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Data Hogs: the Monsters Carriers Created
jfruhlinger writes "A recent study claimed that the top 1 percent of mobile data users eat up half of the available bandwidth. But assuming it's true, who's at fault? Stats show data usage has increased radically with each new model of the iPhone, and similar phenomena are in place for Android phones — all of which are gleefully sold to the public by the same people who complain about 'data hogs.' Isn't this the equivalent of a car dealer heavily promoting Cadillacs, then complaining about poor fuel efficiency, then charging a ton for extra gasoline?"
I think the idea is to slowly promote an idea that caps and traffic shaping are good for the vast majority of customers.
Save the bad car analogies for the comments.
The top X% of any distribution is always going to consume some "large" number Y. I bet the top 1% of income earners earn 80% of all income. The top 1% of book readers probably read 80% of all books. And I bet the top 1% of slashdot posters live in 80% of all basements.. it's just basic math. Whenever there's a distribution.. well, some people will do a lot, and some a little.
Who would have guessed that consumers would actually use their data plan?
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A US friend of mine boasts of going into the hundreds of gigs on his mobile plans, because he can, when we in Australia are stuck on 1, 3, maybe 10gb plans at the most. As a user of one of those 'data hogging' iPhones, it certainly uses more mobile data than my previous nokias (1-2gb now, compared to a few hundred mb) that's a ridiculously huge scale difference between the increase of the iPhone in natural use over phones before it, and those who'd *bittorrent* from their phones just because they can.
>But assuming it's true, who's at fault?
Oh its the Internet users. Its always the 1% that are the hogs and the poor Internet providers must provide data caps to make their oversold lines work for the rest.
Cry me a fucking river. Maybe just maybe don't sell your packages when you now your network wont handle them.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Doin what? Until you answer that you're just spinning wheels.
Is there some kind of spam sending virus out there? That would make sense and you could hope they'll fix it.
Are they spending a lot of time at websites? More than 10 or maybe 15 years ago now, Akamai fixed that, maybe the mobiles need that?
Is it one specific app, like google maps?
Is it tethering people trying to run an entire disaster recovery site over a phone?
Does it really matter? Supposedly 1% of the population, that being teen girls, made up most of the call volume at one time. So?
How does their battery survive this intense use? My new android phone barely lives thru the day with light use, so they must be living on a charger?
Why are they "monsters"? What a weird way to describe human beings. That means I should use my leet skyrim skills and cast an ice spear at them, right?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Occupy Verizon?
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Yes, it is like selling a fuel-wasting car and then forcing the consumer to purchase fuel from you and only you. And advertising the fuel inefficiency as a feature. And rationing the fuel and switching from unlimited fuel to rationed fuel... ok maybe the analogy breaks down somewhere around there.
The carriers want their cake, that is selling phones with data-heavy features that people love, and they want to eat it too: i.e. not expanding their network with all the profits they are making in order to handle the load from the phones they just sold. Greedy bastards. The solution would be to create some genuine competition instead of the cartel-like operation we have in the US right now, but the barrier to entry is so high that is next to impossible. Maybe some government regulation might even be in order (much as I usually hate such things), given that these companies often have what amounts to a government-granted monopoly on certain EM spectra.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
1% uses 50%. Does the top 20% use 80%?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That is a poor analogy. An auto dealer isn't too concerned about fuel efficiency; the customer is. The auto-dealer also doesn't complain about the price of gas when selling a vehicle; the customer is. There's too many people at work here to blame it all on the dealer: auto maker, transportation costs (gas companies, getting the car from the factory - from Mexico, Japan, etc), emission laws, taxes, etc.
With the phone it's mostly the same thing, except we have the users to blame for downloading a Hi-Def 3hr long movie to a 3.5" screen.
According to the stats, 3G Modems account for 26 times more data usage than the baseline (iPhone 3G), and nearly 10 times more data usage than the next biggest consumer device (iPhone 4S for downlink). "3G Modems" don't count as phones, at least not in my book. That would either be tethering, running a phone as a wifi hotspot, or a dedicated hotspot device.
So these are probably people that don't have broadband service and use 3G for the home connectivity, or people that constantly travel. My uncle just set something up like this a couple weeks ago - they have no other options for broadband at their home, and even had to use a DSS dish as a signal reflector to be able to get 3G service because they are so remote (the dish was my idea, seemed to work good).
