Time For Universal Data Plans?

theodp writes "Between multiple cell phones and their add-ons, high-speed Internet connections, and digital TV subscriptions, most households are paying for data delivery at least three times over, often paying the same provider twice. It's time for a universal data plan, [CNET columnist Molly] Wood declares. 'I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose.' Still, she has hopes that the-times-they-will-be-a-changin'. 'It's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing.'"

Comments

I wish they would like money less

[Bayoudegradeable]

I, too, wish I could pay once for my data stream. I, too, wish companies would just let me "pay once" for the service. And what are the chances in the U.S. of having telecoms wake up and declare, "Folks, we're just making too damned much money! It's time to think of customers, give them better services and charge them less. I hereby renounce all bonuses and profit!!"

Re:I wish they would like money less

[toppavak]

Well, if they're government-supported monopolies who also get their infrastructure subsidized it's only fair the tax-payers get something in return.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[ta bu shi da yu]

The solution is so simple, I'm not sure why anyone didn't think of it before... just allow people to access the data only once.

Wikipedia? You only need to go there once - you certainly don't want to pay for that article on Progressive Outer Retinal Necrosis more than once!

New York Times? Nothing new there - you don't need to go back to it more than once.

Bob's House of Fetish? Why would you want to browse there multiple times, you sicko?

Amazon.com - precisely how many books do you really need to buy? There are only so many combinations of sentences that can be crafted in the English language; besides which, Amazon is so totally a "one-click" solution that there is no reason for you to need to access data there twice.

Honestly, there are so many examples I could go on all night. But I won't, suffice it to say that I agree with the article's central thesis - say "no" to multiple charges for access to the same data multiple times! Allow an ISP to prevent you from browsing today so that you won't be charged tomorrow. It's got my vote!

Re:I wish they would like money less

[msauve]

Why stop with data? Why not demand the ability to pay for all of your life at once, and get unlimited service. No more incremental housing or food or medical or entertainment costs. Free Ferraris for everyone!

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

True true... and I think this whole thing is about having service providers being more like prostitutes instead of the bloodsucking bitches that they are.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[raddan]

You can pay once for a data stream. It's called Internet service.

Telephone and television are services on top of those data plans, and as such, they are extras. You pay extra for more. In an ideal world, that extra work is easy (just provide the "television" and "telephone" services on top of IP transports), but actually, because of a mixture of legacy systems (e.g., analog television) and QoS requirements (your telephone-over-cable connection is only pretending to be POTS), running these services is not so straightforward. It's fair to pay more for more services. "More is better", remember, and we pay more for better.

Because TFA is filled with gems like:

You're paying multiple times for "unlimited" data? Isn't that like multiplying by zero? Either way, you lose.

which is obvious idiocy. So, translation: "we think we're paying too much".

And, we are paying too much. But her argument is stupid.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Yo Mama pays me!

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop the presses. Those who buy goods and services want to pay as little as possible and constantly complain their costs are too high. Those who sell goods and services naturally want to maximize their profits. Whining about government and corporate managers greed is ludicrous. If you want to go after someone go after investors. Its entirely possible that Ms Wood has investments in say British Petroleum or AT&T either directly or indirectly via a pension or even life insurance. Would she and millions of others accept lower returns on their savings and investments in exchange for lower phone bills?

Re:I wish they would like money less

[shentino]

Do I get to cache it?

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Weezul]

Yes, but just making the deal will never cut it. A sustainable system for subsidies would be : large corporations who receive significant public subsidies or hold public contracts in excess of $250M per year must become publicly democratically chartered companies, which means all american citizens have the right to vote in elections of board members and executives, and these results must be approved by a second round of elections among only stock holders.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Hognoxious]

Its entirely possible that Ms Wood has investments in say British Petroleum

No, Mr Obama, it's entirely impossible. No company with that name has existed for over a decade.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously do not get the point of this post. Wow.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[davester666]

"Amazon.com - precisely how many books do you really need to buy? There are only so many combinations of sentences that can be crafted in the English language; besides which, Amazon is so totally a "one-click" solution that there is no reason for you to need to access data there twice."

Hell, just buy/license a dictionary. All the other books are in there.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[GameboyRMH]

You joke, but with telecoms phasing out unlimited connections, advanced caching systems (and data compression) will become increasingly important in the near future. All those extra gigs of space and extra cycles on your machines will soon be put to use.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[ErikTheRed]

I already paid once for my car. Those car companies want me to pay again every time I replace my car or buy an additional one. Even if I have two or three cars I still only drive one car at a time. Why should I have to pay more than once? Stupid, greedy car companies. The government should do something about this.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The thing is, if you are using both cellular and wired internet, you are paying for multiple pipes. The cost of wired infrastructure is almost completely unrelated to the cost of wireless infrastructure. There are very few shared resources for the last mile, towers don't help DSL or cable, and DSL or cable don't help towers, except maybe shared backhaul. Yet people want to pay one low fee to use either as you see fit. Not only that, the airwaves can only pass so much data as you're sharing more constrained bandwidth with more people than you would with wired internet, so the data doesn't necessarily have an equal cost.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

What extra gigs of space? Mine are already full of teh pr0nz.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Hognoxious]

It exists, it's called sosherlissum!

Re:I wish they would like money less

[VTI9600]

The only telecom "subsidy" I am aware of is the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for not by tax dollars, but by mandatory contributions from telecom carriers. The stated purpose of the USF was simply to provide access, not to make sure that prices stay low. That being said, I do think that the USF has run its course and ought to be ended, but I digress.

It is only natural that AT&T and all other wireless carriers would put strict caps on the usage of their wireless service, and increase prices per Mb as demand goes up, because the 3G wireless band has a finite limit to the data it can carry, and there's no indication it will expand any time soon. When resources are scarce, one should expect prices to increase. On the other hand, its always possible to lay new fiber and copper so we can expect cable and DSL plans to stay unlimited and be competitively priced for the forseeable future.

Of course, one thing that TFA points out that really is quite frustrating is the fact that companies always charge extra for SMS messaging. SMS messages (at least in GSM implementations) use a rather ingenious method of piggybacking ontop of the SS7 protocol that requires no additional bandwidth from the GSM carrier! Yet we still get charged outrageous fees for them because of high demand...I predict that this will change as more people switch to data-based texting services such as GChat, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[VTI9600]

There's a word for that: Communism

From Wikipedia:

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life.

Last I checked, it doesn't work. You either end up with an utterly failed system of production as in the USSR, or a totalitarian regime that oppresses its people, most of whom end up living in abject poverty.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Mr. Slippery]

There's a word for that: Communism

The GP author proposed only that large corporations -- which are already created by the state, and so are not free market entities -- be democratically controlled. He(?) did not propose that all economic decisions be made democratically. So, no, no communism here.

Last I checked, it doesn't work.

Well, Russia did rise from having no industrial base whatsoever to being a superpower and the first spacefaring nation -- and that while bearing primary responsibility for defeating the Nazis, fighting them on its own territory and suffering tremendous losses -- while under communism. I'm no fan of Stalin, and some of Marx's ideas were decidedly bone-headed, but it's a little simplistic to just say "it doesn't work".

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Ichijo]

Well, if they're government-supported monopolies who also get their infrastructure subsidized it's only fair the tax-payers get something in return.

Wouldn't it be better to get rid of government support for monopolies? If farmers already get massive farm subsidies, why can't they pay for their own Internet connections?

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair? Whats that mean?

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Weezul]

The GP author proposed only that large corporations -- which are already created by the state, and so are not free market entities -- be democratically controlled. He(?) did not propose that all economic decisions be made democratically. So, no, no communism here.

Yes, but in-fact my comment was even more subtle. I never advocated placing those corporations under government control. In particular, their independent democratic status would largely eviscerate the legitimacy of government regulations, well assuming those regulations were targeted at subside receiving companies.

To me, the biggest large scale difference between communism and our state capitalism is that communism consisted of basically one dominant organization with subsidiary organizations, while our state capitalism consists of a handful of distinct large organizations. You'll obviously make better decisions overall when you've got several fully independent organizations that are permitted to fail, witness the rise of Google and Appel and Microsfot's decline. So I'd assert that communism failed from an organizational disconnect from reality, which might've been less severe early on.

Btw, you might consider other variations without quite so much independents. For example, the people might elect "topical boards" that oversaw all companies that fit within their domain. You notice however that this would depends more upon the power of the stock holder boards for independence. And thus rings far closer to my critique of communism.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[forkazoo]

You can pay once for a data stream. It's called Internet service.

Telephone and television are services on top of those data plans, and as such, they are extras. You pay extra for more. In an ideal world, that extra work is easy (just provide the "television" and "telephone" services on top of IP transports), but actually, because of a mixture of legacy systems (e.g., analog television) and QoS requirements (your telephone-over-cable connection is only pretending to be POTS), running these services is not so straightforward. It's fair to pay more for more services. "More is better", remember, and we pay more for better.

Okay, I'm in LA. Show me a mobile operator that will let me just get an Internet connection for my smart phone. I can use Skype and Google for my phone and SMS needs. A buddy of mine just searched high and low, and found that some providers offer a data plan without voice service only if you can prove that you are completely deaf. So, short of spending time at more Rock concerts, I'm not sure that I can take advantage of your claim that it is possible to pay only for Internet.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[jesset77]

Okay, I'm in LA. Show me a mobile operator that will let me just get an Internet connection for my smart phone.

Uh...... this has got to be a trick question, right? Like the carrier has to support YOUR smartphone, or you fear jailbreaking or you've already sliced it up with a chainsaw, or don't want out of a contract, or something?

If not, then this is just the first thing that I found. 8I

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

They get free or very cheap access to the rights of way to run their lines. Further they are often granted a monopoly by the local government (e.g. only one cable company, only one incumbent local telephone carrier, etc).

Wireless is a slightly different story - the carrier buys a license to a specific spectrum band in a particular region.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[calmofthestorm]

> Last I checked, it doesn't work. You either end up with an utterly failed system of production as in the USSR, or a totalitarian regime that oppresses its people, most of whom end up living in abject poverty.

That wasn't communism. The Soviet Union was an authoritarian police state state that cloaked its policies in veils of communist propaganda. Furthermore, Marx made it very clear that Communist revolutions in pre-industrialized countries would fail, as the infrastructure wasn't even there.

I don't happen to support Communism but I do get sick of these simplistic statements like "X doesn't work because that one time it was tried and 'failed'".

Re:I wish they would like money less

[OrwellianLurker]

Thanks for the car analogy. Now everything is clear.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if I owned a company that could provide all of the information services a person needs, I'd do exactly as this article suggests and make a fortune taking all the others' customers!! Including you. That would be a competitive edge!

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Smallpond]

Did the car company offer you "Unlimited cars*" when you signed up?

* Unlimited plans subject to availability. Terms and conditions may be changed without notice. Current offer includes only a 1975 Trabant.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[OrangeCatholic]

The reason Russia failed is because after Stalin, everybody realized that they could never again have such a powerful ruler. So they ran everything by committee. "Topical boards" is actually close to how they did it, although there were no elections, just greasy palms and "remember to be a good Communist."

>communism consisted of basically one dominant organization

If it was America, it would be like if your first priority was to be a "good Democrat." We actually have a milder form of this, it's called taxes. You have to pay taxes to be a "good citizen." If this leaves you with nothing, it's not their problem. The question is whether you can change your leadership.

People really get torn up over Communism, but basically it was 1-party rule with state intervention in the economy (farm quotas, for example). But that's it. Any powerful party can be "communist" if it wants. It just means checking with them first.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[OrangeCatholic]

>I don't happen to support Communism but I do get sick of these simplistic statements like "X doesn't work because that one time it was tried and 'failed'".

Fraternity houses are communist. You can eat like a king for $5/day, but you have to walk through someone's puke to get to class.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[OrangeCatholic]

>Further they are often granted a monopoly by the local government

I'd like to know why this is the case.

If you go up on a telephone pole, there are 3 wires: Power, phone, and cable. How do you get to be the fourth?

After all, "phone" is really TV/phone/internet and "cable" is really TV/phone/internet. So how did those two guys get so lucky?

Re:I wish they would like money less

[OrangeCatholic]

Oh really? You should try telling them. Typing British Petroleum into Google comes up with BP.com as a paid link.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Wolfraider]

In this case, I would think unlimited would mean that I can go drive the 1 car as much as I want, not an unlimited number of cars

Re:I wish they would like money less

[johnlcallaway]

The stupid part in both arguments is the statement 'we are paying too much'. Really ... and what metric is that based on?? Why is it 'too much'. What is the basis for that?? Because one type of use is less costly than the other so they should charge less?? Really?? Why?? What part of 'free enterprise' do people not understand. No one has to use their cell phone to access their email or web page. No one has to text message. No one even has to have a cell phone. It is a CHOICE to do these things. Twenty years ago, most of these things didn't exist. They only reason people pay today is because IT MAKES THEIR LIFE JUST A LITTLE BIT EASIER. So you just need to decide if that little bit easier is worth it or not.

If someone thinks they are too much .. THEN DON'T USE THE FUCKING THING. I rarely text, so I don't really care if it's 5 cents or $10/message. I rarely use internet on the phone, so I don't care if they stop allowing unlimited data. I just won't use them if they do.

My cable company raised their rates. So I dropped extended digital since I wasn't really using it. Then they raised them again, so I took back the digital converter they were charging me $5/month for. All I missed was the program guide, which I got for free on the Internet anyway. They are raising them again, so I'll either cancel all but basic cable, or switch to satellite. Then there is always over-the-air for free.

So if you are willing to pay for something, then they can pretty much charge whatever people are willing to pay. It's only when you are willing to give it up or go elsewhere will they reconsider. My cable company doesn't give a damn about my dropping their service, because there are plenty of people who will pay for it.

