New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices

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New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 4, 2012 @01:21AM from the new-avenue-for-family-strife dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"

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A bit too specific isnt it? by mehrotra.akash · 2012-02-04 01:39 · Score: 1, Insightful

We are discussing mobile plans from a specific country
Isnt that news a little bit too specific for a global tech site?
1. Re:A bit too specific isnt it? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 01:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  We are discussing mobile plans from a specific country
  Isnt that news a little bit too specific for a global tech site?
  That's paid spam.
2. Re:A bit too specific isnt it? by CrackedButter · 2012-02-04 02:09 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Not if this is the first of its kind and could be copied around the world. That's the hope right?
  
  --
  Jonathanjk.com
3. Re:A bit too specific isnt it? by mcgrew · 2012-02-04 02:14 · Score: 2
  
  I'm not the target demographic, either, even though I'm in the US. I live alone and seldom have more than 3 devices sending/receiving data and have unlimited plans for both wired internet and mobile. But the concept is worth discussing, just as stuff BT pulls is.
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
4. Re:A bit too specific isnt it? by realityimpaired · 2012-02-04 05:10 · Score: 2
  
  Only, it's not the first of its kind.
  http://www.rogers.com/web/content/dataSharing?setLanguage=en&setProvince=ON
  Just off the top of my head. They were flogging that as a great new feature a year ago. Not that I would ever buy from that particular company, I think they're evil incarnate. But they did offer data sharing a long time ago. Putting it on an "unlimited" data plan is new, but the main reason Rogers doesn't do that is that they don't have unlimited data plans. I imagine that if they did have unlimited data plans in the first place, they'd offer it too... probably for a price that's just as obscenely out to lunch as the one that's discussed in TFA: for what Rogers would charge to share 3GB of data and 200 minutes between two phones, you can get two unlimited everything phones from Wind... unlimited data, unlimited minutes, unlimited texting, and unlimited long distance.
  Similarly, I doubt very much that the companies TFA is discussing will be particularly friendly with their pricing....
5. Re:A bit too specific isnt it? by CrackedButter · 2012-02-04 06:26 · Score: 1
  
  The optimist is me says they will if people in a sizeable manner starting taking Ting up on their offer.
  Btw I said 'if' in the previous post. I live in the UK so I didn't make to make a sure statement as I didn't really know. But thanks for letting me know.
  
  --
  Jonathanjk.com
Data, minutes, SMS by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 01:52 · Score: 1

"Minutes" is an antiquated concept. It's all data. VoIP is here to stay.
1. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by mehrotra.akash · 2012-02-04 02:00 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  IDK about cell networks, but many landline networks are still circuit switched I think
2. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 02:25 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  No, they are not. There's a dedicated line from the phone to the local exchange, and at least if you can get DSL, the circuit ends there. The digitization of the phone network was the reason why 56k modems worked: The fastest mode was quasi-digital instead of modulation/demodulation.
3. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by sorak · 2012-02-04 02:45 · Score: 2
  
  "Minutes" is an antiquated concept. It's all data. VoIP is here to stay.
  People still would prefer to know how much of the final product they are getting, rather than something that can be used to estimate the quantity of the final product. If your primary use for a cell phone is conversation (mine is not), then you don't request 1gb worth of usage. You want to know how much talk time is available. Just as someone at a restaurant wouldn't want to request $3 worth of hamburger, or chicken measured by the amount of feed needed to produce that quantity of meat.
4. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by OldTOP · 2012-02-04 03:10 · Score: 1
  
  Sort of. But all data is not created equal. VoIP requires many small packets which consume more packet switching capacity than a smaller number of larger packets typical of other data. VoIP also typically requires higher QoS than other data. Of course that can all be swamped by streaming video.
  
  --
  The universe was intelligently designed. Unfortunately God was in a hurry so he coded it in Java.
5. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by petermgreen · 2012-02-04 03:25 · Score: 1
  
  Do you really think anyone is going to wonder how many minutes they get out of their data plan when loading a typical web page is equivalent to 5 minutes of talk time?
  4 megabytes or so seems insanely high for one web page to me.
  