Better known as 318230.
I think a more valid comparison would be if a dealer sold that Cadillac for a fixed monthly price including gas. You pay the same amount, but some people use more gas than others - assuming we're talking about an unlimited plan. They see the top 1% of data users as people who leave the car running in neutral in the drive way with a brick on the gas.
I go back and forth how I feel about this. I see friends that watch netflix videos on their phones (even when they're around wifi) and I see the carriers point. I don't do much streaming and my data comes in at about 800-1000 mb / month - so I'm fine with my 2 gig plan. However, with a tiered plan (2gb + 1gb/ 10$ as mine is) I think the carriers lose their right to complain because the people are paying for their consumption. (And with Sprint, you're pretty much limited by the fact that you're on sprint... I'd have a hard time pulling an abusing amount of data on their network in my area.)
Instead of the telcos wringing their hands in front of Congress saying how much their users are hurting them by using services that the customers paid for, in efforts to justify additional fees, I'd rather them get a government grant/loan for added infrastructure. This essentially is what China is doing with China Mobile. The telco gets infrastructure grants, China gets a top class infrastructure that can handle communications needs. Both benefit.
Today's data hogs are tomorrow's average users. What do you expect when *every* new electronic device is coming out connected to something (watches, cars, refrigerators, you name it in addition to the usual standbys), carriers are pushing smartphones and advertising fast new networks and new apps? You have smart TVs and a half dozen connected set top boxes just in the living room. Netflix comes on everything. The industry is pushing always available all-you-can-consume content, then at the same time complaining that people are consuming too much. Sigh...and then you get "solutions" of tiered traffic and data caps and throttles. But what happens when the early adopters of today become the normal users? Is every person who watches Netflix streaming or downloads movies and TV from iTunes or Amazon or streams Pandora the 1 percent of data users?
Seems I've heard that somewhere before ...
Dog is my co-pilot.
The user is responsible.
I torrented all six seasons of the Sopranos in 720p over my phone.
Why? Tethering was easier than running a cable.
As much as data caps might crimp my style, it isn't fair to expect minimal users to subsidize me forever.
Usage-based billing also creates a powerful incentive to push users to connect to WiFi at home and in the office. Cell bandwidth is limited, so it makes sense for everyone to offload to WiFi, where available. People with unlimited data might not bother. Those who worry about a cap will have a reason to respect the network's finite capacity.
The carriers aren't without malice. They are certainly money grubbing. All I'm saying is users are not always the poor, downtrodden victim.
When the average cost to transfer a gigabyte of data is below 5 cents - http://business.financialpost.com/2011/02/05/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost/ - I don't buy all these complaints from carriers about customers using huge amounts of data, especially since the typical "unlimited" (heh) data plan costs $30/month. At that rate, a customer would have to transfer 600 gigabytes of data in a given month to equal the raw cost of that bandwidth to the carrier.
Now, admittedly, that is based on the raw cost of bandwidth, and, of course, other factors come into play in figuring the cost of delivering that data, but the point is that carriers are, without question, earning money hand over fist with the current rates they are charging. I mean, we also have carrier CEOs admitting that the cost of bandwidth has little to do with the cost of services - http://stopthecap.com/2011/07/28/time-warner-ceo-bandwidth-costs-are-not-terribly-relevant-to-broadband-pricing.
No, these common refrains from the carriers are due to nothing more than them wanting to have their cake and eat it, too. They don't want to upgrade their infrastructure to support the bandwidth capabilities today's customers are demanding, but they still want to justify charging the rates they do whilst continuing to advertise "unlimited" data plans. So how do they go about doing that? Blame any and all bandwidth problems on "data hogs".
Again, I'm not buying it.
Who cares about total usage? What is the percentage of the network that is being used? If the network is 10% loaded and 1% of the users use 80% of the 10%, who cares? If the network is 100% loaded, then I might care.
I've been first time shopping for a cell phone. It has been a nightmare. You can't pick a phone and then pick a plan. You have to pick a plan, then pick one of the phones that that particular provider carries. It's completely backwards. I don't (to use a car analogy) pick a fuel provider and then choose from the cars they sell.
I've lost pretty much all respect for the telecommunications industry. It should be cut in half, separating the provisioners from the content providers. One company runs the cable and another provides the tv channels. One runs the wire, and another provides the dial tone. One runs the fiberoptics, another provides the internet. One provides the cellular network, another provides the phones for it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Really.
