Slashdot Mirror
Mixed Reception To AT&T's New Data Pricing Scheme
Several readers have sent in followups to Wednesday's news that AT&T was eliminating its unlimited data plan. Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics defends the new plan, writing, "Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted, with an incentive to use as much as you could. That brings price stability to the end user, but it's a horrible way to manage electricity load." Others point out that this will likely engender more scrutiny from regulatory agencies and watchdog groups. A Computerworld article says that one way or the other, AT&T's decision is a huge deal for the mobile computing industry, influencing not only how other carriers look at data rates, but how content providers and advertisers will need to start thinking about a data budget if they want consumers to keep visiting their sites. AT&T, responding to criticism, has decided to allow iPad buyers to use the old, unlimited plan as long as they order before June 7, and Gizmodo has raised the question of "rollover bytes."
No AT&T?
No Apple iWhatever?
NO PROBLEMS!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
sooner or later, and we all know it..
My heart goes out to the poor developers, who are already fighting with their bosses over why they shouldn't be using Flash on their .mobi sites.
I want a way to grade my traffic and clearly stated policies for bandwidth usage that don't directly impose caps. People who use too much bandwidth should be charged by having their packets put last in the queue. If they are kind enough to label a bunch of their traffic as 'bulk' then that traffic can be put last in the queue immediately and not counted against their high-priority bandwidth usage.
Charging people by bit is the wrong model. The infrastructure is there and costs nearly the same if tons of data is going over it or no data is going over it. Charging by byte taxes and charges people for exchanging information, and I think the whole economy would suffer for it.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Imagine, for a moment, if we bought real estate the way we buy electricity. We'd have a punch card at the door to record when we go out, and when we go in...
You can't take the sky from me...
Then price it like electricity. Does anyone pre-pay for electricity?
.0122 dollars per mb you go over right? Hell they should just charge you that rate regardless of what plan you buy.
Fortunately my power company doesn't rape my wallet if I use a few extra watts. At 25 dollars per 2gb then they should only charge you
Derene is wrong, wrong, wrong.
You could do subscription based power distribution. After all the generators run whether people are using power or not.
The issue that I had with a pay per byte used is that I had NO way to control the data going out of my phone. From my perspective I was not using an application that would use the network nor did I have any applications installed yet my windows mobile 6 phone would continue to drip data usage. I had no ability to monitor control or limit data usage.
The whole internet is based off a model that you don't have to meter your bytes which will mean mega bucks for over running your budget for these providers.
Mixed Reception To AT&T's New Data Pricing Scheme
That's true provided your definition of "mixed reception" encompasses the pitchfork and torch carrying mob ready to storm AT&T headquarters.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's a media device that if I download two movies in a month from iTunes over the 3G I'll exceed my limit and Steve Jobs sold it as having an unlimited data plan. Also bandwidth is not the same as electric power. The actual power used is low it's all about infrastructure and AT&T wanting the money but not wanting to spend it on infrastructure. It's more like water being directed to your house from a large source. The problem is they don't want to install bigger pipes so they just fine you if you use too much water. The scam is 95% of the people, according to them it's even more, don't use all their bandwidth so they are trying to stop the handful that use more than the average. If they want to play it that way people that use less should get a refund.
Imagine, for a moment, if you bought infrastructure equipment, and sold only the capacity you could actually deliver at any given time? Regardless of whether your equipment is fully utilized or underutilized, you still have to pay the cost of the electricity to power it, and the real estate in which it is housed.
This is why flat pricing models are a good idea. Imagine for a moment if AT&T charged by the byte, and people stopped using all that bandwidth to save money. AT&T's income would decrease, but not their cost of business (hey, they've already bought the equipment, might as well use it...)
If AT&T charges a flat rate, they can predict their income and plan accordingly. However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next. Not only this, but there are perhaps a sizable portion of their customers who will instead try to minimize their costs. With a fixed rate plan, they have no option. But with a pay-per-byte plan, users like me could use their services for pennies a month. AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month. The reason why people pay so much for data plans is because they have to, not because they want to. Give the people the ability to save money, and they will take advantage of it.
These kinds of plans have been tried before, and they always fail. Email is cheap, bandwidth-wise, and movies can be had from Netflix for less than the cost of the bandwidth used by the net.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Electricity and other limited resources are NOT like data. The only limitation on an internet connection is bandwidth, which is a rate, rather than an absolute quantity. The comment in the article comparing unlimited data plans to unlimited electricity is just stupid, and shows a complete lack of understanding of basic physics.
If you burn 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity (which equals 3.6 billion joules of energy), that energy had to come from a specific quantity of oil, coal, natural gas, or some other limited resource. Generally speaking, if you hadn't wasted that power, the power company would still have that much in natural resources left to use. So every unit of energy carries a dollar cost.
Data isn't like that. If the connection is present, it costs no more for the internet provider to transmit at maximum bandwidth versus transmitting nothing at all, for a given period of time. You might as well use it. The only limitation is bandwidth, since the "pipe" is only so big, so if everyone is trying to transmit/receive data at the same time, they're going to be limited as they have to share.
If the ISPs are worried about people hogging bandwidth, there are other ways of dealing with that, such as by limiting their individual bandwidth. For instance, those found to be hogs during peak times can have their bandwidth limited to less than others who are more occasional users. Limiting people to a specific quantity of data is just stupid and greedy. If someone downloads tons of stuff during off-hours, making use of bandwidth that would otherwise go unused, this does not cost the company anything, nor does it inconvenience other customers.
There is absolutely no reason data providers cannot place transparent bandwidth limits on hogs during peak hours so that everyone can get along, without having to add on any extra fees or hard limits, or causing any inconvenience to other customers.
I woud LOVE it if at&t and, in fact, all phone companies, just charged me a fixed cost per text message, per minute call, per 1M data. A rate that was competitive. This works just fine for the water works, the electric company, the postal service, the toll system on the highway, to name a few.
I would be OK if they tiered a bit - first 500 minutes talk at $0.05/minute down to $0.03/min till 2000 minutes, etc.. Same with texting, same with data - essentially switching on bulk mode as you "earn it."