But I don't have to....and neither do you have to pay for those extra cell services. So either put up, or shut the fuck up.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Kpau]

I'm still trying to figure out why I should pay $30/month per phone to AT&T for 5GB per phone per month (since we all know "unlimited" equals about 5GB). This is IN ADDITION to the plan rate for voice calls. Especially when a voice call is actually much more intensive an application. And no, the "tiered" plan they're introducing is bollocks as it spikes at data transfer volumes that most people will exceed by a few MB. ($15!!!! oh, one KB too many - $30) So, needless to say they have NOT reached me as a data customer with their new plans.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Weezul]

Yes obviously the U.S. economic model with only one party would also prove disastrous; however, one centralized parliament making all major economic decisions would also prove disastrous, even if they had multiple parties.

We truly need multiple almost completely independent organizations that succeed or fail based upon their own decisions, the more the better. That said, all those organizations could have democratically elected leadership.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[V for Vendetta]

Hell, just buy/license a dictionary. All the other books are in there.

I doubt so. You would miss out all those beautiful neologisms.

Re:I wish they would like money less

[Anonymous Coward]

The giant gaping hole in your argument is that we are "paying more for better". The problem with that is most of the time, we are paying more for the same garbage. I can't count how many times my ISP has re-worked their offering such that basic parts of the service become paid addons.

If you think her argument is stupid, take a look at your own...

No.

[Jorl17]

And, by the way, there's more to the world than USA.

Re:No.

[mrsquid0]

Very true, but sadly the profit motive is more-or-less the same everywhere. The real hope is that governments will start regulating ISPs and data stream providers.

Re:No.

[sznupi]

Still, some places manage to get better deals. Some (usually those needing it the most & with not great ability to afford many things) - much worse...and BTW those are primary the ones where great progress in avaiting to unfold thanks to, eventualy, cheap & easy means of communication. However we like to bitch about costs of internet connection, they aren't exactly limiting to us; many people aren't that fortunate.

PS. Keeping with the spirit of "I want a pony" of this discussion - would be nice to have a "child account" for, well, kids; one which covers communication with few selected numbers but works like prepaid for the rest (without limiting communication with few selected numbers once prepaid credit runs off)

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real hope is that governments will start regulating ISPs and data stream providers.

There you go GP. Obviously NOT American.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, yes nobody said profit motive is bad. But when the places in the US aren't really competing, well it sucks.

In Japan things are more expensive in general (because quality is higher), but on the other hand I don't get people trying to triple-dip either.

I can't blame a carrier charging separately for a mobile data and land-line data, because they are probably two different divisions, and anyway use different infrastructure. The whole "We need to charge extra for tethering", etc., is BS though. That comes from "Unlimited" really meaning "How much we can estimate they will use and allocate for." For a phone "Unlimited" = XX megabytes/month, and for a computer it would be XX + YY since computer users use more. I think it would actually be better when they simply charge per MB, because it would make price comparisons easier. Once people realize how much SMS messages and such cost per MB, there will be outrage.

Back to Japan, I pay 3 data plans right now.
1. (Sort-of data) My cell phone.
2. My e-Mobile wireless broadband (Kind-of like MiFi). This works with my laptop, skype phone, ipod touch, whatever.
3. My OCN/NTT/Flets (kind of like FiOS). This is 100Mbps to my house. I will cancel it soon, as soon as my 2-year contract is over.

Really, I can use #2 for everything. The battery life isn't as good for VOIP as native mobile phone yet, so I pay for a real cell phone still. Other than that, I don't have to pay for data more than once if I don't want to, #2 I can take anywhere, and it's reasonably fast. If I had a newer phone with WiFi, I could even use it in place of a data plan.

In TFA it talks about "mandatory" data plans. That's BS. Buy the phone on your own, and you have no mandatory plan. If you buy it from the carrier with a subsidy, well, that's because they want you to pay more per month - that's why they give you the subsidy (duh).

At any rate, I can get all the data I want, anywhere I want for $50 a month. If I want to keep my fiber land line, you're talking $100 total. Voice is still separate in general, but if you want to use VOIP in a well supported way, you can get the WiFi blackberries from T-Mobile and try that method.

Re:No.

[DJRumpy]

I have to wonder how many people really do have the same provider for cell, and internet, which is where this seems to be going. For instance, I get my internet via Time Warner, but my cell service via AT&T. I am not totally opposed to paying per byte for internet, but I would expect the price to be fair, and looking at all of the existing plans, none of them are. They charge exorbitant fees for a paltry 5GB of data on cell networks where they currently provide unlimited data via land lines for the same or less per-month charges. There is a huge disconnect between the value perceived by the user/customer, and the costs being claimed by the likes of AT&T/Verizon/Comcast/Time Warner, etc.

The cell providers have had years to build out these networks, yet the price hasn't dropped, they still charge huge sums of money for simple text messages, and offer no unlimited plans with the exception of the iPhone plan, and that one is already endangered as well. All of the other cell data plans are capped at 5GB or thereabouts.

At some point, they have to understand the frustration that we get unlimited internet access via land line, but restrictions and high costs for cell data, all to the same internet and probably through the same backbone once it leaves the cell network.

Re:No.

[NotBornYesterday]

I'd like to see the energy crisis solved this way. I shouldn't have to pay separately for gas for my car, heating oil for my house, and electricity as well! The fact that I've already paid for energy once should be enough. Corporations are so damn unreasonable these days.

Re:No.

[mrsquid0]

The proposal is not much different from existing family plans. Multiple devices share data and voice plans in some way. It should not be that difficult to have multiple devices attached to the same data plan.

Re:No.

[db10]

swooosh!

Re:No.

[Floody]

In Japan things are more expensive in general (because quality is higher), but on the other hand I don't get people trying to triple-dip either.

Things are more expensive, generally, in Japan because demand is high (and supply is limited, in some cases). It has nothing to do with quality.

Re:No.

[jesset77]

would be nice to have a "child account" for, well, kids; one which covers communication with few selected numbers but works like prepaid for the rest (without limiting communication with few selected numbers once prepaid credit runs off)

So, something like T-mobile Family Allowances then?

It presupposes that you, as the parent have a line on the same plan.. but that's a pretty safe assumption, rite?

Re:No.

[jesset77]

At some point, they have to understand the frustration that we get unlimited internet access via land line, but restrictions and high costs for cell data, all to the same internet and probably through the same backbone once it leaves the cell network.

No, I don't think they "have to" understand that. They also don't "have to" know how tragic mortality is for me, as an individual. They're not really in a position to change either one.

Put simply, if you think an ISP's major financial burden is backhaul infrastructure and connecting to the same internet that everyone else does, then you probably also think that a farmer's major financial burden is in purchasing seed stock. Working square miles of farmland with a quarter million dollar combine and watering it with patch-rotary sprinkler chains a half mile long must be peanuts compared to getting your hands on some seeds.

So put this in perspective. Which do you think costs more? Getting 100Megabits per second to a large building somewhere, or getting 5 megabits per second to each of 20 people in a given neighborhood? How much more would one cost than the other?

Here's a hint: getting 20 people 5mbit involves as a necessary first step getting 100Mbit through a building or switchpoint somewhere. So, the first problem is a an inevitable subset of the second.

Here's another hint: once you string cable somewhere, the cost difference per mile of 100 strands of gigabit glass fiber and 1 copper pair of cat-3 telephone wires is minuscule compared to right of way costs. Put simply, distance costs money and the width of the pipe costs very little.

So the upshot is that each backhaul to a neighborhood costs your ISP barely more than an individual user's connection does. They pay maybe double to get 100 megabits into a neighborhood switch box what they pay to get 5 megabits to the very first customer off that switchbox. That means the last mile cost exceeded the backhaul cost as soon as the second customer signed on, and 100 megabits with generous oversubscription rates will serve 50-80 5 megabit customers.

So a reasonable estimate of serving just 20 customers off of a switchbox costs 12 times as much as simply lighting up the switchbox itself. 12 times as much for the same bits and the same internet, just to get it delivered to each of those homes.

So if you want two pipes into your house, guess what: you're going to pay for two pipes because you've doubled how much you're costing the ISP. The backhaul is peanuts compared to getting those bits delivered to your doorstep. If one of the pipes you want is wireless, then you will pay for the load you are adding to the wireless distribution network and you'll pay for that shiny cable to the house, too. Nobody cares that all of the bits dump off at the same place, you want two helpings of the expensive part of the network.

You are not buying the internet, you are not purchasing bits, you are paying to have them delivered to you. It's the same as the newspaper. Read it for free at the coffee shop, or pay to have another copy printed and bicycled to your doorstep. Want a copy at home and at work? Yeah, you're paying twice. Who cares that it's the same news in each one? You're the one that wants it, and someone has to print it twice and deliver it to you two different ways.

Re:No.

[sznupi]

Pretty close, yeah - though I really do think that setting the credit limit for "extra" usage (the one except "always allow") should be via classic prepaid mechanism; a hybrid kind of account, basically. If the kid needs to cover that part from own general funds, it's beneficial IMHO on several levels.

Anyway, this service is not available at my place...even though I have a provider that is for a long time fully owned by T-mobile (and reasonably integrated with them)

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no 'pipes' involved with a cell tower, in the normal sense, other than the single pipe to feed the tower. The last mile doesn't apply, as you can drop a tower into an area and serve a large population located around that tower.

Re:No.

[sznupi]

PS. Wait, I take it back - I checked the website of the mentioned provider owned by T-mobile; and, since I did so the last time, this one quite recent "family network" offer showed up (easily found; new & promoted) - one which is even better than from T-mobile US; one which is exactly what I wanted (a prepaid account can participate in "family network" and gets huge credit (that might be actually better than "unlimited" ;p ) for calling with said network)
Oh well, it's getting better and better...

Good luck with that

[Some Bitch]

I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose

So what, all the mobile and fixed line operators have to merge? How about TV service providers, does every infrastructure provider have to buy one of those too? Fucking idiot.

Re:Good luck with that

[Ultra64]

That is not in any way implied. Fucktard.

Re:Good luck with that

[Hognoxious]

Actually, it is.

From TFA

I want to pay once (maybe twice) for data,

Say I want to pay once maybe twice for my weekly shopping. That's hardly going to happen if the butcher, the baker and the greengrocer are all separate businesses, is it? However if I buy everything at the supermarket it becomes a reality.

No outrage...no government action.

[RandomFactor]

"Now, though, with the FCC breathing down carriers' necks about tiered usage plans, it's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing"

Granted we're paying multiple times as noted, but...

Why would the government care to do anything about it? I can buy a song on cassette, album, cd, mp3... government hasn't regulated that. Why would it regulate multiple data-plan channels?

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right; they wouldn't. It would be stupid to tell Verizon that they can't charge me for a 3G or 4G or whatever plan because Comcast already charges me for data. And that whole unlimited thing - that's slowly coming to an end. It will eventually be more like electricity I imagine as companies don't want the unlimited and people get fed up paying for set tiers and getting screwed on overages. (And yes, I know that electricity has pseudo "tiers" in some places to encourage conservation however those are either around being "greener" or attempting to get people not to run their clothes dryer at high usage times). In general, there will probably be some kind of a cost per unit assigned (maybe per GB) instead of a tier. This will take a good long time though. As far as the "one bill" it would be tough to say that we are "paying for the same thing" unless you really abstracted the whole infrastructure out of it. It would be like saying "I am being charged twice for travel; a toll on the bridge and then a fee to ride the ferry". Just because both 3G and dsl/cable/fios are both providing data doesn't mean they both share an infrastructure.

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[AHuxley]

The older optical nation building did get some tax payers input and the telcos are sort of granted areas of consumers in bulk form.
With the ability to have lock in comes a few options to be regulated.
The telcos spent billions and feel they are making millions while their networks are just dumb packet pipes for others to make billions.
So they will sell speed and sell all they can as extras.
They missed the idea of data caps and counting data usage up and down, but I am sure they have creative plans for the next gen networks.
VoIP was just the wake up to dumb packet pushing, now its a race to ensure dumb packet pushing can never enter the publics mind again.

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[kenh]

I clipped the exact same quote to make my comment - but I had a slightly different take - how is paying for a home data plan with my cable co. and paying for a different data plan for my smart phone paying for the same thing twice?

I have wiored phone service and cellular service - are those the same offerings? Am I being billed twice "for the same thing"? No. A wired phone provides certain things and a cellular phone provides others, same with mobile and fixed data plans.

Also, remember, each data plan and telco plan incurs another round of state and federal taxes, so what is the government's motivation to reduce my number of accounts, thus reducing their tax revenue?

I think the writer is confusing her desire for simplified billing/lowered costs with her ISP/telco/cable company's need to change things.

If I go to an "al you can eat" restaruant, and there are four people in my party, each one has to pay the price of an "all you can eat" meal, they all can't share the cost of one "all you can eat" meal (Why not? They paid for an unlimited amount of food, why can't they share it?), why does she expect internet access to be different. An unlimited data plan allows fo "X" amount of bandwidth, two devices can consume "2X" amount of bandwidth (operating in parallel, even if each device can get max. bandwidth x 24 hours each day of the month).

If I have, say, a cable network connection at home with one ISP and one data plan and then I have two iPhones each with their own data plans I can run all three devices at the same time, would she prefer that she only pays one fee, and that when she uses one iPhone the other iPhone and her home connection go offline, since she is only paying for one "unlimited" data stream? Or when she is online at home her iPhones don't have internet connectivity through the EDGE/3G network?

Three devices can consume 3X the bandwidth, why should she only pay for 1X the bandwidth?

Since it is the weekend, here's a little "unlimited food" humor from John Pinette - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdwuiyO7hOU

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm as big a free market supporter as they come, but this is not a free market. Whether it is massive subsidies given to build infrastructure or permission to use some of our limited frequency ranges, we are already talking about oligopolies and major government involvement here.

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[mcnellis]

Sure you can but you could just buy it once and then download it again for free, and possibly legally given Fair Use rights. Right?

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[Anonymous Coward]

The article did make a point about how a single data connection at home does not charge for all the devices that you put on it. So I can see her point about family plans and the added line charge.