I find article by New York Times much easier to read: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/technology/top-1-of-mobile-users-use-half-of-worlds-wireless-bandwidth.html
You have to pay attention to the fact this talks of *global* mobile users. That includes, for instance those hundreds of millions in Africa that don't have a data contract of any kind. In addition to not having data contracts, they use calls very sparingly. They have to. Western countries are relatively small portion of mobile subscribers when it comes to subscriber count, although they certainly form a big piece of the global operator profits pie. Data users, in general, are even better, and even a large portion of westerners either don't use or don't pay for data.
NYTimes mentions Finland as a country with considerably higher data usage than the European average. I live in Finland. Yet, operators have shown only miniscule interest towards traffic shaping or bandwidth caps. I guess it's a question of having working competetive landscape, and building your network to serve the customers...
No you pay the same as others but try to use a US data plan there and then it's rape time.
"A recent study claimed that the top 1 percent of mobile data users eat up half of the available bandwidth." No it didn't. It said that the top 1% download half of the total data downloaded. There's a big difference.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
First it's "You're holding it wrong", now it's "You're holding it too much." I just want to masturbate dammit!
...oh wait, what were we talking about?
If you look at that study, it appears that 3G modems are the real culprit - unsurprisingly, since they can be used as a broadband replacement in areas where landlines aren't available. It's not really the phone users who are the heaviest, probably the people using a 3G dongle with a router. I quote:
Uplink data volumes:
3G Modems (various): 2654%
HTC Desire S: 323%
iPhone 4S: 320%
Downlink data volumes:
3G Modems (various): 2432%
iPhone 4S: 276%
Samsung Galaxy S: 199%
Then the "standards" people are offering more and more diverse and duplicate scripting and plugins to make web page sizes explode beyond reason.
http://www.httparchive.org/interesting.php ; IMO we should STOP with the 'new' web technologies and just focus on making things 'standard and efficient'. But then of course without new tech, there would eventually be no new security holes or new products to flog, requiring new hardware to run at speeds we use to get with the old stuff... and rinse and repeat... Anyone for a game of Duke Nukem 3D?
Google restore a backup from 1999 plz.
The data on that site cannot be believed. You need a independent third party to do the research.
http://www.arieso.com/customers-partners.html
2. Then they continued to try and use the word unlimited while they limited stuff. NO. Lying is not allowed.
3. They need to be honest and advertise three things: A "Peak Speed" for first x data/month. B "Reduced speed for rest of y data/month. C. Price.
4. Once you list these things then consumers can make real judgements - both the high end data hogs and the average user.
But they don't want to do that. They would rather keep everything nebulous and get clients by who picks the better advertising campaign instead of better service.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Does this mean Occupy is gonna have to protect the internet from those corporate finance types using up all the downloads?
we in Australia are stuck on 1, 3, maybe 10gb plans at the most
I really don't get why carriers in the US don't use this sort of a model. I am on a 1.5 gb plan with optus, and it is more than enough for my phone, and for my laptop (I use my phone to wifi tether). There isn't ever really anything that I want to do using my phone that will use up more data than that.
If I want to update drivers or files, I generally do it at home, not on the move. The only thing I really use data for is email/browsing on my laptop, the phone is also email or the occasional map when driving. Aside from that, I do all my serious stuff at home. It isn't because of a low data plan, it is simply because if I am out and about, the last thing I am thinking of is torrent files, distro updates or any other data heavy application.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I remember back on 2003, when I worked at a company developing mobile applications (in BREW if you are interested) and everyone was talking about what would be the next big thing in mobile, the operators were looking for other sources of revenue and were betting that the money will be in selling aggregated services (meaning selling other things than calls). One of the big things was data, and they used to check data usage very closely and were very happy about it. back then I coded a simple ringtone download app (that basically had only funny sounds), that browsed trough categories and let you hear it and finally buy it so you could set it as a ringtone. Because people could just hear a full preview of the ringtone they wouldn't buy as much, they would just use it to hear funny sounds and laugh with friends, no need to buy it, if you wanted to hear it again just open the app again. the thing is that the preview didn't save the file to disk until you buy it, it downloaded from the server and played from memory, so the app used a lot of network. While it consumed almost nothing for today's standard, it was a lot back then. If I remember correctly the download speed was something like 14.400bps, that was before gprs. What I wanted to say is that it was a network hog. But they didn't complain, the execs from the phone operator were very happy and they loved the app exactly because it was using a lot of network, more then they ever saw before. of course on the other hand they sold network usage by the kb, no one ever dreamed of unlimited back then. but I believe the main reason was that it meant that their bet on selling aggregated services was right, data usage was indeed growing as they expected but now that it has they are complaining. the same way that they accepted 9 years ago that call minutes and sms were eventually going to be sold cheap (in bulk or on a flat rate for unlimited) and found new ways of making money (selling data and apps) they should once again innovate
The correct analogy is selling all you can eat meal plans and then complain that a few of them eat too much. If you insist on Cadillac and car analogies, it is like selling unlimited free fuel and then complain people actually drive up and fill up lots of fuel.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They want to market these features but hope people only impulse buy them for the novelty. God forbit if you actually start to use it on a regular basis.