Right now, through "fear" and published horror stories about giant bills, they manage to talk most people into "flat unlimited rate" - show me the person who uses exactly 200M of data, or exactly 900 minutes of talk time. Rollover is sorta nice, but the rules around it are petty and serve to lessen the usefulness (expired minutes, resetting when you change plans, etc..)
If everyone paid exactly for what they used - you and everyone of us would win. Flat unlimited rate is a great idea, except that it doesn't really save anyone money - unless the resource is unlimited - which bandwidth cannot claim to be - in fact, mathematically and economically speaking, it can't.
When you pay your electric bill, you typically pay a flat rate (a connection charge) to your electric company for the transmission system, and a per kwh rate to them to buy electricity from any number of generating plants. Use 1 kwh or 1000kwh, your payment stays the same. Now if you want to jump to the next level (1ph 120v to 3ph 480v) then you pay a higher connection charge, but still don't pay more for your usage for the /transmission/ of the power.
If you want to follow that model then I'll gladly pay AT&T $5/month for their network transmission services, and a per MB rate that they can pass on to the webmasters and hosts of the websites that I visit.
I don't understand why so many people make these analogies between networks and fuel/electricity/etc. AT&T isn't providing the data, they're providing the conduit you use to get it. I'll use the same example I used on the AT&T forums:
Two people pump x amount of gas each from a fuel pump at the same time. The hose is split so that they can do this simultaneously. This goes relatively quickly.
One hundred people pump x amount of gas each from a second fuel pump at the same time. Again, the hose is split so they can all do this at the same time. This takes considerably longer.
For those who think charging according to how much data you use is only fair, remember - all people mentioned above will end up being charged the exact same amount of money. In this case, they're paying the supplier for the hose based off how much they pump through it. This, IMO, is a much better analogy for what the carriers are doing.
FTS:
"Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted, with an incentive to use as much as you could. That brings price stability to the end user, but it's a horrible way to manage electricity load."
That analogy doesn't work, because the main constraint for electricity isn't network capacity, it's the fact that most current methods of production consume a resource irreversibly, so you're being charged for the use of the resource, not just the use of the power lines. Data doesn't get "used up", only transferred around, so it's relatively easier/cheaper for cellular (or land) networks to increase their capacity to transfer data than it is for energy companies to produce more energy.
Yet another ludicrous analogy from the industry.
Electricity is a finite resource. Generators can only make so much, and the more you make, the more energy in it requires, whether you are burning fuel or damming a river. If you try and plug too many devices in, they won't all work, or you'll blow a fuse, or none of them will work at all.
Bits are an infinite resource. Computers can make as many as you want, and the difference in power required between a few and a lot is negligible. If you try to plug too many devices in, the worst that happens is they might not work as quickly.
Bandwidth isn't consumed, it is used or wasted. Network operators don't use fewer resources when their networks are idle. The only metric which determines the cost to the network operator is the regularly occurring peak load. Therefore pricing based on amount of data transferred doesn't fit the cost structure: It is purely an instrument of market segmentation.
"Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country" Well Bozo, going by that analogy, then AT&T shouldn't get any of the money as they aren't the one who is generating the data. Like Electricity, they would then have to buy data from every computer owner who is connected on the web as they would now be a "Data Generation Station". So, lets see when AT&T decides to pay PopSci or Popular Mechanics for the pleasure of transmission of their data. Right...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Just think of how much Video streaming you can do with an ENTIRE 2 GB a month! And hey, the iPad/phone/touch don't support flash, so you don't need to worry about ad's eating up your bandwidth! All for just $25 (2 GB plan) a month, or an extra $20 if you want to have tethering. (great deal, amirite?)
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
BS like this keeps me from graduating from my pay-as-you-go phone where I average ~$10/mo to something snazzier that would immediately jump to ~$100/mo. The plans don't scale well at all to really light users like me who would enjoy the niftier phones, but had the gang rape every month when my 30 minutes of calls and couple email checks would still cost me ~$100.
Sadly sooner or later AT&T and the like will eventually find a quiet way to collude and make pay-as-you-go suck bad enough, or drive the prices up enough to ruin even that little haven of wireless bargains.
The plan is just a way for AT&T to get rid of its least profitable customers. These are the ones who actually *use* the network capacity that they pay for. Most people are light users. They pay a lot of money but don't actually use much capacity. AT&T loves these people, because it's essentially free money. The ones who actually use the service are not very profitable, because AT&T has to provide capacity for them. (Capacity isn't needed if you don't use the network!) So rather than expanding capacity to match demand, they're making it economically infeasible to *use* the capacity that you pay for.
AT&T claims that most people use less than 2 GB/month. That's great, but that's partly because of the lack of good applications for most smartphones. (iPhone users use much more than half the data on the network.) Imagine if AT&T had imposed a cap based on what most people used in 1993. The web would have no pictures. You couldn't afford them. If they based it on what people used in 1996, the web would have no audio or video. You couldn't afford it. Same with most applications used today, network based software distribution, Skype, and many other things we take for granted. The cap makes higher bandwidth applications unaffordable for most users, and will seriously stifle the development of new technologies for mobile device.
This is a truly bad idea...
I've had an iPhone for a year and a half. I love it, but for the last six months (the months I could review) I never even got up to 100MB per month. I use the phone all the time, but often within WiFi range.
I'd rather pay half as much to get what is still more than double my normal usage. It would also discourage casual youtube streaming and thus probably improve network speed for everyone.
The one thing I'd REALLY want from AT&T (and Apple) is an app that reliably monitors billable bytes in a billing period. ("Gosh, I'm close to my limit this month. Better watch the funny cat video at home.") I know you can dial *DATA# but it should be part of the "Settings" info.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
From a business perspective, this is the golden egg: 1) If you use less than your total minutes, you've overpaid = more money for the company 2) If you go over your minutes you pay an exorbitant overage charge = more money for the company Of course, it shanks the customer.
Some early toasters didn't come with the traditional two-pronged plug. Instead, you had to unscrew a light bulb and screw in the toaster's plug. Why? Because the electric company charged more for general-purpose outlets! Prior to metered billing, people paid for electricity by the number of fixtures and their estimated electric use. Everything became sane once the electric companies introduced metered billing.
Anyway, AT&T's $20 / month tethering plan is just going to make me switch when my contract is up. Charge me for the bandwidth that I use, not for the device!