However, I think she is being greedy by asking for a single, unlimited plan. I do like the all you can eat reference. What the family plan needs is a peak usage limit and cost for going over. All networks have finite space and that needs to be controlled and managed, hence the problem. As a single person, I do not want to be paying the same rate for my one device that her family of 4 are paying. Data is bandwidth size (bits per second) and duration (total bits over time). That is how all plans should be measured and built. Once they do this then we could have a single plan that allows for video, voice, and data. I know that video and voice are really data, but I was leaning on the QoS rankings there. With this single plan, you would know that SMS takes less bandwidth then talking or video conferencing does.

We need to separate the services from the network.

Re:No outrage...no government action.

[Kpau]

I have 5 phones on my family plan... at current pricing, that would be $150 extra a month for 5 data plans. Ain't happening, especially when that works out to effectively about 25GB.... that's very pricey. Even with the tiered pricing, that's still $75/month for 200MbX5. Basically, the pricing tells ME as a consumer that the telcos are unprepared for a rampage from someone like CLEAR who is positioned to offer devices with more useful data transfer volume capacity (and skype).

ain't gonna happen

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time for a universal data plan, [Cnet columnist Molly] Wood declares: 'I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose.'

Ain't gonna happen so long as America is a capitalist/corporatist society. Asking for this goes against the very ideas of capitalism.

Re:ain't gonna happen

[mrsquid0]

No, asking for it is very capitalist. Providing it is what goes against the very ideas of capitalism.

Re:ain't gonna happen

[Anonymous Coward]

No, asking for it is very capitalist. Providing it is what goes against the very ideas of capitalism.

Point taken.

Re:ain't gonna happen

[NotBornYesterday]

I disagree If someone is willing to pay for it, a capitalist society will deliver it. Service providers would be willing to offer contracts similar to this. Look no further than the bundling plans that cable and telco providers have been shilling over the last several years. Including an unlimited mobile data plan in there would not be a problem for a company like Verizon. The question is, is the price they would ask for truly unlimited service on a truly limited network is what Woods would be willing to pay?

Re:ain't gonna happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought a proper capitalist market made prices trend toward going lower in competitive markets... oh, wait. COMPETITIVE markets. Telco oligopolies need not apply. My bad, carry on.

Re:ain't gonna happen

[Totenglocke]

Actually, I can already tell you of one company in the US that does this. Cincinnati Bell offers home phone, DSL internet, and wireless phone services. They have a deal called "Why pay for two?" where if you purchase your home DSL internet through them (two speeds, 768Kb for dirt cheap and 5Mb for only $15 more) and have your cell phone through them, you pay $0 for unlimited texting and unlimited internet on your phone because you're already paying them once for your internet.

universal, yes, unlimited, no

[yyxx]

I don't think "unlimited" plans ever made much sense because some people will abuse it. Costs are proportional to volume, so pricing should be too.

Reasonably priced universal plans do, however, make sense. In Europe, you can get data plans for something like EU20 / month for 5Gytes with no restrictions on how you use it (cell phone, laptop, etc.). Some companies even give you multiple SIM cards for the same account.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Hatta]

Costs are proportional to volume

Is that true? Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything? I think the cost lies in building and maintaining the capacity. Once it's there, it's most cost effective (in a bits/dollar sense) to keep your network as close to saturation as possible. Costs are not in fact proportional to volume, and they shouldn't bill as if they were.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[sznupi]

Plus that's certainly not the best of deals around here - what about 4GiB for EU12, prepaid, recharge like this valid for two months, and with remaining data credit not lost if you recharge the account again before that 2-month cutoff point?

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[vlm]

Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything

Most gear has surprisingly variable power draw based on utilization. However the cost of power is so low, relative to the other fixed expenses, that its basically a rounding error. Its right up there with paying the landscaping crew to mow the weeds down, the outside plant maintenance (paint crew), and the snowplowing contract. Many people confuse the rather high power density and total draw of a "big data center" with the rather low power density and total draw of a POP.

And yes it does cost them to have the gear sitting around doing nothing, because the interest on the bonds/loans accumulates no matter if they're selling or not.

The expense is enough to discourage me from participating, so I don't. They have made a calculated business decision that they simply don't want/need me. I don't see any point in feeling insulted/vindictive/cranky about it. Some folks, however, respond to it angrily like they're being made fun of by a girl whom won't date them. Its just business and theres plenty of fish in the sea, so chill...

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Barryke]

I don't think "unlimited" plans ever made much sense because some people will abuse it.

Abuse is suggestive. So is a fair use policy. Well here in the Netherlands its pretty close to unlimited. I can do whatever i want (am a heavy user) and without problems.

My mobile internet has been truly unlimited since 2003. And i use it all_the_time. Theres a fair use policy, and i did not get blocked. Even tethered it for a few months, used torrents and still no pain. Of course it all depends on the company and how it defines fair use.

Vodafone for example says "10MB per month is enough for anybody!" and stupidly calls that unlimited. Tmobile says "We don't have a number for that, it depends on usage. Using 2GB in a month is no problem."

For home ISP: using about 80% of my broadband connection capacity 24/7. Nothing there as well. Fair use!

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. But anybody who buys more data then should pay less for the data. Bandwidth isn't a scarce resource. It is only made scarce by the lack of demand but then isn't really scarce so it isn't a problem those who demand it make it less scarce when charged for it and should thus pay less for it because the money becomes available to build new lines where it didn't exist before. If they don't build out more lines the only ones to blame are the companies themselves. And if nobody is eating up large swaths of bandwidth then nobody and being charged less for it then they simply are selling too little to too many. The question is what is a fair price for bandwidth? The truth is the line should be given free and bandwidth should be charged for. We should all have the maximum capable that our lines we choose to use can sustain is based on the distance/other users and then pay for the bandwidth we eat up and the time in which eat it up. If others are also demanding it at the time we want it the price goes up. If not the price goes down. We then just set a price limit on our routers at what we're willing to pay per MB/s or whatever we're calculating it based on at the given time. If it is too high then it simply throttles the connections.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[gnasher719]

Is that true? Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything? I think the cost lies in building and maintaining the capacity. Once it's there, it's most cost effective (in a bits/dollar sense) to keep your network as close to saturation as possible. Costs are not in fact proportional to volume, and they shouldn't bill as if they were.

For UK broadband ISPs you rent their lines from BT, the main cost is renting the capacity. Every megabit / second capacity for delivery to end users costs them money. Using the capacity up to its limit is essentially free.

So download all night long and driving their usage up from 50% to 51% has almost zero cost to the ISP. Downloading at peek times when 100% of the capacity is used, forcing the ISP to rent more capacity off BT to keep their customers happy, that costs the ISP real money.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[lsmo]

I don't think "unlimited" plans ever made much sense because some people will abuse it.

If something is advertised as unlimited how can you abuse it? You are placing the blame on the wrong side of the equation. Lets look at it this way... An air carrier over books a plane, and all passengers show up for said flight. By your logic it is the passengers fault that someone will have to be put on another plane. If the network can't handle unlimited use then don't advertise one. Or you may just over book the network and some passengers/packets will have to wait for another flight/pipe.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Hatta]

But usage doesn't cost BT any more than non-usage, so that doesn't change my argument. BT shouldn't charge their customers as if it did, and those ISPs shouldn't charge their customers based on capacity either.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[raddan]

No, that's not true. Saturation with Internet protocols is extremely bad; likewise for radio signals. Many of you probably think that if you have a 100 Mbit connection that you should be able to use 100 Mbits. Sounds fair, right? Sadly, TCP suffers from something called "congestion collapse" when it hits roughly 40% of utilization, so a congestion-avoidance mechanism was introduced to constantly back-off your send rate (it's called "exponential backoff") to prevent this from happening. The only way to fix this is either to over-provision, or to impose heavy-handed QoS parameters. Not to mention-- what does "saturation" mean? If all of us get 5 Mbit plans, does that mean that our ISP needs 5n (where n is the number of customers) available bandwidth? What about upstream of them? What about upstream of that? Such a provisioning scheme is a fantasy.

Wireless is in a similar, but slightly different boat: wireless is sort of like our old hub infrastructure, before switches were affordable. That essentially means that the network is like a bus, and that clients themselves need to handle collisions, which are frequent. Because of TCP's congestion avoidance mechanism, it can't tell the difference between a packet lost due to a collision and one dropped because of network saturation, so it does the same thing, it backs off. In wireless, the data link layer tries to address this (at least in the 802.11 protocols), but it is not terribly successful, and that is because there are all other kinds of problems with radio transmission, like the "hidden terminal problem", etc, that don't exist in "well-behaved" networks.

Anyway, all of this means that as you add customers to a wireless network, your capacity may decrease. I'm not saying that telco prices are fair, but the economics of managing such a resource are not simple.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[ickleberry]

Use UDP?

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Rich0]

Here is where your argument fails - how much capacity should BT have in the first place?

If people use lots of bandwidth, then they get saturated, and then people browsing the web get annoyed at page load rates.

So, they add more capacity. However, since there is no per-kb rate/etc on usage people just up their demand for bandwidth accordingly, so they're instantly at 100% capacity again.

So, then you get into fights over what is and isn't network abuse and all that. ISPs try to filter torrents and all that nonsense, then that leads to encryption and a war of escalation in technology. It doesn't really resolve the problem.

Instead, if you just charge a reasonable amount per gigabyte then usage is self-regulated. If you want to seed torrents all day, have at it. BT will even run dedicated fiber to your house if that is what it takes to keep you going. However, you'll pay for it, and if the price is worth it to you then by all means go.

Unlimited plans usually translate into people who barely use the service paying for those who heavily use it.

The key is to regulate so that telecoms end up charging reasonable usage rates. Maybe force them to charge the same rates for corporate and home users - no way they'll try to charge fortune 500 companies crazy rates...

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Ernesto Alvarez]

What the GP talked about is there for a reason. If you used UDP in a congested network, you'd probably get lots of packet loss. If you tried implementing your own retransmision algorithm, you'd probably get the same results as TCP with no congestion control algorithm: extremely low throughput, even though you have enough bandwidth.

Just don't do one thing at once and you won't suffer the penalty as hard as you would one connection at a time.

(and I'm not sure about that 40% figure, TCP RENO is probably more efficient, and you're not supposed to connect to the net with something worse than that)

And since the penalty is per connection, the ISP doesn't suffer the way you would. Their pipes probably fill to capacity (or close), provided there's demand.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I did ATM(async transfer mode) networks, hitting 40% utilization was considered a critical situation. The average utilization could not exceed 20%.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[TheRaven64]

True, but misleading. Capacity has a fixed cost. Providing 100Mb/s of available bandwidth (in any form - terrestrial radio, fibre, satellite, or whatever), costs a certain amount. Providing more than that costs more. If you have 100Mb/s available, you can sell ten 10Mb/s slices, or 100 1Mb/s slices with guaranteed throughput. This is (very approximately) how broadcast radio and television works - channels pay a fixed amount for a fixed reservation (a channel).

Alternatively, you can sell time-limited segments of it. This is how telephone calls are sold. You pay to use some fixed amount of bandwidth (around 9.6Kb/s for GSM) for a fixed per-minute cost. This works especially well if people don't have identical usage patterns. You might only be able to support 100 concurrent users, but you can support 1,000 or 10,000 overlapping users, as long as no more than 100 are making calls at once.

Another option is to sell 'up to' 10Mb/s, but with the proviso that it will degrade if more than 10 people are actually using the service concurrently. This is how most broadband providers work. Typically, they try to segment their networks so that you don't have more than 10 people saturating their network simultaneously at most times. It doesn't matter at all if you use the network 100% of the time, as long as 10 other people aren't doing the same. It does matter if 20 of you are all saturating the network for half an hour, if it's the same half hour, but it doesn't if it's a different half hour.

The cost of providing the bandwidth is not directly proportional to the amount that you consume in any of these models, but it is related. The more bandwidth you consume, the fewer concurrent users the provider can service in a given time window. If you use less overall, use it at a different time to others, and so on, then it becomes cheaper. If you are constantly saturating the network, it becomes more expensive, because more infrastructure is required per customer.

There are a few ways to alleviate this. One is to provide some kind of QoS and charge more for higher categories. Most people won't care (or even notice) if an email is delayed by five minutes, but they will notice if a voice packet is delayed by even a few hundred milliseconds, or by a few tens of milliseconds more than the one before it.

This means that you can charge more for a voice-quality connection, with guaranteed a maximum latency and jitter. You can charge less for bandwidth that doesn't have these requirements, so your client can opt for a cheap connection for things like downloads and email that don't have realtime requirements.

Simply charging more for heavy users is not the best way of reducing congestion, but it is the simplest to implement.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Sycraft-fu]

Yes, oversubscription is essential to cheap Internet. If you tried to provide full, guaranteed no matter what, bandwidth to every connection you'd have very little bandwidth to each individual. Instead you oversubscribe and so long as people play nice and don't try and use 100% all the time, it works.

As an example, take an office network. Suppose you have a building with 5 floors, 40 PCs per floor. You want to provide gigabit to the desktop and to the servers. Well, for about $8500 or so you could do the whole building with nice, managed gig switches. You'd have a core gig switch for your servers and connections to the other switches, and a gig switch on each floor. You'd discover that so long as people played nice, they'd generally get their gig, or near enough. They could transfer their files and then let their connection sit idle. Despite the fact that there'd be a great deal of oversubscripton per floor, it'd work well.

Now assume you wanted dedicated bandwidth for every person to the core, and then to the server. Ok well now you'd need to go two switches per floor. 20 computers per switch, and 2 10gbps uplinks from those switches to your core. So instead of about $1400 per floor you are now at $6000 per floor. Your core switch is also going massively up in price. Just to handle the 20 10gb connections it would have you'd need to spend in the range of $12,000 for it. So just for the desktops you are at $42,000. Of course if you want the server to have bandwidth for everyone it is going to need 200gbps of connections. I don't even know what kind of cards you'd have to get for that, never mind the disks to support it.

Oversubscription is key to low cost. Prices start to go up exponentially for bigger switching (and routing) hardware. As such the only reasonable way to provide people with bandwidth at a low cost is to oversubscribe. This tends to work ok since most people use their net connection in spurts, they don't use it full blast 24/7.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[shentino]

With fixed costs, billing by usage is equitable.