They want you to buy it because it's cool, forget about it because it's complicated, and never use it while paying for your 3 year term dataplan.
The problem is a lot of people don't use the features they buy, and the phone companes LOVE that. So then they get mad when there's people who actually do use the service since the pie chart isn't a greedily big like when people buy extended warranties.
That's right, this is just as bad as if they offered extending warranties and starting QQing really hard when people started making claims.
Most major cellular phone issues would disappear if we completely separated the phones from the contracts and let people swap carriers on a month-to-month basis. It would be great if the FCC would force cellular providers to separate a bill into the network connection bill and the phone loan. This would force the phone companies to compete on price and service rather than locking people into contracts
Almost all the phones out there, including iPhones and Androids and even Windows phones have the ability to open a socket and leave it open until it times out (15 to 18 minutes later) to detect when there is something to send, (an email arrived, a message, etc). Apple use the Microsoft method and expanded it big time in their push technology to prevent polling by several apps for multiple email accounts, etc. Google, Apple, Microsoft all support some form of this for email, calendar, and messages.
Unfortunately, the Facebook crowd can't live with out knowing instantly when someone updates a page in some dank part of the inter-tubes, and therefore many apps poll. Bandwidth has become so reliable that nobody bothers deploying push technology if they can avoid it. People want instant weather, news, stock quotes, etc, and its just easier for these software developers to poll for this data while the phone sleeps in your pocket.
Add to this carriers tracking your phone's position without your knowledge. Several carriers sell this service to their customers for tracking family members. Then there is the whole Carrier IQ debacle. Its hard to know how much data this really pushes, but I suspect it is small.
But most of the traffic is stuff that customers specifically ask for. They want the Facebook updates. They want the weather. And they insist on using pop mail accounts that don't support IMAP Idle and therefor have to poll for messages every few minutes.
Server side services, search, SIRI, are also growing in popularity, but again this is by user request. You don't have to strut around asking what your calendar looks like instead of tapping an icon.
So I don't thing the Carriers are guilty here of much beyond offering what their customers want in terms of connectivity.
The problem here is that the Carriers realize just HOW MUCH the customers want this, and are currently in that phase of their business plan where they are milking it for all they can, pretending there is a bandwidth shortage, and applying caps and tiers to maximize revenue. I suspect it is mostly to prevent calls via Voip from being cost effective, and to hold down those people who tether an entire household to a single 3g phone. We've seen this all before. Just about the time the bitch level raises high enough to attract regulatory attention things will become free again. Just like long distance calls. Just like text messaging.
Its a passing phase. As soon as LTE is as widely deployed as 3G today, carriers will stop selling minutes and just sell you bandwidth, and you will make calls over the net. Voip and sip will go from being virtually banned to mandatory.
Then prices will come down as tiers will expand, and they can launch the next phase of artificial shortages and over charging for what ever feature is next to strike the fancy of consumers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
1% might seem small to some, but it's not.
Think of all the people you know who have a phone. How many people do you know that don't have a cellphone VS people you do. How many people do you have on your facebook or whatever.
For every 100 people, 1 of those is a bigger data user (who knows, maybe it's you).
Let's say that in a large city, 1,000,000 people have smartphones. That means that 10,000 of those people are considered *heavy* users. This isn't one-in-a-million people, it's ten-thousand-in-a-million... which is still quite a lot of users.