No, I will not work for your startup
The ridiculous part is that they're still charging a fee to enable tethering. That sort of makes sense with an "unlimited" plan. Presumably, the plan price was based on an estimate of how much data you'd use. Since tethering will obviously drive up usage, that assumption is no longer valid. (This highlights the absurdity of so-called "unlimited" plans that aren't really.)
But now that you are paying for actual use, there's no excuse to charge anything for tethering. You've paid for 2 GB (or whatever), and it shouldn't matter how it gets used. If you use more, you pay more.
I'd really like to see a regulatory authority question that charge.
Curious to see if app revenue goes down, since many of them require bandwidth usage to function. Also, in the case of my Backflip, if AT&Twill still charge high monthly fees for bandwidth heavy apps like Navigator. If I'm paying extra to download maps, I sure as hell ain't paying $10 a month for a GPS app.
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
When I was in Hong Kong, I just had to pay $51 USD per month and they'll give you unlimited 3G data with tethering, tons of voice minutes, wifi access at their hotspots throughout the city, and an legally unlocked iPhone 3GS.
Now I'm in Palo Alto, that barely buys me a voice plan. And even if I give them 2x what I did in Hong Kong, I'm still capped. And AT&T's reception in cities (like San Fran) sucks - yet it's Hong Kong that has more frickin' high rise buildings to block the 3G signals - and in Hong Kong 3G fucking works. I really, REALLY have no idea how any of you guys can try to defend AT&T over their crap service.
The issue with per-unit data plans is that there's a big difference between my data usage and my electricity usage: who's in control. With electricity I know how much my appliances use every month, and I can control that by controlling my appliances. If my electricity bill's too high, I can elect to turn off lights more or switch to lower-wattage or more-efficient bulbs. I can turn my computer off when I'm not using it. I control how much electricity I use and when, and I have a fairly fine degree of control over it.
With data, I've nowhere near that control. When I open a Web page, I don't even know how much data it'll involve until after it's done loading. The Web site's in control of what's on it's pages, and if it decides to ship me 50 megabytes of graphics and scripts and such all I can do is not visit that site at all. And I've still eaten up that 50 megabytes finding out that I will, so really I have to avoid visiting any Web site I haven't visited before and know how much it'll send me. That, to me, isn't real control. And that lack of control's why I want a fixed-rate plan or I'm not going to use the data features much if at all.
we bought mobile data like we buy hardline data in this country. the service would (relatively) constantly improve, and come down in price with no caps or bandwidth throttling and (relatively) no restrictions on content. This business model has proven to work for the past decade and more, and it has benefited both providers and consumers. But probably not with the 100% profit margin that the providers grubby little hands would like it to. So, now one of the principal reasons for these companies trying to enact the pay-as-you-go model is SURELY to apply it to their landline business, as well. They're already trying it with the throttling, and I know there've been a few attempts at putting download caps on things, which would be a regression to the early AOL and dial-up ISP days.
I am fine with the idea of putting a price on data, but the comparison to electricity is a poor analogy. The cost of providing electricity to someone, more or less, scales linearly with how much they use--each kWh is some amount of fuel that must be burned. The cost of transporting data from point A to point B does not scale linearly, though. E.g., once my router is plugged in, the cost of transferring 1GB from one of my machines to another is very nearly zero compared to just letting the hardware sit there. On the other hand, if I bake a pizza instead of letting my oven just sit there, that's 1kWh or so of electricity that would not otherwise need to be generated. Obviously that's an oversimplification, because the more heavy bandwidth users you have, the more hardware you have to install, so at large scales increased data transfer does increase cost. Nevertheless, it does not scale linearly, because there are economies of scale: bringing 1GB/s into someone's home does not cost 1000 times as much as bringing 1MB/s into someone's home. For energy, though, we've essentially maxed out on the economies of scale and are essentially in linear territory. (Yes, the local provider has an upstream provider, but still...)
the stocks going down.
To make the analogy to electricity work, we would have to postulate a fantasy world where the power companies run no generators of their own, they just maintain the grid. Their customers pay them for access to that grid, and use it transfer energy around between them as needed. The problem is that the electric-power-line company isnt happy with the reasonable profits they are making, and dont want to upgrade their lines to keep up with demand. So they want to start metering the endpoints and charging for the power as if they ran the generators too, but without actually doing any generation themselves, and without even spending some small part of their profits upgrading the grid, which is currently staggering because they have multiplied their customer base many times without upgrading the infrastructure to support it. Instead of expanding the infrastructure to match demand, they figure they can make more money *fining* the customers that actually attempt to use it, and shaking down the people that DO actually generate electricity for ever more money.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I used 4.22gb so far this service month on my Droid.
Obviously this doesn't affect verizon - yet - but I'm not looking forward to when it does.
Can you even get anything less than 2 phase 240 volts in the US? You connect one of those phases to neutral and you have 120V but connect the together and you have 240V.
Doesn't anyone remember AOL and paying by the hour? That model was probably closer to actual costs than this AT&T plan, and we were all happy to get rid of that headache. If an ISP wants more money from me, then they can offer me more speed at a higher price and maybe even offer some services themselves that can utilize high speed internet, for both home and mobile users.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't trust ISPs. They will generally always place the over-limit to be somewhere around 3-5 days if you are downloading constantly, so it's like a trap. I have always wanted a plan with a slower speed, but no trap... and if they offered plans like that this issue nowadays would be moot. So much for setting up an always-running webcam etc.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
What's special about "infrastructure equipment"? When your grocery store decides how much perishable food to stock, they have to make exactly the same kind of prediction. And yet few stores insist on monthly milk-buying contracts.
The truth is that a recurring fee is the ultimate wet dream of anybody designing a business model. Harder to do when there's real competition. Which there is in the grocery business.
And also in the wireless data business almost everywhere outside the U.S. Which is why, contrary to what you believe, that these models have been tried and do work, in countries where there's real competition in the wireless space.
That when we made analogies to utility usage they actually made sense and were applicable to the problem space.
The bottom line right now is the best of wireless technologies just are not capable of scaling with the densities and performance of traditional broadband services. Carriers might think they are leaving money on the table. My suspicion is their customers might think they get WiFi anywhere they go so whats the point in paying an extra $40 a month for high latency capped data services that have zero chance of working in any metro area.
