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T-Mobile Joins the Capped Data Bandwagon
NicknamesAreStupid writes "It looks like T-Mobile is following the lead of Verizon and AT&T in shifting from unlimited data plans to tiered pricing. It starts with their family plans which may be cheaper than unlimited depending on your family's usage. Was this done for its customers' families or for its future parent, AT&T?"
Is that while "capped", you're not shut off on the 2GB/mo or higher plans, simply throttled to "2G" speeds once you reach your monthly allotment.
$ man woman *
-bash:
Was this done for its customers' families or for its future parent, AT&T?
You really need to ask? This was done for profits whether AT&T acquires them or not.
After caps, comes filtering.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
They are bought by AT&T. It was going to happen sooner or later. It just turns out that it is sooner rather than later.
You got the touch!
They always had a 5GB Cap, so all this "They are not longer unlimited, they are now 2/5/10GB caps" is misleading -- you're actually getting a middle-man choice now...
Before most carriers went from 100/200MB to 5GB(aka ""Unlimited""), nothing in the middle. You paid either $15 or $30/month for ~200MB/5GB respectively. At least now the options are more like 200MB/1GB/2GB/5GB/++ with a better price structure.. And I do like that T-Mobile doesn't charge extra for going over.
But the plans were not really unlimited to begin with.
Yes, it's "giving up", but I think it's better to have T-Mobile's kind of capping (where speed gets reduced) than a nice little surprise on your bill with per-GB (or whatever the "over the bucket" bucket size is). It means your bill stays predictable, which is what most users want. If it's slow, it's not a problem for most users, annoying, but not a problem
Hyperom.com
I am willing to bet a lot of people would prefer to replace their Cable, DSL, Fiber with a Cell connection, if it were affordable enough. 3G is fast enough for most browsing.
Cell phones got popular when they removed the extra fees like roaming costs and free long distance calling. Now it seems like they forgot about this with overly expensive data plans with caps. Even if it is cheaper people don't like caps,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You misspelled collusion...
There is no competition in this business...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
so much for their "Truly Unlimited" ad campaign....
it's like a car rental company saying..."yea...unlimited miles" except they forget to tell you they meant "unlimited miles of walking"
is not collusion, but a desire to force the issue with content providers over who pays for high bandwidth services. As services, such as video streaming, become more common networks will become more heavily loaded and the cell phone companies will need to invest things that can keep data flowing. They, off course, don't want to make that investment just to keep money flowing to content providers. So, they need to find a way to shift the costs to the content providers and eventually the users.
By capping data, they can lessen the uptake of these services since people won't what to pay overages. By lessoning the uptake, they slow the growth of the content companies which means they are worth less, giving them a vested interest in figuring out a way to share revenue to pay for the pipe. They'll charge the consumer more, pay an access fee and the cell phone companies are happy. You might think the content providers would be mad - but that also creates a barrier to entry since new companies would need to pony up cash before they have subscribers, making it hard to offer free or low cost services since they customer would find them to use bandwidth were the big players are "free from usage charges."
In the end, it comes down to money. The cell phone companies don't what to be freeway on which content providers gore rich - they want a slice of the pie and by controlling the last mile, they have some leverage.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is a con job. These are the same companies that want to charge you a fortune for limited texting.
Nothing screams "reptile brained monkeys" like human greed. Our system takes greed and puts it on steroids and attempts to hose every living creature for every drop of worth they can for the least amount in exchange. Yes, I remember being burned for 25 cents on up per minute to use POTS. It was like we were all dumb enough to pay them for the "magic call box", they did it as long as they could. And everyone cheers them on and wants to be just like them. It's like being born and raised in Hell, you don't know any better.
My idea is NetFlicks is putting the major burn to every cable company and their cronies want the hammer dropped on them in any avenue possible. Imagine how great it is to be able to just watch your awesome little phone like a TV? Better than "TV" because you can watch WTF you want, when you want it. But this isn't about you getting what you want or even pay for. This is about you being a good little zombie and being farmed for all that you are worth. They want to continue making a fortune off of you from their old tech that has already made them fortunes. That's the bitch about corporations, they can be owned and orchestrated from higher up. This means the entire landscape can be orchestrated to farm us all. This is where the irony is so fucking thick it would kill if it was comedy. All of this happens in "land of the free". Hey, fuckers, you are anything but free.