More expensive hardware? More usage on the existing lines? Is it really that much? Where does the big expense actually come from?
a chance to flap our arms around like chickens and pretend we're someone special for a minute or two.
fricking bots... doesn't this stuff qualify as spam yet?
follow the money, follow the school, follow 'them'!!!
On Verizon if you have an unlimited Data plan they will throttle you if you go over 2gb in a congested area for 2billing cycles.
There is a lot of unused bandwith in some areas, and it is crowded in other areas. You cannot just sum it up, because this would mean "when your net is slow, move to a place, where noone else is using the net, then you can use the available bandwidth there". Its just Bullshit, to see it that way.
Traditionally, the cell companies have offered unlimited nights and weekends. They could use the same concept for mobile broadband. Periods of low network utilization should not count against the caps. This would encourage people to shift their data usage to the off-peak times and that in turn would save the carrier money by eliminating the need to add capacity.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
First, the gas you put into your car isn't typically sold by the company from which you bought your car.
Second, you pay per for gas on a per unit basis and not at a flat rate.
So, no, it's not equivalent.
These idiots need to stop selling "unlimited" because there is no such thing. Even an all you can eat buffet isn't unlimited, it's limited to what you can eat. There is no such thing as "unlimited" anything, especially bandwidth. They need to specify maximum download rate, in terms of bytes per second as well as bytes per months. T-Mobile specifies their bandwidth is limited to 2GB per month (for my cheap plan) and I am very happy with that. Knowing that I have X amount of bytes is better than thinking there is no wall and running into a wall the hard way. Avoid like the plague anything that claims to be "unlimited" because it is a blatant lie.
...and 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
Probably uses 99.99999% of capacity! Cap them! Throttle them! Firebomb their frickin' villages!
What? They are paying you? Oh, nevermind.
They just want you to buy them, not use them, for Pete's sake. You're supposed to act like a virus and show it off to your friends so that they'll go buy one, too, and that's not supposed to leave you any time to actually play with it. Now back to work!
This topic comes up often, and it seems like the only thing people are interested in is having carriers stop using the word "unlimited" in their marketing. But for all the outrage, for the great majority of people doing the complaining, "unlimited" plans actually are unlimited from a functional sense. I'd much rather have carriers use a word that's up to interpretation than have them set strict limits which will then lead to outrageous fee hikes when normal usage moves upwards and that 2GB/mo "premium" plan is no longer so awesome.
Maybe instead of out-and-out throttling the top users, maybe there should be some means by which their traffic could be de-prioritized so that the smaller users, when requesting something, don't feel like the network is saturated. Let's put it this way: if the bandwidth is available, then sure, let those top 1% use whatever they can. But other people who are paying the same rate for unlimited access shouldn't have their access limited by the abusers just because they're using less data.
This way, carriers can watch the moving target of the top 1% (bleeding edge) to determine where usage is going and how they want to adjust for it in time for the top 20% (cutting edge) to get there, and well ahead of the mainstream and late adopter crowds, without changing their marketing, and without setting strict limits which will be outdated in six months.
If you're against the use of the word "unlimited", you should be apoplectic at the abuse of the word "free". And "guaranteed". And "genuine". And "open". And all sorts of things.
The CB App. What's your 20?
My first month I was throttled, I got the “you are reaching 5%” text the day after the first time I ever used Netflix.
A week later I used Netflix again, and I was throttled the next day. (this was at 3.1GB) Next billing cycle I was back to normal but got my first warning at 3.7GB and throttled at 4.2GB
This last billing cycle was right around the same.
However, my sister – and we live together, have the exact same billing cycle. She this month got the “you are reaching 5%” text at 2.1GB – the day after steaming from HULU.com
That’s right, I got my first warning at 3.7GB and she got hers at 2.1GB – we live in the same house, and have the same account!
There is lots of talk about AT&T being aggressive to all Netflix, hulu, and slingbox users (check xda etc) wehre as if you don’t use the services, they will still throttle you, but not as fast.
I think its funny how i got a warning at 3.7gb and my sister at 2.1gb - all because of hulu
..and 1% of Americans are taking all the money, but the media somehow sees that as just a feature of the system.
I suggest a new article: US Wireless companies can't keep up with technology, demand users limit service usage instead of innovating.