With the aggregation of carriers in US pricing is moving out into absurd wacko land realitive to other countries. What we need is the FCC and government to help reduce the barrier to entry for new wireless telecoms to compete with the AT&Ts of the world.
Back when we ran a small, dialup ISP, we charged everyone the more or less standard $20 per month. Then we did a little number crunching and found that most people used less than 100 hours a month, but there were a handful that were online pretty much 24/7. In at least one case, it was a family that had mom on ebay during the day, the kids gaming until late and then dad on during the wee hours. They complained bitterly when we raised the fee for "unlimited", but calmed down when we explained that it cost us around $22 a month just for the phone line they were using and by charging them $20 a month, we were subsidizing their connection.
At least in our area, the situation remains somewhat the same, where ISPs have to buy more bandwidth to keep customers happy during the peak evening hours when more people are streaming more stuff (ie, Netflix and p2p) every day.
The entire cellular industry is a crock of %#^$
(and no, im not saying its full of perl)
They make you sign contracts that they then don't honor by tacking on endless fees and surcharges just to hide the true price for the service. And if you cancel it, get ready for a hefty early termination fee.
As more and more people text message excessively, they routinely up the per message/text message prices. Yea, they have to deal with capacity changes, but even taking those into account, it doesn't cost them much to send them. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS)
They do it because they can and we will just continue to pay 'em.
Why don't they charge us like electricity? Yea sure, some people would have a higher bill, but they would just stop using it as much, while a vast majority of us would have a lower bill.
What really bugs me about the rate changes is how much they are charging per MB when compared to a standard DSL or cable connection at home. Comcast now has a 250GB / 250,000MB data cap and my service runs around $43 per month. So my cost runs around .017 cents per MB assuming I use my full 250GB allotment.
With AT&T's model the cost per MB on the $15 plan is 7.5 cents per 200 MB and the $25 plan is 1.25 cents per 2,000 MB. This is roughly a 440% and a 73% respective increase of the cost of my home bandwidth.
Yes I know it's not quite a apple to apple comparison, but the cost of the bandwidth and wireless support can be no where near the prices they are charging. Unfortunately in the states this goes for the biggest two wireless carriers ATT and Verizon.
I have no problem paying for what I am using, but the pricing of there data is way out of the ball park.
Note: Yes I know my numbers are not exact and I also know I didn't use the standard 1,024k when doing my calculations from GB to MB.
Why is there no content industry trade group which lobbies congress to protect their business.
This will hurt the bottom line at apple, netflix, hulu, xbox live, PSN, steam, every MMO, and a lot of websites.
Where is their lobby? Why aren't they up in arms about this proposed attack on their business?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Am I the only one who is actually excited about this? My wife and I both own iPhones, purchased used to avoid having to sign up for an extra $30/month/line contract. We are both within range of WiFi, 22 hours a day, so I just don't have a need for a $30/month unlimited data plan. What I'd really like is to be able to purchase a new iPhone without a data plan, but at least now there is an option at a monthly price I can maybe handle. With more and more wireless data being used and limited spectrum to carry that data, it seems to me the elimination of "unlimited" plans is inevitable.
What I still find ridiculous is text messaging. How carriers have managed to increase text messaging prices by 400% or more over the last several years, in almost perfect sync with each other, and not receive any regulatory scrutiny for it, is beyond me.
Sure you do. You pay a per-kWh rate for Generation of electricity, Transmission (think high-voltage long-distance) and Distribution (from your local substation). The Generation portion of your bill is likely just under half of the total. The last mile is expensive in electricity as it is in Broadband.
People invariably react badly when they read a news story about some industry and containing words like "government" and "scrutiny." I don't because I can appreciate what things would be like without government protection and regulation. Without government protection, there would be no power lines, telephone lines, data lines or protected radio frequencies. Power company pisses someone off and someone decides to take down a few power polls... someone doesn't like what AT&T wireless is doing and then sets out jamming devices to block wireless signals. Government protection is pretty much a requirement for services like these. But government protection comes with rules and regulation. After all, the government should not afford special rights and privileges without those who benefit from them giving something back to "the people" in some way.
Increasingly, we are seeing a LOT less giving something back to "the people." Increasingly, companies like AT&T whose "right of way" comes from the government of "we the people" abuses the people with all sorts of unreasonable pricing and increases. And then when the government starts looking at what they are doing, both the businesses and people who are pro-business quickly forget where their right-of-way privileges come from and get indignant about government scrutiny, oversight and regulation.
If anything, we need to use the power of "we the people" to threaten such business with increased regulation and oversight including but not limited to pricing structure regulations and the like. This works quite well for other government regulated business such as electric power. They all have limits over what they can charge and not a single plant has gone bankrupt as a result of government regulation. In fact, in places where deregulation has occurred, prices went up and quality/reliability went down. The people NEED government regulation of such utilities. POTS is considered a utility and so should wireless service these days. Their current limit-pushing behavior is simply screaming for a government slap-down with imposed limits that benefit the people... the people whose government has granted these companies right-of-way protection in order to operate.
Sometimes you just have to go outside.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seeing how electricity and data happens to be headed under two completely different markets, Mr. Denere does not know what he is talking about. The price of, say, Coca-Cola is not dependent on the price of fuel. Sure, the latter can affect the former in a slight way, but the price of one is not tied, directly, to the other.
It is obvious that Mr. Denere is attempt to be an apologist for AT&T or is trying to further AT&T's propaganda campaign. I am sorry, but the data plan switch is, in no way, a good idea. AT&T is attempt to continue to rape their customers for sub-par service.
You mean media providers.
The content could usually be conveyed with far fewer bits.
Rewarding those who get to the point could be a good thing.
I don't need flashing graphics to tell me it's gonna rain tomorrow.
"It's going to rain tomorrow" will do. Same content.
An incentive is a artificial, beneficial, effect of an action. If one was to get paid $10,000 for earning a degree, the degree would be the *result* of work and the $10,000 would be the *incentive*. With flat-price, unlimited download subscriptions, a person has the *freedom* to use as much bandwidth as s/he *needs*, but in no way has an *incentive* to use as much as s/he *could*.
That slight correction in language completely invalidates the assertion.
