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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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.

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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?

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.

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]

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.

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).

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.

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.....

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: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?

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.