The only problems we ever see is the want-to-be hive mind of the corporate hydra having internal conflict with its own stupidity. Once it sorts things out, it sics its toady pet governments into action to enforce their will. There is no legitimate excuse for WTF they do with this issue, they are just testing the waters to see how far they can plunge it into us. Its like gasoline prices. They find out just how far they can press the issue before the lemmings become restless.
IT is a tricky crowd to nail down in economic oppression and totalitarianism, you put the squeeze to them, they invent new ways to burn you back. Its best to wait for them to make products that the lemmings can't live without and nail the zombies. They will squeeze the zombies until they cry, then squeeze them until they shut up.
These caps are just the beginning, don't expect to change it, except for the worse. It time to milk the zombies.
Don't think so? Gasoline shouldn't be more than 25 cents a gallon. Seriously, I watched this happen over the years. Who the fuck do they think they are trying to fool? You can't fool everyone all the time. Gas was 25 cents a gallon and there wasn't a shortage. There never was a fucking shortage, nor probably ever will there be a real shortage in even our grandkid's lives. Its all about manipulation of idiot lemmings. They found out we are all dependent enough, and stupid enough to pay whatever they charge for gas, so here we are at $4 a gallon instead of 25 cents.
Take the Red Pill.
Although I am not a lawyer, there would seem to be an issue concerning the sale of "unlimited" plans, if there is a data cap on them. I know when I signed up with T-Mobile I went for the unlimited option and was assured that unlimited meant just that, unlimited. There was no mention of a data cap. By quietly imposing a data cap on so-called 'unlimited' plans, it would appear that T-Mobile are playing rather fast and lose with Federal law. In particular, The Uniform Commercial Code, Section 2-313 (2) states that,
"(a) Any affirmation of fact or promise made by the seller which relates to the goods and becomes part of the basis of the bargain creates an express warranty that the goods shall conform to the affirmation or promise.
(b) Any description of the goods which is made part of the basis of the bargain creates an express warranty that the goods shall conform to the description."
So, why are T-Mobile not in violation of these provisions?Are there any legal types who can explain how this can be legitimate?
Rather than just passively saying "Oops, you went over your data limit, we'll automatically give you more and charge you for it", they just switch you to 2G data speeds if you hit your limit. Cell companies have been looking for "we'll give you enough rope to hang yourself" opportunities at every turn ("oh, gee, you didn't know your kid was sending hundreds of messages and downloading porn at $1.00 per kilobyte until the gigantic bill showed up at the end of the month?") and it's nice to see one of them giving you a NICE way out instead of using data overages as another way to screw you.
Now, if carriers would just quit charging me once for the bits, and again for sending them to another device (tethering), I'd be REALLY happy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Voice doesn't have the same issue in general. People physically can not say on the phone talking ALL THE TIME. If nothing else, they sleep at some point, but in reality, people do many things besides dedicate themselves to a phone call. Phone calls also use a pretty insignificant amount of data thanks to modern compression technics.
Phones with apps that continually do stuff in the background or play full motion acceptable resolution video on the other hand can continually put a large load on the network without the owner of the device being in any way involved with the process. Hell, I burned through a 2g iPad data plan the other day just because I turned the volume down on iheartradio and left work without noticing ... so it switched from wifi to cellular and proceeded to rapidly eat away the data while it was laying covered on my coffee table and I played video games and slept.
Networks treated voice badly years ago, when they didn't have capacity for it really, now that they've built out, voice is pretty easy for them to handle at essentially no cost and it makes them a fortune, more than data for most people.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They always had a 5GB Cap
It's a weird sort of cap. Once you hit it, they throttle your connection to stupidly slow speeds.
Which is funny, since on my "4G" phone in Boston, most of the time I'm lucky to get 10-20KB/sec because all the backhauls are grossly underspec'd.
In Davis Square in Somerville, I'll get several megabits a second. In Roslindale (Boston)? I'm lucky to break 100kbit, yet my phone proudly displays a "4G" icon and full signal strength.
Please help metamoderate.