But this actually doubles the price per byte
Reality: He is paying half as much per month as he was for the same network use.
You: Costs are doubling!
Revise your calculations. Where you went wrong was assuming everyone already uses uo to the maximum limit of bandwidth, every month. It simply is not so!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Admittedly, it would be a very low price per byte, but those that use more would pay more. The price/per byte could also change with the time of day. What if each gigabyte cost $10 for prime time and $5 for off hours. (A few) People that download hundreds of gigabytes would pay a lot more than (most) people who use a a handful of gigabytes.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
There's just so much wrong going on with what they said.
#1 Electricity isn't data bandwidth. AT&T uses deviant methods to get people to use this data plan. They do this by forcing smart phones to come with a data plan, and even disabling wifi or just removing wifi from their phones, like the LG Arena. On top of it all, the GPS devices have no option for Offline-GPS, so that you can store the map data on your phones SD card instead of getting it through the network. When was the last time that the electric company ever forced you to use their service? You can plug devices into generators or cars.
#2 Data bandwidth isn't like a dam or a nuclear power plant, so why are we comparing it to electricity? Why not compare it to cable modems, FIOS, or DSL where it is unlimited? I doubt Verizon's FIOS is using more resources then a Verizon cell phone plan, especially if you consider that cell phone data plans exist on already established cell phone networks, like DSL does. So how is it a burden for any of these carriers?
#3 This crap happened to AOL, and that didn't work. I remember when my AOL bill was hundreds of dollars, because it was easy to go over.
#4 Isn't anyone afraid this might limit the internet? Rather then improving their infrastructure, they rather charge us more for far less? We could have had live streaming media with our portable devices, or online gaming with them.
I would like to have a smart phone without a data plan. I get free wifi hot spots from Optimum Online, so why the hell do I need a data plan? Plus, the wifi hot spots is unlimited data. I had to buy my smart phone off ebay just to avoid the monthly cost of the data plan. I wouldn't mind these new changes if I had the option to avoid the data plan when buying a smart phone.
If I'm going to pay for the amount of data I use, then I want the ability to completely filter ads on my iPhone. This includes the coming iAds.
Two points.
Point one, and I think many people need to understand this, seriously. AT&T NEVER HAD AN UNLIMITED 3G DATA PLAN. EVER. Not for the Joe Schmo you and me, anyway; I'm sure they made deals with large corporations. Why do I say this? Because I, two close friends, and a dozen or more people I know passingly have ALL received overage bills on our UNLIMITED data plans over the past year or two. There was, never, an unlimited data plan. It was 'unlimited' in the same way ISP's back in the day offered 'unlimited' connection time; it was unlimited until you actually left your modem dialed in for a few days, and then they disconnected you for 'overuse'. AT&T pulled a bait & switch on you when you bought the unlimited plan in the first place. Do you want to know why they're doing away with it? Two reasons: one, the new limit on the plans is lower than the 'unlimited' limit.. and they like that; two, and more importantly -- Obama is in office. Yes, I said the president's name. No, I'm not going to say one thing one way or the other politically except this - he's pushing for consumer protections, at least insofar as proper documentation and up-front contracts. AT&T sees the writing on the wall and figures it can kill 2 birds with 1 stone -- fix a glitch they've had for awhile (too much bandwidth available for a flat fee before any overage is hit), and get in line with the political hammer before it comes down on them. That's all this is. It's a way to generate more profit on existing customers AND get good with the government before they even come knocking. Win win.
Point two:
Carriers don't want to start charging per-mb or per-gb except for overages because they know they'll end up like the backbone bandwidth market (not consumer or dedicated server bandwidth; colo & above bandwidth). PREMIUM blended bandwidth at a LOW commit will, if you have any sense, run you anywhere from 50-150 dollars/mbit for the first 10mbit (note that single-provider low-cost bandwidth can literally be as low as 1-2 dollars/mbit at high commit rates, but I'm intentionally going high here).
1 mbit -- 100 dollars, let's call it that for ease of math.
1 mbit / 8 = 125,000 bytes / 1024 = 122 KB * 60 (sec) * 60 (min) * 24 (hour) * 30 (day) / 1024 (MB) / 1024 (GB) = 301.75 GB.
301.75 GB for 100 dollars, assuming you used every second of the pipe. That's, wow, that's / 33 cents a GB, isn't it? And I'll tell you right now, NOBODY would ever charge you an overage or an 'overuse' fee for using that full mbit 24x7 in that market; you pay for 1mbit, you may use it, all month long if you wish. Oh, and that's for fairly outrageous low-commit bandwidth pricing. I've personally seen high-commit pricing for a single provider in the under 4 cent/GB range, when the math is done this way.
Even figuring in that you only utilize a portion of such a pipe in a day, it still doesn't work out in AT&T's favor when compared. Various providers charge up to 2 DOLLARS a MEGABYTE for usage past their 'included limit' on these plans. Isn't that, umm, gosh, actually, I can't even factor how many times over more expensive that is than internet connectivity pricing. Is a cellular network THAT MUCH more expensive than a fiber network? I'll grant you it is more expensive, but over 1000 TIMES as expensive? No, no I don't think so.
You get ripped off every day you pay $10's to $100 for a couple of GB of usable limit (which is what you do RIGHT NOW on your 'unlimited plan' -- the new one just spells it out for you instead of lying). Every. Single. Day.
I have no problem with paying more for using more data (as long as the prices for more are reasonable. No $40 for the first 2 gb, $5 for every additional meg,,,) I just resent the implications that because I take an unlimited plan, and use it a lot, I'm somehow being a hog and abusing the service.
"Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted..." OR Imagine, for a moment, if we bought telephone connection time the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use your telephone as much as you wanted... Oh, wait a minute...
If I'm going to pay for the amount of data I use, then I want the ability to completely filter ads on my iPhone. This includes the coming iAds.
Mod parent up.
The iPhone was never designed for tiered data plans. What are they going to do, have flags for what data connections are allowed? Are apps going to have a bandwidth rating? Or am I just going to have to turn the data off unless I'm in Wifi... ...I hope AT&T is listening. It'd be far cheaper for me to just get a regular phone and an iPod Touch. That idea hadn't even popped into my head until this came along.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The wireless situation Singapore is similar to Hong Kong. Not *quite* as cheap, but still a whole lot more value for your money than you'll get with the likes of AT&T. Plus, the actual service is better. I never had a dropped call and the data rate is actually what they advertise and the ping times are under 200ms on 3G. Decent, cheap, and high-quality telecommunications is just one of many reasons I'm glad to be going back.
