Slashdot Mirror
New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices
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.'"
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.
IDK about cell networks, but many landline networks are still circuit switched I think
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!
Not if this is the first of its kind and could be copied around the world. That's the hope right?
Jonathanjk.com
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!
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.
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.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
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...
"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.
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.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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....
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
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.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
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.
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.
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.