...and 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
Well, for that time and place, 640K was enough. For me at the moment, 1.5 Gb is plenty. Unless the internet changes and getting my news or email changes from reading a few hundred Kb of text to only being available via a HD presentation, 1.5Gb will stay more than enough. I don't use voice commands much, so no large wav file uploads, if I download photos, it is via a USB to my laptop. To be honest, I prefer to have things in a text format anyhow. I don't need earphones or a speaker to listen to it, I can flick past things I don't care about, or I can re-read a sentance without having to input any commands to skip back in a video.
For me, 1.5Gb WILL be enough, and for a long time yet. If one of the sites that I frequent changes to a video format, chances are that I won't be visiting that site any longer.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Look, there is no throughput shortage, at least in fiber. Maybe some wireless spectrum is literally jammed packed and "golly we just don't have anymore or other spectrum we could use or any other alternatives... just running out folks!" .
I'll let people who know comment on that ;)
Somehow I doubt it's ultimately much different than the situation we have with fiber now.
In general, throughput is not a natural resource like oil or gas for which the amount can be said to be finite in any meaningful way.
We can create more fiber throughput at will, and whats more, we could being to use the copious, in fact, excess amount of fiber optic that exists now :
from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576256541491117496.html
A decade or so ago I happened upon a booklet (at B and N no less) that outlined, in extremely frank language, that the way for cable providers to increase their profits without having to create value or increase investment was to create an artificial "shortage" of bandwidth by establishing a tiered system of throughput for which access to the upper tier was subject to bidding .
In this way, profits could be increased not through reaching more customers or even improving service.
Is this different than what Enron was doing when they were blacking out the West Coast by creating a "shortage" of electricity? Is this not the same sociopathic personality types and the same "captains of industry" doing what they do best- lying, manipulating consumers and scheming to increase profits without adding value?
Just so none of us forget how this scam works; from the Enron tapes: From:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/02/eveningnews/main620795.shtml
Energy trader: "Just cut 'em off. They're so fucked. They should just bring back fucking horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fucking kerosene lamps."
And when describing his reaction when a business owner complained about high energy prices, another trader is heard on tape saying, "I just looked at him.
I said, 'Move.' (laughter) The guy was like horrified. I go, 'Look, don't take it the wrong way. Move. It isn't getting fixed anytime soon."
California's attempt to deregulate energy markets became a disaster for consumers when companies like Enron manipulated the West Cost power market and even shut down plants so they could drive up prices. ...
Consumers like Grandma Millie, mentioned in one exchange recorded between two Enron employees.
Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.
Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour."
Another taped exchange between different employees regarding a possible newspaper interview goes like this:
Employee 3: "This guy from the Wall Street Journal calls me up a little bit ago"
Employee 4: "I wouldn't do it, because first of all you'd have to tell 'em a lot of lies because if you told the truth"
Employee 3: "I'd get in trouble."
Employee 4: "You'd get in trouble."
"I'm just -- fucked -- I'm just trying to be an honest camper so I only go to jail once," says one employee.
They should consider the plight of the gas station! Unlike the wireless industry, in the gas business, it's a sure bet that 100% of customers will use 100% of whatever they pay for every time. They'll even jiggle the nozzle to get that last half a drop! To top it off (so to speak), they don't get to charge $100/gallon (rounded up) if the customer goes a bit over. OH, and they're required to display the amount of gas dispensed and have the meter certified as accurate. And no contracts. If they're too expensive that day, everyone can freely get gas across the street instead.
This fits with my speculation that AT&T could care less if you tether or are high usage, they are more concerned with TYPES of traffic.
It also suggests they are simply inspecting end-points (rather than deep packet inspection of content) to determine if you are likely to exceed the as-yet unstated soft-cap of data usage. If you ever connect to those sensitive endpoints they start watching and warning you.
Apparently in their analysis, sustained high bandwidth usage for an hour or more that it takes to watch a movie is MORE HARMFUL to their network than downloading the same amount or more data over short periods of time throughout the month. Either that or there is a HIGH Correspondence between people who do watch movies on their phone and those that exceed bandwidth caps.
In this latter case, visiting Hulu or Netflix just paints a big target on your own back, making you easy pickings.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Its a lot different than fiber.
Each tower is limited in the number of handsets it can concurrently handle. Its finite. And smaller than you might imagine.
Each handset has to be dealt with every few milliseconds. (Are you there? Yes I'm here. Andy traffic for me?)
Less than can be kept track of is the number of simultaneous calls and/or data transmissions that can be handled.