The only way I can imagine that anyone can defend AT&T is sheer ignorance of what else is available in the world, or simple-minded "nothin dem furriners have is better dan 'merica" jingoism.
BTW... SingTel, as a public service, provides FREE and NATIONWIDE wifi at 512Mbps. Could you even *Imagine* AT&T doing so?
When you pay your electric bill, you typically pay a flat rate (a connection charge) to your electric company for the transmission system, and a per kwh rate to them to buy electricity from any number of generating plants. Use 1 kwh or 1000kwh, your payment stays the same. Now if you want to jump to the next level (1ph 120v to 3ph 480v) then you pay a higher connection charge, but still don't pay more for your usage for the /transmission/ of the power.
Well in NY, it's a bit of a farce, but delivery and production are separate (and you can choose different providers yourself) and you pay per kWh costs for both production *and* delivery.
And you're basically wrong.. trust me, even if you are in a locality where these two items aren't billed discretely, "it's in there". The fact is that people get bent up on the distinction of bandwidth vs transfer, or energy vs power as if they are completely unrelated... and these people are either idiots that slept through a first semester calc class or disingenuous.
However, it is also true that comparing the economics of electricity generation and delivery to data services on completely analogous terms is stupid.
a company, if its big enough, can set the conditions for an ENTIRE field of service in a country. and we call this 'free' market. medieval feudal system had more justifications to defend its practices than the joke this thing has become. people need to realize that when corporations go over a certain size, they practically become countries. and if not regulated, they run their domain like a feudal fief.
Read radical news here
I can understand them NEEDING to charge for the 3G bandwidth we use, and, since I'm human and therefore greedy, I can understand them WANTING to charge
us as much as possible.
I don't understand how they can justify charging $20/month for tethering...well, other than the justification of greed. Why should I pay a monthly
fee to allow 2 of my devices to communicate with each other? If, via tethering, I consume more bandwidth, then OK...charge me for the bandwidth, but
it costs AT&T nothing to have my iPhone talk to my laptop! Apple doesn't charge me a monthly fee to use bluetooth headphones with my iPhone or Macbook.
Another detail lacking is whether or not tethering will work with the iPad, when tethered to an iPhone, or if I'll need to maintain 2 access accounts. One for
my iPhone, and another should I purchase an iPad.
[Shrug] "Unlimited" is the way it works for land lines for local calls. I'm not saying that with the suggestion land line costs are equivalent to cellular network costs, but to prove the point that "unlimited" doesn't have to be a problem on the basis of some kind of fundamental and immutable principle of telecommunications.
What they're really saying is: "Our network is too limited, and despite exorbitant pricing and lock-in payment plans it would cut into our profits too much to build it faster, thus our customers must be limited too."
I'm actually curious what Steve Jobs is going to say about this. Seeing as it does pretty well damage the value of having an iPhone, iPad and whatever they bring out next.
3G networks are horribly, horribly congested. Putting caps on data discourages users from using it for high-bandwidth applications, resulting in a superior quality of service for everyone.
It also means that heavier users are paying for the network upgrades that they are forcing the carrier to provide, while lighter users are able to save money.
Having said that, they could try to be a little more generous. Data costs in the US are certainly cheaper than, say, Australia.
The main wholesaler of 3G connectivity here (yes, it is wholesaled) is believed to charge some $1000-$2000 per mbit of connectivity per month (possibly from an aggregation point to a data center owned by the ISP, meaning they must pay IP costs in addition to that). A small ISP recently reported having a single 50mbit connection for 10,000 wireless users - this would cost them up to $100,000 per month. In order for this service to be feasible, they need each user to average under 5kbit per second, or 1582mb per month. Offering unlimited would be simply infeasible. This service works very well - it can deliver several mbits when I need it.
AT&T's situation is clearly different, but congestion in the physical layer (spectrum) is a problem that can only get worse over time. Offering unlimited in the first place was a stupid idea - this only encourages users to do stupid things like torrent over 3G. The heavy users always call "greedy!" whenever there is a change in pricing, but have they considered that the increased price merely reflects the burden they place on the network? Consider that a 3G tower may have a total capacity of 42mbit - if you have 100 people in the area torrenting, the service is going to be extremely shit for anyone who wants to use it for something sensible. De-prioritisation is an ugly solution to this problem.
At least you almost certainly have an unlimited wired connection to fall back to (for now). That luxury is not available in many places.
Doesn't anyone realize that AT&T did this in the correct sequence? First they raised the price of canceling from AT&T, if you're a smart phone user, which was June 1st. Now, they changed their data plans, which would obviously have pissed off smart phone users. What do pissed off customers do? They switch providers.
Customers can't switch because they'll have to pay $300+ for the cancellation fee. They probably won't switch because if you already have a unlimited data plan, it's still unlimited from what I understand. So this just makes new customers run away. I'm a T-Mobile user and I was thinking about switching, until all this bull crap started happening.
The Government should really stop this crap with all cell phone providers, as it's unfair to customers. Can't buy a smart phone, without being required to get a data plan. Canceling will cost an absurd amount of money. How can cell phone companies be competitive, when all they're doing is locking people into their service and changing contracts in order to suck more money away from customers?
ATT and Version, and Sprint, et all, have already agreed that the price is $60 per month for 5gigs. $30 per month for unlimited breaks the agreement.
There is no collusion, it's just the open market setting the price. Besides everyone knows if you have brought an iPad~iPhone, obviously you can afford to pay a lot more than $30.
Why have your cake if you are not going to eat it? Having a fancy internet media device and not using it much (to keep within data limits) is like having a Ferrari but only driving it on the second sunday of every other month so you don't scratch it. Why bother? If I'm going to pony up the dough, I only want a daily driver, or at least something I can take to the track once in a while.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
My suggestion is we all say "fuck you" to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and all of the other big carriers and build community owned fiber networks and set up open wireless mesh networks.
