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."

Comments

If you want to compare it to electricity....

[mayko]

Then price it like electricity. Does anyone pre-pay for electricity?

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 .0122 dollars per mb you go over right? Hell they should just charge you that rate regardless of what plan you buy.

Re:If you want to compare it to electricity....

[IANAAC]

I belong to a coop for my electricity, and yes, we do pre-pay, in a way. We pay 31 bucks a month for a set amount of kilowatt hours, and if we go over, we get charged more.

The big difference between electricity and cellphone data charges though, is that if I see I'm going substantially over my limit - very easy to do in the summer - then I can self-regulate, by not using power hogs like air conditioners. Or I can split my load to partial electricity and partial propane (which is ALWAYS prepaid in these parts). That's very hard to do with data consumption. I mean, say you visit a specific news site every day. Not unreasonable. But how do you know what's going to be on the page from one day to the next?

Re:I don't want this

[Runaway1956]

Exactly.

There are already posts about loading pages for a few k of content, which total up to megabytes - all because the page is burdened with advertising. Even though I have the slowest, crappiest, highest latency DSL in the world, no page should EVER take a minute to load. I upgraded from dialup just as soon as DSL became available in my area, and the advertisers sucked up every bit of bandwidth that I'm paying for!! Me, I'm PAYING for advertising! Why? I don't want to see ANY of it!

AdBlock Plus, and noscript are essential to browsing the web on dialup and any low-bandwidth plan, as well as for anyone living an hour or two from the big cities. That is just so WRONG, on so many levels.

Expensive per MB

[mprindle]

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.

Re:it had to happen

[laughingcoyote]

The tethering fee is due to the added value of the data going to your computer instead of your phone. It is far mare convenient to access the Internet on your laptop than on your phone so why shouldn't you pay for it? I'm not saying I like it but that's how capitalism works.

Bullshit. Utter bullshit.

If I buy something, I can use it however I like. You can't have it both ways. If you want to give me a limited amount of data, I should be able to do absolutely whatever I want with that data allowance. You're selling me 2 GB per month to use up in any way I see fit. THAT, is how capitalism works-you sell me something, it's mine now, and I do with it whatever in the hell I like without owing you another nickel.

It doesn't matter that there's an "added value". 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...". The moment you got paid, you no longer should have any control over what you sold me or how I choose to use it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a rabid capitalism supporter, either. But capitalism involves a transfer of ownership being a transfer of ownership, period. Government-protected monopolies rent-seeking every penny they can get their greedy little mitts on is not a "free" market in any meaningful sense of the word.