Spectrum availability (radio frequencies) in a given area dictate how close towers can be built to each other. Towers cost money. Lots of Nimbys refuse to have them close by.
Its a lot different than fiber.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
These are quantitative considerations. When you crunch the numbers, do you actually arrive at "shortage?".
I am edified by your comment. But does it mean "legitimate shortage" ? That's the question.
As far as one point you made: towers cost money. Yes, in more ways than one, right? If you build a lot of towers and alleviate the shortage then the concomitant drop in pricing power you experience as a result of increased throughput "costs you money".
AFAIK this is the situation with refineries. NIMBY, yes (ever been to Billings MT? How to kill the livability of a entire city using just one industry.....) but also, why spend money to reduce your pricing power?
This is where govt regulation has to step in. Companies have no natural incentive to serve their populations well under these circumstances.
This is what we did with rural electrification back in the day. Ditto POTS. Now we have the "you're poor, here's the 10 bucks a month cable internet plan". Al a rezsult of government stepping in and saying to industry , "uh, no. You have to do this".
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Come on, everything I buy costs per unit. Gas, electric, water, onions. This buffet mentality, more like 'Gravy Train', has only been held on to because
THE VAST MAJORITY PAY FOR DATA THEY NEVER USE!!!!
Want to have a disussion about how best to arrive at a fair market price in an oligopoly? Fine, let's do that and stop bitching about how the few are ruining the gravy train for the carriers.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Hey y'all, it's pretty casual around here. Nobody on Slashdot worries much about Proper Tyre.
I know it goes against the apparent grain... you know-- to actually *do* something... but if the folks on Slashdot spent less time complaining *here* and more time complaining at the FCC, State Corporation Commission (of whatever State they live in), contacting their local media outlets, and writing to their (supposedly) elected officials-- sooner or later they would have to do *something* about it simply due to the ruckus it'd be creating... These policies can only exist when applied to single subscribers and "in the dark". When it's exposed to the cold light of day-- the politicians have to respond to the critics.
Furthermore, folks here could introduce the Carriers, and the websites of the various elected representatives to the "Slashdot Effect"-- long and sustained. Check in with them several times an hour, all day, every day-- keep up the heat, keep up the demand, make it hurt. They'll have to respond.
It's more like cocain dealers complaining about not having enough cocain around to meet the demand.
Probably, there is a lot of pressure for the data part of the business to work just like the voice part of the business. (Innovator's Dilemma)
For ages, they've been selling contract-limited sets of voice minutes that expire. When people use more minutes, overage bonus money comes in. If they sell you flat-rate data, there is no overage bonus.
As for complaining, I often notice that the executives complaining seem to be the ones in charge of making it happen. He's the one who gets bad performance reviews when users complain and he still must support all this new demand with no increase in budget. (Why else risk reducing sales?) The executive in charge of the sales staff isn't complaining at all.
Customer do not like surprise bills at the end of the month. They want to know up front how much they will pay, even if it is more. Remember what happened when AOL began offering flat-rate? Remember getting unlimited texts added to your plan after that cell bill?
I know that my Droid 3 on Verizon came with a lot of pre-installed apps that are network enabled and not removable by normal means. I'm not just talking about the Verizon's Backup Assistance or VCAST mess, they also included Skype, Slacker Radio, NFL Mobile, etc. These encourage the users to burn bandwidth and in the case of background services force it. It makes me wonder with the android phones how much bandwidth is burned by the network enabled bloatware?
we in Australia are stuck on 1, 3, maybe 10gb plans at the most
Actually optus offer a $2/day plan which includes mobile calls/txts and unlimited data (no tethering allowed) if you want to use it in a usb modem or as your primary internet then its $3/day
True the network is congested as hell in a lot of areas, but if your lucky enough to be in a low usage neighbourhood then you can easily rack up a few hundred gig a month (even more now they are upgrading most towers to HSPA+ so you get 14mbit instead of the usual 7)
Most of the new gen phones run far more efficient on WiFi than on 3G or HSDPA. If the carriers just spend a few bucks on a campaign promoting it, then their problem will be solved. Most smartphone owners have WiFi at home and quite a large percentage have a guest network at their work. If you run WiFi at these two locations, it is to improve your own battery life and the suggested mobile data limits are all of a sudden acceptable.