I find it interesting that people are debating whether or not Verizon will follow AT&T or if people will be better or worse off with the new plans. Here is the thing everybody seems to miss. Earlier iPhone users, who are currently eligible for an upgrade, just got screwed, because while they were likely planning to upgrade via a subsidized price to the up and coming iPhone, they will be forced to take the new data plans. The only way for them to keep their unlimited plan is to either buy the iPhone at full price or go and get an smart phone elsewhere. I think this is the perfect time for earlier iPhone users to seriously consider Android devices like the EVO (Sprint), Droid Incredible (Verizon) or MyTouch Slide / Nexus One (T-Mobile). Here are my latest speed results (Nexus One on T-Mobile).
/1010 kbps
6/4/10 981kbps / 779 kbps
6/2/10 3081kbps
5/26/10 1081 kbps / 387 kbps
5/25/10 1309 kbps / 382 kbps
My co-worker just picked up the EVO and got 4.5 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up in our office today. Think about that, he was getting better then T1 performance on a mobile phone.
I ssh to my Linux machine and VNC to my Windows desktop from my Android phone every day (using 3G on phone) to my home network which is connected to Internet via 4G (Clear, which is partnership with Sprint).
The reason AT&T is setting data limits is because they spend money on providing kickbacks to Apple for iPhone rights and buying TV commercials to make themselves look like they have a better network than they do. They failed to invest in their network and they are paying for it, or rather the person with the 200MB plan that uses 201MB and pays $30 just like when he/she had unlimited plan is paying for it. They are trying to increase profits by putting their customers in tiny (high margin/profit) boxes. The plans are priced to reduce usage and increase profits (even if revenue falls). Instead of rushing to build a better network, they can take their time, because they setup pricing data plans to motivate users to take or the worrying about data usage (or pay out the nose for going over the set limit). It's BS. If they AT$T network drops your connection when you have loaded half of a file or web page, it still counts against you, even if it is unusable, do you pay for packed headers or do they? Do you pay for each TCP package they needs to be recent because the network drops your packets? It's BS. I thin the future is going to more likely be a fixed price plan for all data, voice and text. Sprint is already testing those waters.
AT&T needs to die, because it is just a crappy company, most people who use it have not idea how much better the other carriers are or are tied to AT&T because of the iPhone, no because they like AT&T. AT&T crashes more devices/calls/connections then Flash does, but since they pay Jobs money he looks the other way.
Respect the Constitution
You should jailbreak your iPhone and then use it to share the 3G connection by acting as a hotspot. This is ideal for people who own an iPhone and want to get an iPad. Since you are already paying AT&T for a 3G connection (on the iPhone) and it's unlimited - you can dispute overage chargers with the person on the phone, I only had to do that once and they stopped charging me overage fees after I went over 5GB/month - there is no reason to pay extra and get an iPad 3G, just get the cheaper WiFi version. I've even stopped paying for my home internet connection. My 3G data plan from AT&T is my only internet connection and I max it out almost 24/7.
You don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. Every place I've lived, residential electric rates are two tiered at least. Exceed a certain number of kWh and you start paying more for the excess, e.g. http://www.dteenergy.com/pdfs/electricRateOptions.pdf
If you have to cap it, then cap it, but not at 2GB.
To continue the electricity analogy, what if the price of your unlimited monthly electricity dropped by 15% and you got only a couple of week's worth, and had to stop using your TV and computer in order to have lights at the end of the month? What if you stopped buying electric devices altogether and the whole economy suffered?
If you change 2GB to 5GB and make tethering free that is much more reasonable.
In other words, the lack of disincentive should not necessarily be construed as an incentive. More importantly, if I waste electricity, more has to be generated at an environmental and monetary cost. If I use more bandwidth, not necessarily so. If enough people need more bandwidth, then more will have to be created by upgrading infrastructure. Unlike generating extra electricity, however, monetary costs are not simply "wasted" -- but rather remain as infrastructure upgrades. You pay once, and reap the benefit indefinitely.
These two commodities are fundamentally different beasts. Moreover, it's not as if we sell electricity in a tiered pricing structure. It's not "Use up to 2 gigawatts and pay 25 dollars a month", so the analogy is simply isn't apt on any level.
don't complain of dimensional analysis when you've failed your physics analysis. When you send a data packet, the is no loss of future data packets. And sending one data packet costs the provider as much as sending no packets or sending packets at full rate.
1's and 0's don't wear out.
The energy does. When you use that energy, the energy available in coal for future use is lessened. Coal is used up, worn out.
Let me split up that 2 Gigs between the devices I use. Having individual data plans for laptop, netbook, tablet, pad, phone, car and whatever else I can jam 3G into is insane. Switched away from Cingular(ATT) when the first bluetooth cell phone they had charged me hundreds of dollars in data a month. On a supposidly unlimited plan billing would drop the charges but never prevented them. Had been fine using 9600 baud tether on BellAtlantic(VZW), my data plan was the voice plan. Let me use the gigs on any network and any device and I'll pay double.
If I use more kWh then I get charged more per kWh after using a certain amount. The only exception in PG&E country is those who have time-of-use meters, where you pay based on when you use the power.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's no set "way" that capitalism works. Capitalism is simply a system in which the means of production are under private ownership and value is freely exchanged between private parties. Private parties are free to define their business relationships however they see fit.
There's nothing about a restrictive licensing scheme that is "not capitalism." If one private party offers it, and another buys it--congrats, you've got capitalism. Don't like a particular pricing or licensing scheme? Don't buy it.
If I buy flour, you get money for the amount of flour you sold me at the price you asked, and that is the end of you having any say or interest in that portion of flour. You don't get to come back later and say "Wow, that's a nice loaf of bread you baked. That added some value to that flour, let's talk about what you owe me now...".
AT&T is not coming back later. The terms of the deal are defined up front. Again--under capitalism you just get to decide whether you want to buy it or not.
Now all that said, the U.S. economic system is not pure capitalism. It's mixed and regulated, and you could make a case for government oversight of this type of relationship. My point is just that you can't hide behind the term "capitalism" while you do so.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Sounds a lot like the old "640K should be enough for ANYONE!" line to me.