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6. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by petermgreen · 2012-02-04 03:27 · Score: 2
  
  The physical circuits are long gone in most places but on conventional digital phone networks keeping a call open keeps a reserved slice of bandwidth (a "virtual circuit") for the length of the call. Afaict on the landline side while telcos are starting to roll out VOIP there is still a lot of conventional virtual circuit based network around too. On the mobile side afaict virtually all phones in use today are still using circuit switched voice protocols (LTE is supposed to change this). IIRC circuit switched calls* also have priority over packet switched data traffic at least in GSM.
  *You can have a circuit switched data call with GSM but almost noone does it anymore.
  
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7. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by JustOK · 2012-02-04 03:38 · Score: 1
  
  Average is approaching 1 meg for pages these days.
  
  --
  rewriting history since 2109
8. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-04 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  800KB is way too high. Mumble only uses about 40kbit(300KB/min) for high quality VoIP. That assumes you're talking the entire time. Anytime you stop talking, it about drops to 0.
  Web pages are in KB, not MB. Heavy everyday browsing on my smart phone, even media sites like YouTube, is only a few hundred MB at the end of the month. Based on your estimates, I would reach my average monthly download usage in a few hours instead of 30 days.
9. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by TuringCheck · 2012-02-04 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  Mobile phones sold in the last 7 years or so don't even have CSD or Fax support anymore. No regrets - they were low performance and a PITA to support. The packet switched data is superior in all ways.
  
  On the other hand about 95% of all telephone calls (fixed or mobile) use at least on one segment virtual circuits over various TDM transports, even if in some parts of the world the SS7 signaling has migrated to the SCTP/IP based SIGTRAN. Very few calls are converted directly to VoIP or other packet based voice transports.
10. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by SQLGuru · 2012-02-04 07:33 · Score: 2
  
  People are starting to equate data size with other sizes already. How many minutes of music does an MP3 Player hold? How many pictures does a 2GB SD card hold? etc. Most ISPs even have a handy little chart that shows you.
11. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by petermgreen · 2012-02-05 10:34 · Score: 1
  
  Do you have a source for that claim? (i'm not nessacerally saying it's wrong but the handful of pages I took a quick look at all seemed to be much smaller and I'd like to know how the number was arrived at and what assumptions were made)
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
12. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by JustOK · 2012-02-05 11:58 · Score: 1
  
  http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-why/
  http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/
  
  --
  rewriting history since 2109
13. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by petermgreen · 2012-02-05 12:59 · Score: 1
  
  http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ [websiteoptimization.com]
  "Charzinski's 2010 paper shows the beneficial effects of caching on performance. Table 1 shows that the average top 500 home page goes from 507K and 64.7 requests upon initial cache-cleared load to 98.5K and 16.1 requests."
  As I suspected it seems like the "nearly a megabyte" headline figure you quoted is for loading a page with nothing in cache and the average pageload is likely to be much lower.
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
14. Re:Data, minutes, SMS by sorak · 2012-02-06 04:02 · Score: 1
  
  A minute of talk time consumes about 200kB per minute full duplex for typical mobile phone quality. Let's add 100% packet overhead and another 100% for better quality, so we end up with 800kB per minute. Then a gigabyte is 1250 minutes with excellent quality, or about 3000 minutes at normal quality. Do you really think anyone is going to wonder how many minutes they get out of their data plan when loading a typical web page is equivalent to 5 minutes of talk time? SMS makes this even clearer: Do you worry about the number of instant messages you can send with your data allowance? No, you know that it's "enough".
  That's my point. Some people don't use their phone for web, ever. Why should they want to do this math? For many of them, they just want a straight and simple answer, even if it actually gives them less service. I can understand, for example, that a well-compressed data stream* will use a variable bit-rate compression, that if combined with efficient background noise reduction could result in conversations using a highly variable amount of data, based on how much of it is noise and how much is silence. Still, many of the people in my community would rather hear "you're getting 450 minutes of talk time" than "you're getting 2.5gb of data usage and your typical conversation uses anywhere from 64-128kps, meaning that you are getting 650-325 minutes", or the more likely advertising response of "you're getting up to 700 minutes"
  Of course, I do live in a conservative community.
  * And I don't know if common voip solutions do this
Good idea by Hatta · 2012-02-04 02:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

Why stop there? Why not pool everyone's data together, and charge us all the same price?