Say you invest a fixed amount of resources to bake a huge pie. How much should you charge people for a piece of it?

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Interoperable]

The carrier has a given capacity to be divided between users. If a user uses more of that finite capacity than other users, then that user should be billed more. The pricing model that most accurately reflects the value of the commodity would be to have users pay for the bandwidth that they use, scaled to the demand at that time of day. I don't want to pay for someone else's "unlimited," I want to pay for what I use.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Hognoxious]

The root of your problem is that you've assumed that "not smoothly variable" implies "not variable".

Imagine you run a pub. The rent is a fixed cost.

The purchase cost of your beer is a variable cost; the more your customers chug, the more the draymen must lug.

But what happens when your pub gets more busy? You can't hire half a barman. And the glass cleaning machine's too small, but the next size up is too big.

These are stepped variable costs; they're flat except when you pass thresholds, at which they move very suddenly.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[InfiniteWisdom]

Is that true? Does it cost the telcos less to have all those radios and towers sitting around not doing anything? I think the cost lies in building and maintaining the capacity. Once it's there, it's most cost effective (in a bits/dollar sense) to keep your network as close to saturation as possible. Costs are not in fact proportional to volume, and they shouldn't bill as if they were.

Costs are most certainly proportional to volume. A tower has a finite capacity, and the more bandwidth people use the fewer subscribers each tower can support.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[NotBornYesterday]

The key is to regulate so that telecoms end up charging reasonable usage rates. Maybe force them to charge the same rates for corporate and home users - no way they'll try to charge fortune 500 companies crazy rates...

Maybe pricing has changed since I last checked, but no way do I want to pay business T1 or T3 rates for my home internet connection. I simply don't need the SLA that businesses need and pay for.

I don't get it ... you just got done stating that metered use would be self-regulating, and then you go on to state that external government regulation is the only way to solve unlimited usage. Why not allow the market to set the metered and unlimited rates, and allow people to choose which is right for them?

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Rich0]

Simple - telecom is a natural monopoly.

I don't want ISP data rates to resemble cell phone sms rates...

Now, I'm completely fine with market internet rates, if the last mile rates are regulated.

That is, you pay your phone company to get your data to the central office, and then you pay a different company to get that data to the internet. The last mile fee structure would be based purely on the technology - so DSL would be flat rate, cable might be use-based, etc. The last mile provider would be prohibited from offering ISP service.

Competition doesn't really work well for the last mile, which is why we have the mess we currently have.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[sonicmerlin]

Uh, I think you mean EU 20/month for 50 (FIFTY) gigabytes.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[hitmark]

and the kind that brings the most money for the effort.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[sonicmerlin]

Uh...once you run the fiber to the tower upping capacity is not so difficult. AT&T's problems were due to skimping on costs and running multiple T1s to their towers instead of just going all-in with fiber.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[hitmark]

only that towers have a clear way to lower the bandwidth available to a heavy user in case some other user comes along and wants use to. The big problem is that towers can only handle so many active users, no matter how much or how little bandwidth they are using, each time slot kept open for those push notices is one that cant be used by anyone else on that tower.

newer protocols are getting better at stuffing more active users in a smaller time slot, but towers have a problem thats unique to them (tho analog landlines had a similar issue back in the day, thats why there was pr min charges on calls beyond the local switch. only so many wires going out that way, unlike the local call where everyone had a wire going to the switch in the first place) that one do not see if one only deal with wired networks all day.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives multiple SIM cards?

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[rdebath]

TCP does NOT suffer from congestion collapse until well past 40%, congestion collapse of TCP requires the line to be running at 100% with enough channels that the transmit windows overload a router's memory buffers because the packets in the buffers get stored for longer than the retransmit time of the connections. For modern routers RED (Random Early Drop) tends to avoid the problem.

For the 40% rules you're probably talking about a CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection) connection like old 10Base2 (coax, cheapernet). Nearly all modern networks share the connections for more effectively than that; the major exception being, of course, WiFi.

But the GSM (3G etc) protocols don't work the same as WiFi. Those protocols use time division multiplexing like techniques and so don't suffer as badly from collisions as WiFi. However, they do suffer from the same limited total bandwidth, a switched 100BaseT network can reasonably have a Gbit/s flowing through the switch but radio is limited to the amount that can fit in the channel no matter how many devices there are.

So fast-forward 100 years. The wired networks with have insane speeds, optical wave guides (aka fibres) with terabit rates for everyone at the same time, but the radio wireless can't physically get past a few gigabits shared between everyone in a cell (when all radio is cell packet data).

Right now the cell radios are limited to a few megahertz bandwidth so you get a few megabits per second and only if you're the only one in the cell on that channel.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortune 500 companies pay more than you do. They want redundancy, QoS and guaranteed service and they pay for it. Look at the cost of a dedicated T-1 sometime.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, know what you are talking about before you open your month! (Or in this case, start typing)

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[NotBornYesterday]

... you pay your phone company to get your data to the central office, and then you pay a different company to get that data to the internet. The last mile fee structure would be based purely on the technology - so DSL would be flat rate, cable might be use-based, etc. The last mile provider would be prohibited from offering ISP service.

It sounds like you want to take the existing internet business market, fracture it, keep the resulting pieces in separate silos, and award a monopoly on land lines to the telco industry (what about cable?). I don't like that idea, but hey, that's what opinions are all about. However, what you've just said flies in the face of what the original article is asking for - one bill to pay, one throat to choke, one entity to deal with. Simplicity.

Plus, merging land and mobile data provisioning is what the author is looking for, meaning that the last mile in many cases is the airwaves. 3/4G networks, microwave last-mile for rural ISPs, etc. As a matter of fact, I'd say that the future of last-mile internet connectivity is going to be mostly wireless, much like the present day state of the art in telephony.

Now, I'm completely fine with market internet rates, if the last mile rates are regulated ... Competition doesn't really work well for the last mile, which is why we have the mess we currently have.

Well, it isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US had under AT&T's regulated telephone monopoly. History shows that regulation means that the provider has no incentive to improve service or run more efficiently. The telco infrastructure of the US stayed in the stone ages for a long time because of that. Competition brought about big, fantastic changes and lower costs for consumers.

Competition is tough to foster in a wired last-mile scenario, but easier to get going in a wireless environment. Hence part of the reason I think the question of last-mile wires will be mostly moot in about 10 years.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[VTI9600]

If all of us get 5 Mbit plans, does that mean that our ISP needs 5n (where n is the number of customers) available bandwidth? What about upstream of them? What about upstream of that? Such a provisioning scheme is a fantasy.

Not quite...That's where content delivery networks such as Akamai come into play. By hosting nodes at your ISP's NOC, you can get high-bandwidth delivery of most commonly accessed content without your ISP needing to maintain huge pipes to its peers.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[nurb432]

I don't think "unlimited" plans ever made much sense because some people will abuse it.

So? That is how EVERYTHING works, why should i have be penalized due to someone else not behaving? this works with bandwidth as much as it does with free speech or right to bear arms, or privacy walking down the street.

And i disagree that they didn't make sense. Meeter use is what doesn't make sense. *especially* as the ISPs via their content divisions are trying to get you to use more data every day.. streaming this and streaming that...

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[nurb432]

Right, it is actually cheaper to utilize a higher % then let it sit. That is how you recoup your investment.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[ShakaUVM]

Only if you needed reliable transmission. If you were doing something like a game where it's more important that a packet get to its destination quickly than reliably, UDP is often better than TCP.

UDP flooding can also be used to 'steal' bandwidth from the nice orderly TCP using folks.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[ShakaUVM]

Sure, but the bandwidth caps mobile providers are using are set absurdly low. In your example, you'd allow a user to use the network at full speed for half an hour per month. (Assuming full 10Gbps, and a 5gb/mo cap.) And then if they go over their limit, charge a single enough money to not only do the full wiring you calculate above, but also to coat all the wires in gold, paint racing stripes on them, and still have enough left over to buy Ferraris for everyone in net ops.

It's not like a reasonable person using 'unlimited bandwidth' is even close to these low caps providers are setting. Watch 10 Youtube videos a day, and you've hit your 5G cap.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[jesset77]

With fixed costs, billing by usage is equitable.

Say you invest a fixed amount of resources to bake a huge pie. How much should you charge people for a piece of it?

I should pay for one slice and get as much pie as I want, delivered to my house or wherever I travel of course, so I can eat it wherever I want.

I mean, you've already baked the pie and it will just go to waste if you don't let me stuff my face all I want, right?

And I want to speak to your manager, anyway. When I traveled to Mexico last summer, the pie was cold and stale by the time your delivery boy got it to me. Dx

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Rich0]

It sounds like you want to take the existing internet business market, fracture it, keep the resulting pieces in separate silos, and award a monopoly on land lines to the telco industry (what about cable?).

Well, the telco and cable ALREADY have monopolies. I just want to split the last mile from the ISP business. You're not suggesting that you actually have a choice of either telcos or cable companies.

However, what you've just said flies in the face of what the original article is asking for - one bill to pay, one throat to choke, one entity to deal with. Simplicity.

Sometimes the best way to do things isn't the simplest. Why should I have to pay extra just so that you can get free unlimited satellite internet service anywhere on the earth when I have no need to travel outside of populated areas? Why should somebody who just wants to check email have to pay for somebody who downloads torrents over the 3G cell network?

As a matter of fact, I'd say that the future of last-mile internet connectivity is going to be mostly wireless, much like the present day state of the art in telephony.

Depends - if you're talking about checking email or basic web browsing - maybe. If you're talking about streaming HDTV or whatever the next big craze is - probably not. I've got something like 30Mbps on my land line - only a few wireless technologies can even approach that and certainly not in a shared network.

Well, it isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US had under AT&T's regulated telephone monopoly.

Uh, you say that as if your local phone company wasn't regulated. The only thing that was deregulated (somewhat) was long distance service.

In fact, what was done to AT&T is basically what I want to see happen to the last mile. In the POTS system the last mile is a natural monopoly, but long-distance isn't. So, they split up phone companies into local and long-distance providers and deregulated the latter. I want the same thing. Split up the last-mile connection providers from the ISPs.

When you do this, then you aren't stuck with slow access to Youtube because your cable company wants to promote some other website, or whatever. You don't get much choice in your last-mile provider, so that should be regulated so that consumers don't get burned. You do get choice in your ISP, so those should be deregulated.

Competition is tough to foster in a wired last-mile scenario, but easier to get going in a wireless environment. Hence part of the reason I think the question of last-mile wires will be mostly moot in about 10 years.

You'll always need regulation in wireless, since spectrum is a scarce commodity. However, I do agree with what you are getting at - last-mile is a much smaller problem with wireless.

However, I don't see last-mile wires going away anytime soon - if anything demand will increase. Once HDTV over internet becomes mainstream you are going to see people's bandwidth use explode. It is going to be extremely hard for wireless to compete with copper, let alone fiber.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

If they increased their overall capacity and nothing else, they WOULD resolve a lot of the issues. Unlimited bandwidth does not mean an unlimited download speed. I can have unlimited downloads at 1MBs or 800 KBs. It is more a case of how much they can handle at one time. The easiest way to manage that is simple, don't offer what you can't give and in these issues their mouths wrote checks their ass couldn't cash. To make matters worse when many of them were flat out GIVEN money to fix the problems instead of doing what they were supposed to they gave the cash to their executives and didn't fix crap.

It is when they can't operate within their resources currently and increase the total capacity only to then increase the download speeds of everyone around so they can advertise that new feature do they then end up back at square one.

Majorly Simplified Hypothetical: Say I own an internet company. My backbone can only handle 850 Mb/s and I sell internet unlimited internet access at speeds of 100 Mb/s to 10 people. It isn't their fault that I am overdrawn when they collectively use up to 1000 Mb/s (150 Mb/s above my upper limit) at times cause they are using what I sold them.

Now lets say I increased my backbone capacity to 1200 Mb/s which fixes all my problems and even gives me some wiggle room. The dumbest thing I could then do would be to go around and increase my customers download speeds to 150 Mb/s as that now puts me right back at the same situation I just dug myself out of. And again, none of this would be the customers faults as they are only using what I sold them under the terms I sold it to them.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, costs are proportional to volume. If everybody uses twice as much volume, they need twice the equipment. That's true regardless of whether they manage to fill available capacity efficiently or whether much of it sits idle most of the time.

The can reduce idle times by having peak/offpeak pricing, but that doesn't change the principle, only the proportionality factor.

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[morphles]

Somethings not right, in my country there practically no limited plans (except on mobile), basically every provider gives as much as you can download, most often at speeds of 10Mbit to100Mbit. Well and people do download :D since my country isn't too wealthy "piracy" is quite rampant, and no wonder, when buying games locally ends up more expensive than buying in amazon.de/uk and sending them back all the way to Lithuania. So anyway my point is that providers in my country do give unlimited connection (or am i missing something and this is about unlimited speed, but i somehow doubt that :) ), and its been like this for like five years, and i bet at least some people do download >TB a month. The thing that amazes me most is, my puny country is done with caps for like 5 years, but such country like usa has plans with 20GB/month caps (or am i wrong? but iirc i read someone metion something like this here)...

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know where you got your information, but TCP has not had a problem with "congestion collapse" since Van Jacobson introduced congestion control in 1988 (see "History" section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestive_collapse). Congestion control is not perfect, but it allows networks to be run at very high utilization without collapse. Having said that, networks fundamentally cannot provide good service if over saturated.

ISPs on the other hand are balancing cost/profits with the ire customers feel when things bog down. As individuals we make such trade offs too. Should I go with a cable modem or ADSL? Choose the one that will provide the best service for the lowest cost (or whatever other value metrics you find important).