You make a very flawed assumption that past usage trends are a reliable predictor of future needs. If the new iPhone and next generation of iPad include forward-facing cameras, and video conferencing becomes popular - how much monthly usage will that generate? As another example? AT&T has been talking for a while now about the possibility of offering the ability to stream recorded TV shows from a U-Verse DVR to mobile devices. What will THAT do to people's bandwidth usage?
The "elephant in the room" that few people seemed to notice about AT&T's old "unlimited" plans is, they've always had a 5GB monthly cap anyway! It's in the fine print people usually don't read.... The thing is, it turns out that 5GB per month may as well be unlimited usage for most people, because it's a generous enough amount that it covers the vast majority of use cases. (Anyone exceeding that is PROBABLY doing it via tethering their mobile to a laptop or desktop computer ... and most carriers have tried to steer those folks towards different cellular packages anyway, like buying an "aircard" with its own plan independent of the phone.) So what's REALLY going on is AT&T is trying to bring down the largest available cap from 5GB to 2GB (despite the rest of the industry having standardized on a 5GB data cap).
Only 2% who slurp down porn flick after porn flick on their mobile phone will ever exceed 2gig. You know who you are...
Or people who can't get cable or DSL where they live and rely on tethering as the primary Internet access on the home PC. Updates for the operating system and all applications can be rawther large.
Advertising: "I don't like ads. Find a business model that works".
How about advertising: "I'll look at ads but not if they're an order of magnitude bigger than the article. Find an ad delivery mechanism that works more efficiently." Case in point: I have my Firefox browser set not to download SWF from sites not on the whitelist until I click to activate them because SWF ads are so much bigger than the article. If publishers and advertisers choose to use SWF as a site's primary ad delivery mechanism, that's their problem.
The ads are what pays for the content in the first place
I'd be happy with 5 KB of advertising for every 20 KB of body (like broadcast and expanded basic cable TV), or even 20 KB of advertising for 20 KB of body (like a newspaper), but not 200 KB of advertising for 20 KB of body. That's why I use a whitelist for SWF.
True, but there are plans for people using Aircards. And People who can't get Cable or DSL can't get 3G either.
Nobody is going to tether on EDGE other than out of sheer desperation for an email or something.
Still, those using tethering on a 30 dollar plan were always taking advantage of a general 30 dollar plan, and were probably among those abusing the system. Tethering wasn't even allowed, so hard to accept that as a valid complaint.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
How much streaming hd video content do you get with 2gb?
Watching on the go? Your handheld device with an 800x480 pixel display can display only EDTV like a DVD, not HDTV. Watching at home and tethering because your home can't get cable or DSL? Use your 2 GB on a postal disc rental service to pick out Blu-ray Discs.
Bandwidth is comparable to watts, not joules. AT&T doesn't pay for transfer, they pay for pipes of X size.
But X is less than the number of subscribers times the burstable speed of the average subscriber. To continue the electric power analogy: Like home and mobile Internet access, home electric power is oversubscribed. If everybody used their home circuit's full capacity at once, the power company probably wouldn't have the peak load generating capacity to handle it, resulting in a brownout. So the price per kWh or price per MJ is set to encourage people not to use so much energy within some sliding window that others get browned out.
If you really want the internet to grow, take it out of the hands of Comcast and AT&T
How does AT&T even have a choice? The FCC tells AT&T how much bandwidth AT&T can offer at peak time.
I only install apps from the free software repositories [...]. All my bandwidth usage comes from being simultaneously logged into skype
Since when is Skype free software?
Another way to put it: Cellular Internet is a lot like cable Internet, with all customers on one tower sharing the tower's bandwidth. And it's a lot more expensive to put up a new GSM/UMTS tower than to put up a new DOCSIS segment, especially with all the NIMBYism.
Phone reception aka Communication isn't like electricity. It's like the Internet, a packeted communication protocol. And charging per usage with that does not and will not ever work. This article is complete dog shit.
Then everything would be an analogy.
You use up energy, you use up water, you use up car parts.
You do _not_ use up bandwidth. Once the infrastructure is there, you get a constant "supply" of data at (almost) no cost.
And _that_ is why we don't pay for data the same way we pay for energy.
I have to admit that this is a wonderfully twisted argument that had me clawing at its cracks for a few minutes, though. If I had heard it in a debate, realization would have come _way_ too late. Good mind-trick, that.
The IPAD has a 1024x768 screen, which is well above 480p HD.
Not by much, especially if you live in PAL-land where the 704x576 of a DVD resizes to 1024x576 and is therefore full-resolution in one direction and full-screen in the other, albeit with letterboxing because iPad's dimensions are intended to resemble paper more than a movie. The IPAD has a 1024x768 screen, which is well above 480p HD.
Or I could watch streaming movies on demand using today's technology and convenience instead the old snail mail systems of a decade ago.
Then do so with cable or FiOS, not 3G.
You are saying it as if [the maximum simultaneous throughput of a tower] is some written is stone number. There is no technical barrier here
Each tower has a limited amount of spectrum going to it.
nor is there is a cost limitation preventing the major telcos (I recognize this is different for smaller fish) from changing the statement you made above.
It costs a lot of money to put up more towers. It costs even more to buy spectrum from the FCC so that you can put more throughput on the same tower.
Do you know the average lifetime wholesale cost (in the USA/Europe) of 6mb/6mb full duplex guaranteed bandwidth with a 99.999% SLA on a 1Gbps port? $60. The major providers don't have to pay this much, they sell it for this to other slightly smaller providers.
Comcast sells a consumer link at 6mb/768k asymetric (speedbooster speeds don't count) with no guarantee, no SLA, and with throttling for $40/MONTH.
Consumers aren't satisfied with a connection that terminates at an ISP's datacenter where the customer can rent space in a rack for a server. Consumers want Internet to the home, and the last mile to a a few blocks of homes costs a lot more to maintain than the last mile to a bunch of servers in the same datacenter. I will admit that the analogy with electric power breaks down here, as it would have to be the case that transmission costs more than generation.
I suppose we'll have AT&T to thank when all carriers pull the chair out from under their customers and reduce the internet back to a simple BBS. We can't have images and video...we're on a bandwidth budget. It WILL be nice to eliminate advertising completely though!
DO you like apples? Well, I just got a $4,000 phone bill. Howdoyalike them apples?