owns" the electromagnetic spectrum in a specific jurisdiction, which is about as laughable as thinking it owns the weather.
They don't own it, but the FCC has jurisdiction to regulate it's uses similar to the FAA and US airspace.
If there wasn't regulation of some sort, then the wireless spectrum would be dominated by just a few corporations, being able to put millions into over-powered transmitters that drown out all competition.
That's pure speculation, and not the case anywhere in the world, certainly not when radio was first starting. The FCC was created as a standards body so broadcasters wouldn't accidentally step on each other's toes so to speak, there was never any problem with private property rights in broadcasting. If frequencies can (or could, rather) be bought and sold just like any other product (land), there is absolutely no reason why a few companies would own the spectrum. There might be a few that own a particular frequency across the country, or a large range of bandwidth somewhere, but to expect the entire spectrum to be exclusive to a variety of broadcasters is like saying Wal-Mart will eventually own all the land in the world, it's ignorant, not to mention impossible.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
What went wrong? People leapt at the offer of free/cheap phones without realizing the leverage that 2-year contract was signing away.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
It makes statements like, "Other carriers are slapping the 4G label on a 3G-based technology, LTE". That's incorrect. LTE is part of the upgrade path for GSM/HSPA, but it's a completely new air interface using OFDM rather than HSPA's CDMA air interface. Just because something comes out of the same standards body doesn't make it 3G-based technology. Based on that logic, all of these technologies are based on old-fashioned radio technology. The author seems to want to imply that most 4G is just re-branded 3G that won't help users.
It says things like the iPhone being "just one device used by 3 percent of [AT&T's] customers." That's flat out wrong. Last quarter, AT&T activated 3.1 million iPhones. AT&T activated iPhones for more than 3% of its customer base *in a single quarter* and over 46% of AT&T's post-pay customer base used integrated devices as of the last quarter. Was there no fact checker for this article?
Finally, the article says that 4G won't solve the spectrum/capacity issue. It provides no evidence for this and merely rants about how you can't use a phone made for one carrier on another carrier and, therefore, nothing will ever work right. Yes, it's disappointing that all carriers don't use the same technology and spectrum bands, but that hardly has anything to do with capacity. The fact is that 4G is likely to solve a lot of capacity issues. With a 4G, all-VoIP solution, carriers should be able to get voice usage down to a fraction of their bandwidth. That's huge. Yes, 4G will see users consume more data as it gives them a faster, better experience. However, people aren't likely to start streaming audio at 512kbps or video above what YouTube and Hulu are pushing anytime soon. So it's likely that 4G will see an increase in available bandwidth considerably above any increase in customer usage. Plus, when talking about websites and such, the majority of the time is still spent with the connection idle as the user reads the page.
4G will improve our wireless experience by improving speeds and alleviating some capacity issues.
Congress needs to "Man Up" and write a bill giving the Communications companies a dead line of say 6 years to have
This List of things done. During the the wait time tax Corporate Bonuses an extra 15% and of course forbid any increases in salary above the inflation rate for this time. Of course if a company does in fact certify the list as being done (and have IRS types sign off) then they can stop paying the extra tax.
If the list is not done for any reason the extra tax jumps to 40% when the dead line hits.
the biggest problem is way to much money is being used to pad corporate profits and CXO bonuses and not enough is being used to oh PROVIDE SERVICES.
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That would be theft, it's no different than knocking over your neighbor's house with a bulldozer, you just can't do that. That's what the FCC was created for, not for regulating content, not for auctioning off entire blocks of spectrum like they are now, and not "licensing" wavelengths with annual licenses and terms on their use.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Property protection doesn't involve regulation, certainly not regulating content which is most of their job now. Protection is enforced by the courts, perhaps prosecuted with the help of a specialized beau, like how different divisions of the FBI specialize in different crimes, the FCC would investigate those "jammers" that would violate a broadcaster's right to their frequency.
Wonder what the public key field is for?