What chaps me is that the providers were able to hoodwink Congress into giving them a boatload of money to "wire the woods" and then did nothing. In the rural area where I live, there is no real competition and no incentive for the providers to improve. In fact, they have lobbied the state to enact laws that prevent towns from building their own infrastructure in spite of the fact the providers they have no intention of doing anything anyway. I envy our European and Asian neighbors who have much better performance at a lower cost. (And don't give my the line about the US being more rural than other countries. The problem in the economics is not the cost of putting in the capacity, it is about companies maximizing their profits to the exclusion of the people they are supposed to serve. While companies are like that, the government shouldn't pay them for the privilege with money out of our pockets when we get nothing in return!)

Anon

Re:universal, yes, unlimited, no

[Rich0]

Ok, suppose they upgrade their backbone connectivity to 1200Mb/s in your example.

You propose that their customers be FORBIDDEN from downloading data at 150Mb/s since the network MUST be provisioned to sustain peak capacity 100% of the time.

99% of all internet use cases involve short times of peak usage, with long periods of low usage.

So, why can't companies sell a plan that fits this bill?

Now, I'm fine with banning the word "unlimited" if there are limits. That's just truth in advertising. What I'm not fine with is forcing all plans to be unlimited.

Given the choice of unlimited total volume at 512kbps, or peak use at 30Mbps with a download cap of 100GB per month (or some kind of defined-in-advance throttling at that point), I'm going to tend to choose the latter, even though the former gives me 50% more bytes per month. If I were capped at 150GB/month then it would be a win/win to choose the "limited" plan - as my cap is the same as the most I could get from the lower-peak-bandwidth plan, but I have the option of either throttling myself or surging at peak rate.

Perhaps you'd be happy if the ISP-provided modem had a checkbox that would throttle you to a level that you could download at 24*7 without any ISP complaints? Then your plan could be advertised as a 30MBps plan with a 100GB cap, or true unlimited use at 300kbps.

The problem is that no matter how big you make the upstream connection, you are going to inefficiently allocate it if you assume 100% usage by ALL customers. What you propose is that rather than just throttling the 0.01% of people who use their connection 24*7 that the ISP throttles everybody just to be fair.

Universal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I pay in Altairian credits? Gold pressed Latinum? Whats the signal like in the coal sack nebula?

I too

[dnaumov]

wish that radio spectrum wasn't finite and would allow for unlimited bandwidth and removal of traffic caps. However, reality begs to differ with my point of view.

Re:I too

[Itchyeyes]

^This

Not to mention, mobile data and access at home are very much not the same service, even if they are provided by the same company sometimes. The only fair point I think TFA makes is in regards to providers charging for different types of data on the same network, eg charging for text messaging on top of a mobile data plan, or digital phone on top of a cable Internet service.

Regulators do know, and do not care

[cavehobbit]

'It's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing.'" They do know this. they do not care. The regulators are in the pockets of those they regulate. Look at any regulated industry. Most of the time they support being regulated because they use those regulations for their own benefit. Oil, gas, Finance, banks, autos, pharma, etc. Even if an industry fights against initial regulation, they support it afterward, when then end up controlling it. They use the regulations to justify anti-consumer actions and to drive UP the cost of entry to keep competition down. Or even to eliminate competition if they can slip in a regulation that damages competitors. That is why lobbying is such a big business. the lobbyists win no matter what happens with regulations. They get paid to fight against or for any regulation that comes up. They are worse than lawyers.

Re:Regulators do know, and do not care

[ducomputergeek]

There is a lot of truth here. And it can even be self regulation. Just look at PA-DSS. I wonder how many people here know that if they are running an e-commerce site with any OSS shopping cart and directly accepting credit cards they have to stop as of July 1st. There is no FOSS shopping cart application that is PA-DSS certified by Visa et. al. The only thing that comes close is Magento Enterprise edition ($9000). The Community Edition is not nor ever will be.

We forked an opensource point of sale application that has just passed compliance and now waiting for the paperwork to go through to be certified. Total cost, about USD 85,000. $20,000 for QSA, another $1250 for certification, and the rest to hire programmers because the documentation requirements on how an application is developed does not fit with the normal "community" development model opensource uses.

I know a lot of companies complained about the PCI requirements because it is expensive. We're a small shop with a half people on staff total and it's us over a year to get PCI-Level I and PA-DSS certifications. With one of our products, we've seen three competitors drop out of the market. They were extremely small up starts with only a couple people and suddenly found they couldn't meet the requirements. We proved it can be done by a small shop, but we burned over $200,000 in cash doing it.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for a 3G connection from AT&T for my iPhone. I jailbroke it and I can use my iPhone as a hotspot for my other decives (MacBook, iPad) and doing it this way I only pay for 1 internet connection. Every month I go over their "unlimited" cap of 5GB and they never charge me more or ask me to use less. I use a lot more than 5GB, probably at least triple that and I've only had to call and dispute overage charges once. After that they stopped charging me.

Use and abuse your ISPs and telecomm companies, they are doing the same to you.

why?

[maraist]

If I pay for electricity at home, why should I be forced to pay for it again at work.. Or at the mall. Or when I'm overseas.. That's not fair.. waaaaaaah.

Re:why?

[tverbeek]

The article's whole line of argument is utterly unsound. The author apparently doesn't grasp technology or economics. Her home DSL and her 3G data plan are simply not the same thing.

"Data access" is not universally fungible. The cost to deliver 1MB of data by DSL is not the same as delivering it by 3G, which is not the same as delivering it by CD+USPS, which is also not the same as delivering it by wifi+shared-T1, etc. If AT&T charges me separately (at a higher rate) to deliver data to me by 3G, distinct from their charge to deliver it to me by DSL, that's just good business sense and smart use of finite resources.

Furthermore, the value to me of these various delivery channels is not the same: the ability to load a weather map on my phone in the middle of nowhere is worth more than loading it from the comfort of my home. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other. The ability to download a complete distro of Linux at 6Mbps is worth more than doing it at 56Kbps. Of course I should expect to pay more for one than the other.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess for me I don't understand paying for mobile data and then again for the ability to tether too. It's the same connection regardless. In that particular case your analogy is broken.

Re:why?

[ceejayoz]

If I pay for electricity at home, why should I be forced to pay for it again at work.. Or at the mall. Or when I'm overseas.. That's not fair.. waaaaaaah.

AT&T just announced that iPhone tethering will be an additional monthly charge but that using it still eats up your data plan's bandwidth allotment.

That's like paying for electricity at home, but having to pay an additional charge to use the paid-for electricity in certain appliances.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only example I can think of where a universal data plan would work is with a customer that has verizon DSL/FIOS at home and has a verizon cell phone.

Every other combination out there are seperate companies. So are they saying because i pay brighthouse $45 a month for my cable internet that tmobile should just wave my data access fees on my cell phone? WTF? are brighthouse and tmobile supposted to share that $45 somehow? who the hell is going administer that system of fee sharing? oh let me guess this is how obama is going to create more jobs by forcing this down the necks of the telecom industry and creating a govt agency to oversee it all and take their cut as well on top of the telecom taxes we already pay.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I pay for electricity at home, why should I be forced to pay for it again at work.. Or at the mall. Or when I'm overseas.. That's not fair.. waaaaaaah.

Electricity is not sold as a MOBILE service. Correct for that, and your argument is more akin to

If I pay for electricity on one account in my kitchen, why should I be forced to pay for another account for my living room.. Or for a third in my bedroom. Or for a fourth in my garage.. That's not fair.. waaaaaaah.

Overage fees are the real killer

[antifoidulus]

The real problem really isn't the data limits per se, but what happens when you go over them. It's really easy to accidentally go over your limit(for instance if you think you are on wifi but are actually on 3g), and when you do you have to pay out the ass. It would be nice if regulators forced providers to offer an option to block internet access until next billing cycle if you go over instead of only finding out after the fact that you now owe hundreds of dollars because you accidentally misconfigured your device.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Japan, there have been enough complaints that cell phone companies now DO notify you, and/or cut off your access until you've confirmed that you do want to keep using the service for a fee. However, in Japan, there are true unlimited data plans. The one provider that has said that "technically, it is not REALLY unlimited" made a statement that you will be throttled if you exceed 300GB per month. On 3G. I'm not sure how that's even possible, but they're honest at least. So here's what happens if you AREN'T on an unlimited plan, and exceed a threshold. You get a call, and they tell you you've exceeded the limit by xxMB or whatever it is, and the charge is XX yen. (Usually 5-digits-yen, equivalent to a couple hundred US$.) That usually scares the crap out of most people. But, they offer you the unlimited plan, a one-time offer, and if you sign up there, they will apply the unlimited plan to that month so you don't need to pay the 5-digit-yen extra. It certainly is a way to get cell companies to get more people onto higher cost unlimited plans, but it is indeed a very courteous way of doing so, since it usually saves the customer a lot of money. (Not to mention that with so many high-bandwidth usages of a mobile phone these days, the customer would probably join an unlimited plan eventually anyhow.)

There are a lot of things that are backwards in Japan, awkward, and sometimes just down right infuriating, but it never ceases to amaze me how it is so far ahead of the U.S. as far as consumer telecommunications is concerned. That wasn't true 20 years ago, so they did something right. Most likely simultaneously as the U.S. continued to keep doing things wrong...

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[AHuxley]

Japan like S Korea wanted a real telco network and rolled it out via laws and tax breaks.
The US just lobbied to connect schools, hospitals, towns, rolled out a rust belt network and told everybody they where living in the future.
When the rust belt fails and optical is cheap, it will be upgraded and consumers milked again.
Looking from the top down the US public network is a wonder of cold war networks, cash savings and pure profit.
Everybody who needed a real network built their own it seems.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[ZorinLynx]

How about just regulating overage fees to be capped at the same rate as what you are already paying for service?

For instance, if you pay $60 a month for 5GB of transfer, and use 10GB of transfer, the provider cannot legally charge you more than $120 for that month.

Right now you pay an arguably fair rate until you reach your cap, then you are utterly *reamed* for any additional usage. This is even worse on voice plans, where additional minutes can cost close to a dollar when you've paid only cents for the original minutes in your plan.

This would go a long way towards solving the problem.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[ceejayoz]

It'd be nice if regulators asked why the overage gigabytes cost tens, hundreds, or thousands of times as much to deliver, too.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[scamper_22]

People who just want unlimited everything have no idea of the technical limits...especially on wireless.

That said, the billing mechanisms are horrible and that needs to be improved.
MB counts should be available on the homescreen of all phones. You should be able to disable data after it crosses the line.

Or if they don't want that, just have a simple pre-paid account for money for 'over-charge'. once it is depleted, you can't be billed anymore. This at least prevents u from getting insane bills.

On the fixed wire end, we're at the point where we can pretty much allow general web browsing, but video and downloads are still issues. Once you cross your 'limit', companies should be able to throttle you down to basic web browsing speeds. This give you unlimited access... but not at the maximum rate.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[FooAtWFU]

That, and realistic overage rates would be nice. If I use 10GB on my 5GB-for-$40 plan, I should pay something like $40-$60 extra, not $300.

Re:Overage fees are the real killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but in south korea you need a registered internet ID to legally post in forums, and the impression I get from most koreans I know is that they don't trust their local media at all and get the feeling that the government controls all of it. I'll take our chaos over their order thank you, even if it carries with it some inconveniences to have the government not more involved in these sorts of projects.

How true

[Anonymous Coward]

What is even more surprising is brazen device profiling, where you are forced to buy a data plan, even though the quality is bad, just because you have a "smartphone".

It's already here...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called Verizon OneBill:
http://www22.verizon.com/pages/onebill/

Or do they actually think that somehow changing the billing structure will automatically cut the price in half (or thirds)? Frankly it doesn't matter to me if I pay $40 for DSL and $40 for broadband wireless vs. $80 for "Anywhere Internet" - at least with it separate I can pick and choose my carriers for each.

Unlimited = Subsidized

[Anonymous Coward]

She wants unlimited data.
Someone has to pay for that.
Those who don't want, need or use the unlimited data end up paying for her desires.
Like me.
Let her pay for her own usage and abusage.

Re:Unlimited = Subsidized

[Khyber]

Umm, the assholes are oversubscribing their networks and not providing us with what we were initially paying for.

A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliver

[bogaboga]

'I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose.'

Here's what such a plan would feature: A monthly cost of $240. How about that?

What are you paying for?

[AmazinglySmooth]

You are paying for _access_ to data. You may also pay for the data itself, too. I don't understand what this person wants.

Re:What are you paying for?

[maxume]

They want a simpler bill and the ability to get a hold shiny for as little as possible, they are apparently incapable of resisting it.

Are you just stupid or is it ignorance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, are you simply stupid or just ignorant? Why are you paying for data from cell, isp, and at work differently? The data is provided by three different companies.

Do you think that AT&T Wireless is the same company as AT&T Telecom? You are very confused if you believe that. Wireless is not government regulated. Telecom (SBC) is definitely regulated by the government. The accounting rules are COMPLETELY different.

That's your local, state and federal government at work currently regulating telephone service and trying very hard to also regulate ISP service. When I worked for AT&T, we could purchase new equipment that merged DSL and telephone capabilities into a single device. The problem was that the local utility commissions would not agree to only regulate telephone service. If the hardware did both jobs, then they needed to regulate both services. We purchased different cards because of that, which was much more expensive.

Re:Are you just stupid or is it ignorance.

[Montezumaa]

Well, you share in the ignorance. Land-line companies are not heavily regulated by the government anymore, as you are attempting to suggest(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996). Wireless companies are regulated pretty much at the same level as land-lines providers(which most of the big wireless carriers are run by..wait for it...wait for it...land-line companies), as the wireless companies use public airwaves to do business(if you are not aware, "The People", not corporation, own the airwaves). You have to also remember that those wireless towers are fed by wire-line companies(which are not always the same company that owns the antenna), so that line running up to the cell tower is regulated by the current laws for wire, not wireless.

AT&T Wireless and AT&T Wireline are the exact same company, they are just run in differing way. My girlfriend, who works at AT&T Wireless, get extremely cheap wireless accounts, free long distance on her home phone, and free DSL. This is because AT&T covers all AT&T brands(though AT&T is not really AT&T anymore, it is SBC under a different name, but with the same bad management).