--
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
1. Re:Good idea by Zouden · 2012-02-04 02:22 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  What would you prefer, being charged per megabyte or per device? Because most people are charged per device. $40/month for data on your phone, fine, but then you want a sim card in your iPad? That's another data plan at $40/month, regardless of how much you use.
  The article is proposing a usage-based system that's independent of the number of devices. That's a much better arrangement IMHO.
  
  --
  "A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
2. Re:Good idea by OldTOP · 2012-02-04 03:11 · Score: 1
  
  If I had teenage kids I might agree with you.
  
  --
  The universe was intelligently designed. Unfortunately God was in a hurry so he coded it in Java.
3. Re:Good idea by jpmorgan · 2012-02-04 05:37 · Score: 2
  
  As someone who uses almost no data, I don't see why I should subsidize your mobile internet usage.
4. Re:Good idea by Belial6 · 2012-02-04 06:28 · Score: 1
  
  As someone who uses data, I don't see why I should be subsidizing your use of all the infrastructure that gets created because of people using data.
5. Re:Good idea by evilviper · 2012-02-05 00:17 · Score: 1
  
  As someone who uses almost no data, I don't see why I should subsidize your mobile internet usage.
  I'm sure the early adopters feel the same way about you...
  Cellular bandwidth is ephemeral... Pumping a GByte of data costs next to nothing. It's expanding the network to handle a large number of people doing that at the same time, which is expensive. And in that case, a technological solution is desirable and workable.. If a certain cell tower is maxed-out, throttle the highest bandwidth users until there's excess capacity. Then add more cells only when even the low bandwidth users are being throttled. Problem solved forever. Heavy users get all the excess capacity they want without insane charges, and light users get fast speeds and aren't negatively impacted at all.
  
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  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
6. Re:Good idea by sudonim2 · 2012-02-05 06:17 · Score: 1
  
  With tethering and WiFi Hotspots, if my phone has unlimited data, every other device I have has unlimited data. The only question is how many hoops I have to jump through to bypass my carrier wanting to charge me for using my devices in the most obvious fashion.
'My hope is that family data plans come soon' by exploder · 2012-02-04 02:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'
The family plan will come to your carrier just as soon as they've worked out the necessary details, i.e. made sure you'll end up paying just a little more than you do now.

--
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contracts by lkcl · 2012-02-04 02:41 · Score: 2

ahh, i can just see the divorce settlement arguments already, over who owns the contract, who owns the bill, and who's going to pay for little johnny's excessive Minecraft and Runescape usage...
Wow, "New"? Really? by iONiUM · 2012-02-04 02:50 · Score: 4, Informative

I'm in Canada, with Rogers, and while they do suck, I have had a family data plan for 1GB (actually I share everything else too) with my wife for 3 years now..
I find it extremely odd that the US does not have this... it's like hearing they don't have wheels, or fire.
1. Re:Wow, "New"? Really? by creepynut · 2012-02-04 03:29 · Score: 1
  
  The US? Forget that, as far as I know none of the other carriers in Canada do it either! I'm on Telus and they certainly don't although I'm not paying for a data plan at all.
2. Re:Wow, "New"? Really? by MobileTatsu-NJG · 2012-02-04 05:15 · Score: 1
  
  So, in Canada, a rate plan is considered 'technology'.
  
  --
  
  "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
3. Re:Wow, "New"? Really? by evilviper · 2012-02-05 00:04 · Score: 1
  
  I find it extremely odd that the US does not have this... it's like hearing they don't have wheels, or fire.
  It's not "fire" it's "sub-prime mortgages"... This isn't some fundamental feature, it's a billing gimmick.
  Read TFA... You'd probably get a BETTER deal going with Virgin Mobile's normal (unlimited) plan, unless you have several devices you use, but barely ever.
  
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  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Economics 101 by Lije+Baley · 2012-02-04 03:56 · Score: 2

They will sell their services at the greatest price which the market will bear. In other words, the price will only come down when we stop merely gritting our teeth and forego the data plan or switch to a competitor with a better deal.

--
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
1. Re:Economics 101 by tepples · 2012-02-04 06:16 · Score: 2
  
  the price will only come down when we stop merely gritting our teeth and forego the data plan
  Virgin Mobile USA won't activate a voice-only plan on an Android phone, even if I have Wi-Fi everywhere I plan to use the data features.
2. Re:Economics 101 by Lije+Baley · 2012-02-04 08:57 · Score: 1
  
  True, foregoing a data plan these days usually means foregoing a smart phone.
  