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First, I assume the original post is mostly about the US, although it might be somewhat similar elswhere too. But, I'd say mos tof the problems come from fairly cheap "all-you-can-eat" packages in the US mobile world. There shouldn't be any limitless data package out there, but packages that allow for x, y and z data, then double or triple the price per mb or gb. All of a sudden you wouldn't have such issues. It's like with gas prices. Ypu can get the cheapest gas, yet still complain. Well, that's life pals.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
No matter how many people they cut off there will always be a top 1% of users using more data than everyone else. If Verizon cut off 95% of its customers tomorrow, the people at 4.95% and above would become the new 1%.
It is had to say.
Palveluun sisältyvä datakäyttö
Alkaen: 1.1.2012
Saakka: 31.1.2012
Kaytetty: 54464.33 Mt
I have a friend who uses my additional USB 3G dongle as his primary connection, hence the high data usage. Something makes me think that "the 1% is ruining it for everybody" is just bullshit.
By the way, this connection costs me 13,90 € / month.
So why is this even allowed to be a problem?
Some simple math ... assume there are 10000 users (this is very low but let's assume), assume there is a 'contention ration' of 100:1, that means the connection from the ISP to the net is 100 DSLs. One percent of users can fill the ISP's internet link, sounds like they may be onto something here. But if we increase to 101 users each gets 99% of a DSL, Ahhhh, that's not a problem. How about 200 users, ie: 2%, trying to go flat out? Well they get only a 50% of a DSL each ... that's still doesn't seem like a problem, after all the contention ratio only guarantees you get 1% of a DSL and 50% would still be 12Mb/s ... we really do need very large percentages of users running flat out for it to be a problem.
And here I'm talking about a very low subscriber base, if there are more people for the same ratio the incremental addition of one person is that much lower so the chance of you getting the bandwidth you want is that much higher in the real world.
I suspect the real problems is two fold, firstly it isn't being properly shared, these ISPs are just used standard boxed routers with standard setup to try to run their decidedly non-standard networks; ie they're not sharing their ISP link between their customers but just relying on the default FIFO methods of a normal router. This fails the first time someone opens a second TCP/IP connection, even a simple 'round robin' between customer IPs would be better in their environment. The second is the old greed problem; they're using INSANE contention ratios, the 100:1 in my math is really poor; I suspect they're far worse.
So what's wrong with my math? If that 1% are allowed to use 50% then there's another 50% for the rest of us(them) to share. If I'm right there shouldn't be a problem. Sure if everybody is being charged the same the 99% might feel it's a little unfair; but the answer to that is simple too, charge the highest users extra and give it to the lowest users as a rebate next month. But of course the phone companies are far too greedy to do something like actually giving back money, even after they've got a month's interest from it.
Another advantage for users is that if the ISP denies you access to some internet data (e.g. BitTorrent or YouTube or IRC site), then they lose money. This means that they have a reason to treat their internet access provision as internet access, whereas at the moment, if they refuse you access to somewhere or something, they reduce their costs, making it worth denying access to stuff via "their" infrastructure.
A telecom operator here in India decided to price calls based on the congestion on a particular tower
Basically, there was a base rate, which was at par with other operators, and if you made a call from a less congested tower, you would have a discounted call rate.
Perhaps something like this should be tried for data as well?
Details of plan : http://mobigyaan.com/uninor-launches-dynamic-pricing-in-up-east-up-west-and-bihar-circles
Sell 100GB of bandwidth, to be used until gone.
The speed of connection would be how you get your customers in, and get them spending money.
Scrap monthly fees.
Car dealers don't sell gasoline, so that's a pretty fucking stupid summary, jfruhlinger. Fucking stagnant fags.
If by "car dealership" you mean "United States Government," then yes. Yes it is.
Are there really not technological advancements out there which will increase cell tower throughput? Alternatives to this technology? Other spectrum we could use in different ways. What about muni WIFI? Verizon et al killed that off right quick. This is the kind of market manipulation that goes on. I't not that I don't believe the corporations because I'm a commie. I am interested to learn more from Slashdotters on this topic.
Well, they could always just put up more towers.
In rural areas they are more widely spaced because they have fewer users to service.
In urban areas they are more closely spaced to handle the higher load.
I know of no reason besides cost to not put one up every city block, more for dense places like New York.
Can't provide enough service in this area? Make the coverage denser in that area.