AT&T made well over $12 billion USD last year, in profit, and in that is AT&T Wireless's profit.

Did you work at AT&T when "Ma Bell" and the "Baby Bells" existed? I am not asking to make fun of you, I am asking in all seriousness. I can understand your stance if this is the case, but if it is not, then you probably were not trained properly when you working at AT&T(which is a big problem at that company).

Costs is divided, not multiplied.

[M8e]

Costs like these(and taxes) are not paid multiple times, it's just devided.

If you want to have unlimited internet at home and in your cellphone you have to pay for it.
If both cost X$, giving you an total cost of 2X$ you still have to pay 2X$ for your "universal data plan"

home plan + phone plan = 2X$
universal data plan = 2X$

Or actually you would most likely have to pay more for the "universal data plan" or only be able to use one at a time.

You must be confused

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't story isn't about Apple or Linux, ergo you didn't need to first post.

Greetings from Suomi.

Cell plans, data only.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I never understood is on cell phone plans why voice, text, pics, data are all separate charges. It all data, it's all digital, it's all on the same (cell) network, why does it matter? Maybe I'm missing part of the story but it seems to me it should all be one charge.

Re:Cell plans, data only.

[sonicmerlin]

Well voice has to be separate because it's running on a separate network than data, but once carriers move to true 4G (LTE Advanced and WiMAX 2), everything will be done over packet switched networks.

Beer

[Hognoxious]

Between multiple cell phones and their add-ons, high-speed Internet connections, and digital TV subscriptions, most households are paying for data delivery at least three times over, often paying the same provider twice

Between going to the pub on Monday, then the supermarket on Tuesday, and the pub again on Friday, many imbibers are paying for beer three times over!

Hope it's not for the same beer.

No

[Sycraft-fu]

Because you are paying for different infrastructure. When I pay for my Internet connection to my house, I'm paying for the cable connection that comes in, and the fibre connection that it converts to further up the line. The cable company maintains that physical network and it does cost money to do so. I'm then also paying for their connectivity, which is a fair amount given that it is a fairly high bandwidth line.

For my mobile phone, I'm instead paying for the cell towers, and the equipment that drives them. I'm also paying for the lines and phone switches and so on further up the chain. There too, I'm paying for bandwidth for the provider though less in that case. The costs there are more the physical infrastructure.

Saying that I should pay one bill because both services access the Internet is silly. They are different physical systems and in my case different companies. Even in the case of the same company, you need to account for the cost of all the infrastructure and support. It is not free to build and maintain a large network, wired or wireless. It is quite expensive in fact. You can't demand that you be provided with Internet in all forms just because you happen to pay for it in one form.

Now, as far as cable TV goes, I can see some point there, but still it is a different thing. Different system, other than the final delivery to the customer, different hardware, different providers. Remember that cable isn't free to your cable company. They have to pay to carry many channels (though some, like shopping channels pay them). That's why sometimes you'll find a cable service that doesn't carry a given station, they get in a fight over rates. Cox here nearly cut ESPN off because of a rate fight.

I can certainly see the argument that perhaps things should cost less than they do now, but this idea that you should only have to pay once is silly, especially when you are talking different formats. The money you spend on a HFC network is different from the money spent on a broadcast satellite is different from the money on a cell network. They all cost a lot to build and operate.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Re:No

[Atmchicago]

Furthermore, I'd like to see the end of unlimited plans, for all of these, and move to plan that resembles utilities. Pay for what you use! Imagine if we had "unlimited" electricity, gas and water plans. People would just leave their lights on all the time, and the whole system would be inefficient. I imagine the same goes for data usage.

Re:No

[Khyber]

"When I pay for my Internet connection to my house, I'm paying for the cable connection that comes in, and the fibre connection that it converts to further up the line."

No, you're paying to get reamed up the ass without lube. YOU ALREADY PAID FOR THE LINES, it's called the 1996 Telecommunications Act. You're just being fleeced and you're too dumb to realize it.

Re:No

[rdnetto]

It seemed to me that the summary (didn't RTFA) was arguing for a single shared account for mobile devices, possibly since the SIM card (and it's sockets) was not designed for extremely frequent exchanges between devices. If this is correct, then the solution is obvious: clone the SIM card. Or are there some legal/technical reasons that this wouldn't be feasible?

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[PolygamousRanchKid]

'I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose.'

Have you considered your own bacup system? I can't swing a dead cat around my head without hitting a hard disk offering for about ~€100.

Keep the backup at a safe place, that you never visit . . . how about your parents' place :-)

But seriously, make backups often, and keep them someplace that you are not inclined to got to that often.

The weather in Iceland seems to be nice right now. If you excuse the volcanic ash . . .

If Iceland is too cold, just send your backup disks to some trusted relatives who live elsewhere . . . .

Highway robbery

[forand]

I agree with others who have posted here that a truly unlimited plan is way over charging the average user or is going to be much more expensive than what we currently have just to make it 'reasonable' for the average user. That being said the current trend is absolutely ridiculous. How can AT&T justify having a pay per byte plan where the paid for data does not roll over and if you go over any amount you get double charged even if it is the last day of your billing cycle?

Personally I would like to see two plans: 1) truly unlimited with a monthly fee of about 50 and 2) a truly pay per byte at something like 7.5 cent/MB ($15 for 200 MB), these bytes have an expiration of 1 year. Both plans you can do with the data pipes as you wish: tethering, streaming, etc.. This gives everyone the flexibility they want.

Don't want this

[MistrBlank]

What I do want though is for someone to see how badly they are robbing us in text message plans and the fact that we pay so much more for an outdated infrastructure and none of the costs are balanced. When everything moves to LTE it'll be more of a nightmare when we're paying for multiple services and they all use the same infrastructure. It will support voip for calls and we don't really need SMS to do texting, the phone company just likes to charge us through the nose for it.

Pinhead

[wellcrafted83]

Yeah I suppose she would support an unlimited energy plan. Paying for gasoline at the gas station, natural gas from gas company, and electricity from the electric company is all too much. It's all just energy anyways. What a pinhead.

How are phone calls, television, and Internet...

[John Hasler]

..."the exact same thing"?

In any case I want no "universal data plan" optimized for people who watch movies on their cellphones, view six hours of tv a day, and download thousands of hours of music forced on me by government. If I want anything it's metered service (that's metered, not tiered).

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't swing a dead cat around my head without hitting a hard disk offering for about ~100

That's around US$145, which buys you one *hell* of a big drive. 750 GB is $55 with free shipping, 1.5 TB is $90. You can get a 2 TB drive for a bit under than price.

Somehow hard disks got crazy-cheap.

Internet is free

[jdagius]

You already are paying one very low fee to use the Internet: zero dollars.

What you're paying real dollars for is the right to access the Internet by means of various physical carriers: price to be negotiated between carrier and user.

Peronally I prefer the Asok (Dilbert's intern) sewage activated access. Whereever you have a sewer pipe, then you have turdo-charged access!

:-]

digital TV is multicast and that is not the same a

[Joe The Dragon]

digital TV is multicast and that is not the same as other data that is just for you.

multicast sends out the same data to mean people at the same time changeing that to each user have there own copy of the same thing will just eat up much more bandwidth.

Retarded

[npsimons]

Between multiple cell phones and their add-ons, high-speed Internet connections, and digital TV subscriptions, most households are paying for data delivery at least three times over, often paying the same provider twice.

These services are *not* the same, and anyone who thinks otherwise is obviously not qualified to talk about. I mean, really, can't these idiots tell the difference between wireless and wired data plans? Not that I'm defending communications companies, but you can already get bundles that give you discounts for these sorts of things. Not to mention that there are some of us who don't use one (or more) of the aforementioned services and don't want to be charged for them (and if you think that bundling all these services by default and reducing choice will make them cheaper overall, you're even stupider than the lady in the article).

Now don't get me wrong, I realize there are problems with things the way they are, but conflating Network Neutrality with this sort of nonsense is holding back the cause; we need to call these idiots out and reject them; Network Neutrality is a reasonable goal, but getting distracted by bullshit like this only hurts the users of data plans.

You appear to forget copyright

[tepples]

I can buy a song on cassette, album, cd, mp3... government hasn't regulated that.

Title 17 of the United States Code heavily regulates that.

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[mikkelm]

How do copyright provisions regulate which media a publisher is allowed to sell their products on?

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[tepples]

I can buy a song on cassette, album, cd, mp3... government hasn't regulated that.

Title 17 of the United States Code heavily regulates that.

How do copyright provisions regulate which media a publisher is allowed to sell their products on?

Copyright provisions regulate which media you are allowed to buy a publisher's products on: only those that the publisher chooses. For example, where can I buy a lawfully made copy of Song of the South on DVD?

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[mikkelm]

That isn't exactly government regulation. That's the publisher's prerogative.

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[tepples]

That isn't exactly government regulation. That's the publisher's prerogative.

Only government regulation allows the publisher to enforce a prerogative.

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[mikkelm]

That's an absurdly broad take on the definition of regulation, and obviously a far departure from the type of regulation referred to in the post to which you replied.

By the same token, the only thing keeping me from taking the dinner off of your table and eating it myself is government regulation, It's inane to argue along these paths.

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[tepples]

How do copyright provisions regulate which media a publisher is allowed to sell their products on?

Some media, such as video game platforms designed for couch multiplayer, have gatekeeper companies that regulate what publishers may and may not publish works in that medium. These platforms use cryptography in such a way that any publisher's attempt to bypass the gatekeeper is likely to fall under circumvention of access control or copy control (17 USC 1201 and foreign counterparts).

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[mikkelm]

Those are contractual agreements between publisher and middleman covered under contract law. The circumvention of the measures deployed is covered by anti-circumvention legislation. To refer to that as legislation is like referring to homicide laws as regulating murder. The definition of the term as used simply does not apply.

Re:You appear to forget copyright

[mikkelm]

s/To refer to that as legislation/To refer to that as regulation/

Televisiphonernetting

[tepples]

Or do they actually think that somehow changing the billing structure will automatically cut the price in half (or thirds)?

Comcast gives substantial discounts to customers who have the "televisiphonernetting" triple-play package.

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[tepples]

But how much does a good USB2 or eSATA enclosure for these drives cost?

Stupid

[amliebsch]

"Between multiple restaurants and their specials, all-you can eat buffets, and grocery stores, most households are paying for food at least three times over, often paying the same provider twice. It's time for a universal food plan, [Cnet columnist Molly] Wood declares: 'I want to pay once for food, I want that food to be unlimited, and I want to be able to eat it in any fashion I choose.' Still, she has hopes that the-times-they-will-be-a-changin': 'It's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing.'"

$15 for 200 is to low. 200 is like 1 windows updat

[Joe The Dragon]

$15 for 200 is to low. 200 is like 1 month of windows updates. So $15 per system just for OS updates and don't even think about onlive / youtube or any other high bandwidth use thing if you don't have like $500+ per hour.

on demand

[tepples]

digital TV is multicast

This is true of satellite TV and of "channels" on cable TV. But as I understand it, video on demand is unicast over cable TV just as it is over cable Internet.

Dumb idea

[Yo,dog!]

Example: start torrents on home network and travel around using mobile data If you want to pay once for data, then have your home network disabled while you use mobile data. It'll never happen.

Re:Dumb idea

[allo]

example: i use torrents at home and surf the net using wlan via the same line. now i use torrents at home, and surf the net using umts. why should i pay more for the same data?

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You're using all wireless, which is the most bandwidth-limited method.

Let's have universal everything

[kc5deb]

Great idea. While we're at it, let's have universal internet plans from ISPs. We could have universal pricing on vehicles. Universal pricing on gasoline. We could all pay the same money for a house - universal housing! Oh, and universal restaurant pricing - everyone pays the same amount for a steak no matter where ya go. Think how grand it would be if the government set prices on every single thing sold in the US. It would make things so much easier to take away that pesky free market. I mean, who REALLY wants to have to bother with having to make their own decisions in their life? It'd be so much easier to just let our government make all our decisions and run every aspect of our lives. Eventually, we could just depend on government run services for everything from food, clothing, transportation, toilet paper, etc. /sarcasm

That is carrier-dependent

[damn_registrars]

What is even more surprising is brazen device profiling, where you are forced to buy a data plan, even though the quality is bad, just because you have a "smartphone".

In the US, if you are on a GSM carrier - where you can swap your SIM card to another phone to change phones (rather than having to go in to a store) - you can essentially pair any phone with any plan. I am using a blackberry on a GSM network right now with no data plan, because I bought the phone through an alternate channel (rather than through the provider). Hence they had no opportunity to force me into a new data-plan-based contract.

On the other hand, other networks have a lock on how you activate a phone. Even if you buy your phone second-hand you still have to take it to their store to activate it; where they are free to say "we'll activate it only if you sign this (contract)".

Re:That is carrier-dependent

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually get plenty of options on Verizon in this respect. Well you get an option at least which is impressive for Verizon. You can basically do the same thing as a SIM swap but you do it online - just plug in the ESN # from your new phone (usually listed inside the battery compartment) into their web-based activation page and you're set. I've done this to swap between two different RAZR V3m's that I had lying around when one crapped out on me. No need to go into the stores which are full of rotten, awful useless salespeople and no support. The storefolk will certainly TELL you that you have to go in-store to activate a phone, but then again, they'll lie to your face about anything just to get you within the reach of their saleshooks. I believe that you can buy a smartphone online and then activate it in this manner without a data plan. But I also assume that if you accidentally go online with it you'll get charged an arm and a leg - or whatever appendage it specifies in your contract.

But we pay for lots of things in multiple ways

[petes_PoV]

Think about electricity, for example. We pay for mains power to our houses. We buy batteries in various forms at various prices - rechargables, single use, car batteries. We have the option for solar power at a different price point. Yet no-one would say "I want to pay once for all my different sources of electricity, no matter what the format is).

This idea just doesn't make sense. The various suppliers (whether for bandwidth or electrcity, or water - bottled, mains, rainfall etc.) all have different infrastructures, cost models, shareholders, benefits and overheads. Same for transportation, same for food sources. I don't thing the poster has thought through much beyond the I want ...... stage

The FCC??