  --
  Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
3. Re:Economics 101 by tepples · 2012-02-04 11:40 · Score: 1
  
  Then how do I run smartphone apps that aren't ported to Windows or Linux without a smartphone?
4. Re:Economics 101 by evilviper · 2012-02-04 23:52 · Score: 1
  
  Then how do I run smartphone apps that aren't ported to Windows or Linux without a smartphone?
  Android has been ported to x86 (90%+ of Android apps are java-derivative based, and so, architecture agnostic), and the Android emulator runs on Linux and Windows.
  
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  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
5. Re:Economics 101 by evilviper · 2012-02-05 00:22 · Score: 1
  
  Virgin Mobile USA won't activate a voice-only plan on an Android phone, even if I have Wi-Fi everywhere I plan to use the data features.
  But you WANT data service on your smart phone. Being able to look-up something when you're in the absolute middle of nowhere is the killer app of smart phones. As a single example, practically all the driving-direction apps on smart phones are ONLINE apps, so when you take a detour, it needs to hit the servers for a new route.
  
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  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? by tepples · 2012-02-04 04:32 · Score: 1

Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? Say you visit more than one page on a given site. All the CSS, all the JavaScript, and all the UI images will be fetched from cache instead of the network. Of course that wouldn't apply to a usage model like a Slashdot user who hits only one page from each site while RTFA (reading the featured articles).
1. Re:Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? by JustOK · 2012-02-04 04:39 · Score: 1
  
  page
  
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  rewriting history since 2109
2. Re:Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? by mcgrew · 2012-02-04 10:19 · Score: 1
  
  People are stupid. I've had internet on my phone for years, but sites still act as if their traffic all comes from computers. Duh, if your pages are a megabyte and won't display properly on their phone of course they'll stay away and all your traffic will be from computers. Kind of like the sites that used to greet you with "You need Internet Explorer to visit this site" and when you wrote them they were like "well, 90% of our traffic is IE." Did web developers all ride the short bus to school? Or are normal people all that fucking stupid?
  Back ten years ago my old gaming site was full of bells and whistles, and the front page was considered huge* (dialup days) at 250k. How in the hell are they making pages four times that size? It's insane. Are web developers instructed to leave their brains at the door, or are they all using bad tools?
  * If my old site was the prototype for web2.0 I apologize profusely to everyone!
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
3. Re:Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? by tepples · 2012-02-04 11:33 · Score: 1
  How in the hell are they making pages four times that size?
  I can think of a few causes:
  
  Some of it probably comes from JavaScript frameworks such as JQuery that abstract over the differences between IE and all the other browsers, which implement W3C DOM.
  Some tools that generate HTML auto-indent the HTML to make it easier for a human to read in Notepad instead of leaving out the indentation and letting the tree of elements speak for itself. This ends up putting a lot of extra space or tab characters into the mark-up, and a lot of web servers can't gzip it away because they don't gzip dynamic pages.
  Extra divs needed to work around the lack of rounded corners and the like in IE.
  Banner rotation scripts on the front pages of online stores such as Phil's Hobby Shop might rotate among three 40 KiB JPEGs.
  If scrollable elements within the page have images, the web browser might fetch all the images, even those not yet scrolled into view. Again, on Phil's Hobby Shop, scroll down to the list of paint-by-numbers near the bottom.
  New sites are more likely to use custom fonts in headings. These can be either Flash fonts for IE or TrueType fonts embedded with CSS @font-face for everything else.
  Though CSS can hide boxes on a mobile device, you're still sending all the HTML. It's possible to send lighter HTML to mobile user agents, but for one thing, a lot of Slashdot users are under the impression that user-agent detection is deprecated, and for another, there have been some legal problems with a user-agent database. Some sites just punt on this and push mobile users to their iOS or Android app.
4. Re:Is it 1 MB per page or 1 MB per site? by gmhowell · 2012-02-04 17:41 · Score: 1
  
  Are web developers instructed to leave their brains at the door, or are they all using bad tools?
  These are not mutually exclusive answers.
  