[drumcat]

You want regulation by the FCC? The same toolbox that can't even regulate Net Neutrality? You're smokin' crack...

People won't buy them

[Sycraft-fu]

The reason behind unlimited plans is simple human mentality. They want the ability to use things an unlimited amount for one price, even if it can be shown they'd save money metered.

ISPs discovered this with businesses back in the early days of the Internet. The only way to offer bandwidth for reasonable prices was very heavy oversubscription, since lines were so expensive at the high level. Hence, you'd sell metered service to ensure that everyone could get their fair share. Well businesses hated it, they were always asking for unmetered connections. They'd pay a lot more for it too. Even when the ISP showed that worst realistic case scenario they'd still pay less, didn't matter they wanted a fixed monthly fee.

Same shit later with dailup Internet. ISPs charged per minute or hour of access time, or has limits with certain plans. Reason was again oversubscription. Phone lines were (and still are to an extent) expensive. You could be paying $50-80/month per line as a business, especially if you had digital lines which was needed for 56k. You needed to pack users in fairly heavy, maybe 10 to 1, to make a profit on that (there were other costs too, like your Internet connection). However people hated it, and the ISPs that would sell "unlimited" connections won out, even if it meant more busy signals.

Hence, we get where we are now. You can see it in web hosting too. So many web hosts these days are "unlimited" bandwidth. Of course there's no such thing, it just means that your service won't be as fast. Doesn't matter, that's what's popular. The webhost I like (Pair) is rarely one people want to go with because they limit transfers. I'll recommend it and people will say "But what if I go over?" I'll explain that their limits are massive, I host gigs of files on my site and don't hit it. However, they'll go with an unlimited host instead.

Metered connections would make a lot of sense. It would allow for more flexibility in terms of bandwidth vs cost. It is feasible to provide 100mbit+ to the home, and have people get that kind of speed, so long as the play nice and share. You see it on office WANs all the time. There the playing nice is enforced by IT. However at home, metering could do it. You could pay a small amount for a fast connection, but little transfers. So your net is fast, but you can't use it all that much. If you need more usage, pay more money.

Just isn't going to happen though. The company that tries it will find their customers jumping ship.

Re:People won't buy them

[sonicmerlin]

Uh, no it doesn't make sense. Shockingly you wrote so much about something you know nothing about. If you read some of the other comments on here you'd understand why bandwidth is nothing like electricity, and the two simply can't be compared. Metered billing makes absolutely no sense based on how the ISP pays and provisions for bandwidth.

Re:People won't buy them

[Atmchicago]

It shouldn't matter how the bandwidth arises. If I use 1 megabyte, I shouldn't pay for 10. Or 100. It's that simple, really, when you have millions of people sharing the same resource. If usage goes down, they can lower the rates, and if it goes up, they can build more infrastructure. Competition should, in theory, keep them from raising the rates, although I'm not always so sure that's the case.

Time for Universal Food!

[swillden]

Between multiple restaurants and their appetizers and desserts, grocery stores, and milk delivery subscriptions, most households are paying for food at least three times over, often paying the same provider multiple times per month. It's time for a universal food plan, [Cnet columnist Molly] Wood declares: 'I want to pay once for food, I want that food to be unlimited, and I want to be able to eat it at any location I choose.' Still, she has hopes that the-times-they-will-be-a-changin': 'It's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing.'

Willing to pay? Willing to charge.

[dazedNconfuzed]

If customers are willing to pay that much that way, providers are willing to take the money.
Nobody is forcing customers to get such an array of services. Those willing to put in a little effort and withstand slight inconvenience can pay much.
There is no right to convenient data plans so great as to compel, under threat of imprisonment, providers to concoct such a "universal unlimited" data plan.
Quit being greedy. You want premium variety, you're going to pay thru the nose for it.

Typo

[dazedNconfuzed]

Sorry, make that "pay much less."

Funny...

[TeknoHog]

Since moving from dialup to ADSL, cable and 3G, I've never seen a "limited" data plan here in Finland. You pay a monthly fee for a given speed, and that's it. ISPs usually reserve the right to throttle, but I've only rarely seen it with 3G, never in wired connections.

I currently pay 9.80 euros for the slowest possible 3G, 384/384 kbps. This is actually better than it sounds, since for example a 1M/1M ADSL gives you about 103 kbytes/s max, but 3G uses a different encoding, and this 384 kbps translates to about 55 kbytes/s.

The faster 3G plans are likewise unlimited for a higher monthly fee, but it's probably not worth it, given all the complications with radio networks.

QOS?

[cervo]

I don't know why they can't just use QOS on their own phone network. They could mark the first 2-5 GB of capacity as high priority, and then the rest low priority. With a fair queuing system, the average user who doesn't use that much data would not have the appearance of being slow, just the guy streaming netflix movies all the time. But with buffering, perhaps the play delay would compensate for the saturated network.

Still they do need to upgrade their network somewhat. I mean if it is the age of video and everyone is streaming video (we aren't quite there yet), they are going to need to increase the initial data cap as well as upgrade their network. Also if they get 25% more subscribers, they will need more network capacity. QOS is not the magic answer to never upgrade your network until 2020.....

Re:QOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

QoS is all very well once data has got beyond the first hop, but it's not so easy on the first mile.

For an example of how it works, get a 10Mbps ethernet hub, plug a bunch of PCs into it and have them all try and send data to a server on a switch connected to the hub. Sucks, right? So now for a bit of QoS: try and apply QoS somewhere on the connection between the hub and the server. Guess what? It makes hardly any difference, because high priority data gets trampled on in the unswitched part of the network, and there's nothing you can do about it.

The hub in this scenario is analogous to the wireless last mile, and that's why QoS is so difficult if you don't have 100% control of all the nodes, which will never happen in a public network.

Re:QOS?

[sonicmerlin]

T-Mobile has done this. There are no overage charges anymore on their 3G network. They will simply throttle you after your first 10 GB.

Re:QOS?

[cervo]

But the telecom network is not a public network. It is a private network. ATT could throttle you at each mobile switching center which would keep the traffic down on their network while it goes between the mobile switching centers to its internet gateway.

Re:QOS?

[cervo]

I always say t-mobile seems the better of the wireless carriers. They always seemed to have better customer service, more reasonable prices (the fact that they only make you pay for a subsidized phone if you subsidize one is also cool, ATT/Verizon make you constantly pay a phone subsidy even when the contract expires....). And the fact that they do this to eliminate overage charges shows that they are really pro consumer. Unfortunately their network is incomplete in many areas. Otherwise I would hop to them and not look back (at least until they start ripping me off like ATT/Verizon).

Even the Google Nexus one seems to have 3G problems with t-mobile. Most articles said the ATT one works way better than the t-mobile one without constantly switching to edge speeds. Otherwise even with the smaller t-mobile network I probably would have visited www.google.com/phone, bought my nexus one for $500 and signed up.

Re:QOS?

[kasin]

I don't know why they can't just use QOS on their own phone network. They could mark the first 2-5 GB of capacity as high priority, and then the rest low priority.

You have just reimplemented tiered data plans, as used in Australia and other parts of the world for DSL. Hit the quota, get shaped to 64/128/256 kbit (depending on ISP and plan). High-quota plans cost more, eg: http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/adsl/extreme/pricing/

Re:QOS?

[cervo]

I don't want to limit bit rate, just prioritize people who haven't yet met their cap above you. If the network is not congested you should get full capacity.... You might limit the bit rate of packets getting the highest priority, but the rest should be delivered to the lower priority queue and still get through....

Some people throttle traffic by dropping the occasional TCP packet to cause TCP to reset the sliding windows. This is not QOS.

There is no such thing as "unlimited" data plan

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling something "unlimited" is a marketing ploy. It is not the truth.
The water on the Earth may appear "unlimited" but it is.
The stars in the sky may appear "unlimited" but they are.
"Netflix-Unlimited" is definitely limited. By snail-mail and by your bandwidth.

Local telephone service may appear "unlimited" but it is. Try to make a call on Mother's day. Telephone lines are "oversubscribed", just like internet bandwidth, just like cellular networks. They all promise more than can be delivered and everyone except you seems to know that.

The data plan for your home ISP may appear "unlimited" but it definitely is. It is limited by
a) time - there's only so much time in a month.
b) bandwidth - you can only pull so much data over the time allowed.
c) location - it works at your home and selected outlets (if provided)

Other words for "unlimited" is "all you can eat" or "no overage charges."

If you'd like someone else to provide an "all you can use" data plan, I can provide it for you for $1,000/month. No problem. Let me know. Of course, the locations will be limited - worldwide coverage will cost more and have much lower bandwidth. Sadly, my offering around the world would have to reduce the bandwidth for your home to match what I can provide at the south pole - about 128kbps. Ok?

Mean while in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

In down under, the public here have had metered plans on internet/phones/everything you have telecommunications wise for a very long time. In fact, in 2000, I remember my family having to fork out $1.20 AUS PER HOUR for dialup. We now pay $90 AUS for a 24000 mbs connection (only 3.5 mbs due to shitty connections) for 25 gig of usage, ie uploads and downloads counted. Do you really want to be like ausfailia?

Btw, $1.20 AUS in 2000 would be $3.00 US due to our exchange rate prior to Sep 2001.

What colour?

[Hognoxious]

Molly Wood declares: 'I want to pay once for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose

And what colour pony does she want?

The claims on the article are ridiculous.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

You are paying for bandwidth. "Unlimited" means as much as you can download in a month. A month has ~2592000 Seconds. At, let's say, 2 mbps, you can download ~632 GB per month.
If you have 2 connections with the same characteristics, you can download up to ~1265 GB. I am not defending the ISPs, I am just saying the article is unreasonable. The internet is expensive. If the internet doesn't grow, or if it's not maintained, it dies. There is no central structure, just a lot of peers. Each spends money on laying fiber, buying routers, and administrating that infrastructure. ISPs spend money on the last mile. Then, they sell each other bandwidth. That's it. Real, pure bandwidth means a symmetrical and dedicated CIR connection. ISPs cut that bandwidth, and sell it in a different way. Buying a CIR link with a nice SLA is expensive. ISPs buy those links and sell them in different, cheaper ways. When you pay for an "unlimited" data plan, you are paying for an statistically calculated share of backbone bandwidth, plus the cost of the last mile, administration, etc. You will have to pay for all those costs eventually, one way or another. If you don't want to be metered, or don't want to pay for additional things like tethering, then buy your own real bandwidth and share it however you like.

The real complain here is that ISPs are guilty of false advertising, and people have bought into that false advertising. They truly do believe you can get 10 mbps for 80 bucks a month. Guess what, there is no way you can actually get such a connection. You are paying for a 10mbps asymmetric MIR. A statistically calculated share of bandwidth. Of course, then they wonder why, oh why do they have to pay extra for a few MB on their mobile phone when they already have all the bandwidth in the world on their "unlimited" home broadband.

The real complain here should be that ISPs are just charging way too much for extremely limited services, and that their prices don't scale up nicely. When you want to buy anything better than their usual plans (for example bigger upload bandwidth) they make you pay through the nose. Asking them to drop their prices and to scale up fairly when you want a little bit more is fair. But pretending that bandwidth is a free resource and that you already paid for it in your "unlimited" data plan is ridiculous.

Re:The claims on the article are ridiculous.

[scanman52]

I agree. I like the chaos. Things are changing quickly. There is no one right answer. The one area regulators can help is to provide a consistent yard stick to measure the service. This way I know what I am buying. This is like providing a consistent method to measure MPG for cars. Let me figure out who I want to deal with.

Re:The claims on the article are ridiculous.

[Envy Life]

But pretending that bandwidth is a free resource and that you already paid for it in your "unlimited" data plan is ridiculous.

Not intending to be too picky, but this is mis-statement... someone who is paying for some sort of unlimited data plan is not assuming that bandwidth is free.

What TFA seems to be implying is that ISPs, mobile carriers, TV, etc should be combined, which is the only way to achieve a single plan for multiple points of Internet access. Sure we can go back to the AT&T-owns-all-communications model, but we've been there, and didn't like it.

Re:The claims on the article are ridiculous.

[slifox]

I largely agree with your post, except one little thing:

They truly do believe you can get 10 mbps for 80 bucks a month. Guess what, there is no way you can actually get such a connection.

Actually you CAN get bandwidth that cheap in the datacenter, granted that all the infrastructure is easier to implement than running last-mile lines...

Here are some convenient wholesale numbers from a couple years ago:
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/07/wholesale-internet-bandwidth-prices-keep-falling/

And I personally buy bandwidth for even cheaper, though not as much of it... I buy for roughly $5.50 per Mbps (up to 10Mbps), and though the SLA is not as strong as if I purchased a wholesale connection like an ISP would, it is *effectively* 99.999% reliable and I effectively DO get all the bandwidth I pay for (e.g. if it's oversold, then someone else is subsidizing my bandwidth, because it doesn't seem oversold to me). Not to mention the fact that my cost covers maintenance of the datacenter (power, cooling, security, employees, etc) and their peering...

Re:The claims on the article are ridiculous.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I maintain several VoIP servers (Asterisk) around the world, namely in the US, Brasil and Argentina. I've also had servers in Australia and the UK before. I know the price of bandwidth around the world. It varies greatly. So, yes, if you go near the Texas/Florida area, and you want to get bandwidth straight from the hose, you'll pay a fair price. Now, when you want to get that same bandwidth wireless with coverage anywhere in the world, or you want it delivered to your house, the prices will rise. The last mile is still more expensive, and it'll be that way until we switch from the current scheme to a mesh-like array. Eventually, the distinction between backbone and last mile will dissipate. Until then, you'll pay for your last mile through the nose.

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[Tuzanor]

Don't forget that the carriers would always have full pipes and congestion with a flat "unlimited" plan. Us users are clever enough to find ways to not worry about rationing.