  --
  Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Cheaper or Coverage? Pick one by rec9140 · 2012-02-04 05:29 · Score: 2

A quickie check for my needs shows a about a $20/month savings, as I would get hotspot which VZW charges for...
BUT the big LOSS is COVERAGE. Like the adage says, location, location, location, and sprexhostgin has crap coverage, period. Where my VZW has full bars.
So huge loss of coverage in areas I need and might need it to save $240 year and get a feature that while it might be nice, if I have no coverage is useless.
Thanks, nut not thanks.
I like the plan idea to mix and match what I need, but first off you offer no UNLIMITED (that means NO DATA CAP), which I have since I've been with VZW since it was BAM.
Offer an UNLIMITED (NO CAP) data option, move to VZW for your network, then we'll talk.

--
1311393600 - Back to Black
Re:Cheaper or Coverage? Pick one by mdf356 · 2012-02-04 05:43 · Score: 2

I'm on Verizon, and the unlimited data probably doesn't help me. I'm not a big mobile user. Oddly, the minutes for our two iPhones are shared with my wife, but they didn't share the texts per month, so I have some and she doesn't.

--
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How nice, AT&T by Richy_T · 2012-02-04 05:55 · Score: 2

At&T used to offer shared data on their family plans. Unfortunately, they changed it to individual shortly before we went to smart phones. Unfortunately, it's AT&T or Verizon in this area and at the time, the plans worked out slightly cheaper under AT&T. If there was someone who offered something with sane pricing, I'd be on them in an instant but there's that whole government enforced monopoly (quadropoly?)/cartel thing going on. I'm thinking of going prepay which actually seems to offer the better pricing model.
1. Re:How nice, AT&T by evilviper · 2012-02-04 23:49 · Score: 1
  
  Unfortunately, it's AT&T or Verizon in this area
  Sprint does (free) roaming on Verizon, and they have cheaper plans.
  
  I'm thinking of going prepay which actually seems to offer the better pricing model.
  Of course it does. Contracts have always been scams, hide the up-front cost, and charge 2-4X as much per month, oh yeah, and throw in taxes and hidden fees.
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why not allow competition? by utkonos · 2012-02-04 11:25 · Score: 2

Why not have more companies that provide phone, messaging, and data service? Why allow TMobile and AT&T to retain their near monopoly over GSM service in the US? Sure, they may be flirting with a family data plan, but I'm know that it will be just like their family talk plans, overpriced and unfair. The only way that mobile phone service in the US is going to improve is to have more providers and stop allowing TMobile and AT&T to stifle competition.
1. Re:Why not allow competition? by evilviper · 2012-02-05 00:10 · Score: 1
  
  Why not have more companies that provide phone, messaging, and data service?
  There are several more companies. Why aren't you using them?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_the_Americas#United_States
  
  Why allow TMobile and AT&T to retain their near monopoly over GSM service in the US?
  What's so compelling about GSM? Is it really so crucial to you to be able to use the same phone when traveling across continents?
  
  --
  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
2. Re:Why not allow competition? by utkonos · 2012-02-05 05:19 · Score: 1
  
  I find it funny that you're defending mobile service in the US. Do you own a passport? Most people in the US don't. I do actually travel frequently outside the US, and having one Android phone for anywhere I find myself is valuable. Are you a shill for the phone company?
3. Re:Why not allow competition? by utkonos · 2012-02-05 05:20 · Score: 1
  
  Not to mention that support for non-GSM Android phones seems to be being scrapped.
4. Re:Why not allow competition? by evilviper · 2012-02-05 09:36 · Score: 1
  
  Most people in the US don't. I do actually travel frequently outside the US
  Perfect. So you're directly admitting that your requirement for GSM is one that "most people" don't have. You also implicitly admit that you know there are alternatives to that would eliminate that need. So basically you're ranting about nothing but the fact that the US market isn't designed the way you'd most like it to be.
  
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  Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What does the T stand for? by Minwee · 2012-02-04 16:50 · Score: 1

You may know Ting better as TUCOWS.
I wonder if they have an option for downloading Trumpet Winsock onto your phone.
Re:Very Significant Detail left out by Minwee · 2012-02-05 04:12 · Score: 1

The original idea was not to have any "plan" at all, but simply charge customers for what they had used in the previous month. So if you used only enough to qualify for the $10 plan, you pay $10 at the end of the month.. If you used enough for the $25 plan, you would pay $25.
The focus groups hated it, because they weren't able to choose a plan like they were accustomed to. So they changed it to the current system where you pick a plan and if you go over it you pay for the next tier. It works exactly the same, but the same focus groups loved it.
People are funny that way.