No thanks, on both counts

[Anonymous Coward]

Mobile data is more expensive to deliver than fixed-line data, and the available capacity on the mobile last mile is an order of magnitude less thanon the fixed-line last mile.

As for unlimited plans, given that a small number of users account for the majority of data traffic, giving everyone unlimited plans effectively means the light users subsidising the heavier users.

So data should be charged by the byte, with the charge to the end user having some basis in reality.

Needs to be a Wireless Internet

[Doc Ruby]

The reason we have flat rate data connections for our wired Internet is because the edge of the Internet has competition between ISPs, and because the Internet itself was started as a lot of independent networks cooperating for complete coverage.

But since the time when the Internet started, it has grown to have much less competition at the edges (telcos killed DSL competitors, and broadband is usually at best a cableco/telco duopoly), while the backbones have consolidated to cooperate in a cartel to keep prices high and investment in speed low.

Mobile phone telcos got going right as the Internet corps got into full swing away from that original business model. They were stuck with the legacy of flat-rate Internet (though they're working to get past it), but did everything they could to keep wireless Internet as monopolistic as possible.

If every mobile phone could connect to any wireless network whose frequency the device can transceive on, without special "roaming" charges or plain lockout, the wireless networks would look a lot more like the Internet, and encourage the flat rate pricing. Telcos especially could be set up to bill the device's own company without a special fee, as their entire voice industry has been based on billing the telco of the incoming call when it reaches the recipient, who are usually on different networks. Such a system would be much cheaper to bill at flat rates, instead of charging for each connection, especially from moving vehicles passing through different networks in a single session.

When the wireless "last mile" is operated like the wired Internet, it will be ready for Internet style flat rate billing. But until telcos are forced to share their market of mobile users, they will never operate that way.

Re:How are phone calls, television, and Internet..

[Anonymous Coward]

So you want a return to the heady days of 1995? I'd rather see providers actually expand their networks.

non-sequiter

[v1]

'It's only a matter of time before regulators catch wind of just how many times we're being charged for the exact same thing.'"

Next they'll go after the newspapers, magazines, blogs, radio, and television for all charging me for their services when I should just get it all in unlimited form from one place for one price.

that doesn't even begin to make sense.

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[sonicmerlin]

Funny. I get truly unlimited wireless in Japan for $40/month. Been using it all month for 3 months non-stop- no complaints.

Re:$15 for 200 is to low. 200 is like 1 windows up

[sonicmerlin]

It's estimated AT&T's 3G network costs them $3/GB. http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100215_absolutely_no_wireless_spectrum_shortage_in_2010/

Obviously 3.9G (WiMAX and LTE) are more efficient with spectrum, and true 4G (LTE Advanced and WiMAX 2) blows everything out of the water. So in other words as AT&T's costs to provide bandwidth drop, they have lowered caps and increases prices. Gotta love corporate America.

I want

[Atroxodisse]

This is completely ridiculous. You are paying multiple times for multiple services. Plain and simple. If you really want to solve this problem get rid of all unlimited plans and charge per megabyte. You'll get exactly what you pay for.

And you write for a tech site???

[QuickSilver_999]

Jesus, what a stupid idiot. I won't go into all the different ways this story is full of idiocy, most of the previous posters have covered that all very well. But seriously, if no one at CNET is looking to fire this moron, then the whole site can just go away. I don't think I'll bother reading anything more from them, since they apparently hire trained monkeys to write there reports.

Re:And you write for a tech site???

[Jedi Strke]

Well .... TFA does go off the deep end about wanting to connect landline and cell charges. But, as far as cell data charges, those ARE double or triple billed already. TEXT = DATA. Period. And until the Telcos admit that, I refuse to text on my phone. And only grudgingly accept the handful I get from family/friends a year; which they are billed for sending and I am billed for receiving, Adding the insult of charging extra for tethering, but not allowing for the higher usage that will entail is also double-dipping. Any data that goes through my cell phone should be treated the same, regardless of it being an SMS or destined for my laptop, Maybe metered is the solution. Maybe the buffet is the solution. What AT&T is launching this week is just stupid.

Re:And you write for a tech site???

[QuickSilver_999]

I'm not so sure I agree. By that logic, I pay for a voice line in my house, plus DSL. Should I get phone free with DSL? After all, it's all just data. Voice = text = data. They are all the same, and yet we have traditionally paid different rates for them. I have more issues with cable companies and the outrageous fees they charge for so called premium channels that they still play commercials on!

Sick of it all, but I'm not about to give up my DirecTV... So I guess I'm just a hypocrite. :)

Re:And you write for a tech site???

[Jedi Strke]

The analogy here is that your phone company decides to cut your voice line and instead use Skype through your DSL; but still charges you for the "voice line." If it is truly a separate service, then yes, the company has to pay it's delivery costs somehow. But with text messages on cell phones, the delivery cost is effectively zero for that text message if it's going over the "voice" channel. And in either case, I should NEVER be charged for an INCOMING message unless I have EXPRESSLY agreed to receive that specific message, ala collect calling.

Why do you think Bundles are so poular??

[RobertLTux]

If there was say 3 or 4 ATT sized providers then it would make sense for each one to have a Single Signon so that you could login and receive all the benefits of being a customer of %Network%

need to make a call on your phone?? %Network has a tower in range
close to a %Network wifi hotspot ?? your call will be routed by way of the hotspot
Wanna watch a movie ?? slot your %Network FlashKey type your PIN and go for it

How many of us would pay US$120 to US$$250 a month (depending on how long a contract you want to sign) to get 720 degree data coverage??

Consider TV Schedule Service

[WebManWalking]

You're paying for it if you subscribe to TV Guide. You're paying for it as part of your cable subscription which includes the TV Guide Channel. You're paying for it to make your Tivo, ReplayTV, UltimateTV, other DVR, etc, work. And you're paying for it again for each additional DVR, even though you've already paid for it from the same provider.

What makes this observation a little different is that there's no ownership involved. You talk about cable operators owning the cables, FiOS owning the optical fiber, mobile phone operators owning the towers, Starbucks owning the WiFi router, etc, but in this country (US), at least, you can't own facts. You can protect facts as trade secrets or other privacy protected information, and the government will cooperate with you on that, but you can't own the fact that something happened. That includes the fact that something was put onto the schedule to happen in the future.

I don't see any outrage at all on this topic (being sold the same free, publicly-available information over and over and over again, information that the content providers want to publicize). There's a fertile market for open source competition in this area, I think.

UMG Recordings v. MP3.com

[tepples]

you could just buy it once and then download it again for free, and possibly legally given Fair Use rights. Right?

Not under current U.S. copyright law. See UMG Recordings v. MP3.com .

don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama will save us, have hope, and change, and Obama money!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19v5Kjmc8FI

Some moving in that direction...

[SuperKendall]

The new AT&T plan has a very reasonable $10/GB overage fee for the 2GB/month plan they are offering mobile users.

Alas, the 200MB plan has a very unreasonable $15/200MB overage fee. Though in theory if you notice before your bill you have gone over you can switch to the 2GB plan (so why does it not auto-switch? A mystery).

But anyway, the higher end overage is a much more sane number than has been traditional.

Hahah the regulators are toothless

[BitHive]

You didn't think all that "free markets, small government" stuff was just talk did you?

This is about the future

[jmactacular]

As more and more people ditch their landlines for cell phones for telephone service, eventually, we'll see people making the same calculation with data. Why pay for the same utility twice? I think the first company to consolidate their land-based broadband service into mobile data service where you pay one provider once, will position themselves best for the future.

Re:This is about the future

[jesset77]

I am just failing to wrap my head about what is the complaint in TFA.

Why pay for the same utility twice?

Because... you're buying two things from them. Right? Your buying this thing, and then ohhhhhh you also want that thing. You can get one, you can get the other, they each have a price. You want both.

They each get you to the same internet, but they do it in different ways and have completely separate associated costs behind them. I live on a lake. I like to get groceries from shop on the far side of the lake. I can boat quickly across the lake and back when the weather is good. I can drive the long way around the lake when the weather is bad or I have other stops to make away from the lake. You know what? I have to purchase and maintain a car, and then I have to purchase and maintain a boat too if I really want to do both of these things at my discretion.

If I'm a cheapskate, I might only drive the car if I don't mind the long commute for every single grocery run. Am I going to die from the inconvenience? Or simply not have a shiny boat to show off to the neighbors?

Internet users can choose to do all of their surfing or telephoning from home, fast and tethered. Or they can choose to do all of their surfing and telephoning over a mobile device, slower and possibly capped, but untethered. (Hell, they're capping home internet these days too..) Neither of these choices will kill you, it just gives you less to brag about to your neighbors and requires that you act with discretion and patience instead of always having the best of both worlds every second of the day.

If they want speed at home and flexibility on the go, they'll have to pay to maintain both the wired and the wireless pipes. It doesn't matter if one company is maintaining each pipe for you, or you have a different company for each pipe. Why would that matter? If I buy both a boat and a car from the same dealership should I get the package deal for the same price as just the car? Should every Car come with a free Boat now, on the off chance you might want one?

A dealer will sell me the boat, sell me the car, and I'd be damned lucky just to get a volume discount for bringing the extra business.

That's why I don't get this article. "Why are you paying two times for internet? I want to pay One Time!" Well, I'm sorry to hear that, I think you lack imagination. *I* want to pay zero times. You know what scratch that, I want to pay negative one times. It would make a nice little side business if someone paid me for the privilege of piping me data. Help pay for my damned Boat, doncha know. ;P

Sure...

[okmijnuhb]

It's like going to the "all you can eat" buffet, and getting yourself two orders.

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[GravityStar]

You don't need an enclosure for every drive. Just one hot-swap enclosure.

There you go, the floppy disk is dead, long live your stack of 2TB hard disks.

I want that data to be unlimited

[nurb432]

And we want some of whatever it is you are smoking :) While it would be nice and logically should be that way, that isn't where the world is heading. Now that people are 'hooked' on data they are going to milk us dry.

No limits, no borders

[robbievienna]

Unlimited would be great... unfortunately most people forget the most ubiquitous limit: borders. All plans are limited as soon as you cross an international border. There are lots of world travellers who want a low-cost single provider solution. I want something to cover me in New York and Paris and Abu Dhabi.

Re:A universal plan wouldn't be difficult to deliv

[tepples]

There you go, the floppy disk is dead

But what replaces the floppy disk for giving somebody a physical copy of a digital work? DVD+R?

..only matter of time before regulators catch on..

[MoeDrippins]

... and keep allowing it. The telco lobbies will make sure of that.

Forced data plans

[Enrique1218]

The real problem is not that Americans pay twice for internet access. Americans are being forced to pay twice for internet access. Smartphone customers should not have to pay for a data plan just to own the phone. They shouldn't have to do it if their land based internet with wifi is sufficient. I suspect that smartphones will replace simple cell phones soon and more customers will be forced to buy the plans. Now, if people want both unlimited access at home and some access anywhere else, let them pay for it. I suspect that there is a significant market for telcos to provide a service and make a profit. Consumers should be able to choose how much internet they want for their devices. My concern is that this decision is made in a board room.

Outsourcing regulation

[tepples]

Those are contractual agreements between publisher and middleman covered under contract law.

Someone who buys a console and jailbreaks it is privy only to the agreement between the owner of the particular console and the store, not to the standard publishing agreement.

To refer to [DMCA-enforced cartels] as [regulation] is like referring to homicide laws as regulating murder.

Yes, the government regulates murder. It expressly permits some premeditated homicides, such as capital punishment and killing enemy soldiers. And regulation doesn't become no longer regulation if it's outsourced to a cartel. Just ask the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which outsources a lot of monetary regulation to the (private) Federal Reserve System.

Re:Outsourcing regulation

[mikkelm]

In your attempt to stretch a dictionary definition well beyond how it applies to the use of the word in this situation, you left out the last bit of my post.

The definition of the term as used simply does not apply.

AGREED

[Anonymous Coward]

Example: Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Oracle, and others will be lining up to support legislation to regulate the software industry in a heavy handed way, and any opposition will be for public consumption.

The net effect will be that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Oracle keep on living fat and happy.

But the so called regulation will just be a dagger to the back of every small and medium sized software company.

In this scenario, the biggies would make sure that NOBODY could release software without warranty, and without jumping through numerous hoops.

The sheeple who clamored for this bullshit, will declare success.

The sheeple squawked (idiots), and so politicians knee jerked (idiots), and the largest companies' legal & lobbying teams (not idiots) stepped up to the plate to seize a golden opportunity.

And it always works.

Always.

Even when the sheeple think they're getting something, be it the illusion of cleaner air, or a bit more perceived service, or fairness, or security.

Someone else got something far greater in return.

History lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a lot of people forget that internet access in the US used to be metered by the hour. "Unlimited" plans aren't unlimited badnwidth or unlimited number of bytes, they're unlimited time. That is every month you can be sending/receving data 24/7. However the promisces about how fast and how much data you can send in a month are very different and not anywhere near unlimited.

This made sence when some plans were $X/hr pay for your usage monthly, and others were $X/month with "unlimited" access. Now that the pay per hr plans are extinkt people have forgotten what "unlimited" means in context and think it means something it doesn't.

Of coarse the ISPs can't reword their plans either because people don't want to go from "unlimited" to "limited" so here we are victums of marketing.

Re:Still same costs

[SQLGuru]

Get yourself a 4G MiFi device and take your connection with you. You don't need a cell PHONE. You need a cellular network data connection. Voice Over MiFi. At home? Your MiFi is docked for power and your devices all run through that. On the road? Your "phone" and laptop and iPad and Kindle and Nintendo DS and and and all connect via the MiFi.

One data plan to rule them all.

You *might* want to have a second MiFi for your house so that you can SlingBox your TV shows, but with so much of it going online now, you could probably just get by with Hulu and Netflix streaming.

Texting.

[DarthVain]

You could also ask the question, "Why the fuck do I have to by extra for texting, when I am already paying for a data plan?".

5000-7000% markup is why.

An even better question could be, "Why the hell is there 5000-7000% markup on text message data in a competitive free market economy?".

Indeed.