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AT&T Expects Data-Only Phone Plans Within 2 Years
An anonymous reader writes "AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said today that he expects wireless carriers to start offering data-only cellphone plans within the next 24 months. 'Analysts see such plans as a logical extension of trends in wireless technology. Smartphones with data service can already use it for Internet phone calls and texting through services such as Skype. Phone calls are also taking a back seat to other things people do with their smartphones. AT&T has been recording a decline in the average number of minutes used per month.' He says there isn't a specific plan in the works — he just think it's inevitable."
They'll be twice as expensive to make up for that phone bill you're not paying.
Can't have your bill going down now!
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I'd rather have a voice-only plan for smartphones.
But the data only plan will cost as much, probably more, than a calling plan and data plan combined. And if you buy a cellphone w/o a calling plan the smartphone is called a "tablet", not a phone. I'm sorry, it just isn't a phone anymore. I use my iPod Touch all the time for phone calls - Google Voice combined with some random Talk app I found" - but I never call it a phone. Because it isn't a phone.
You are new here aren't you. You are here for the company, not the other way around, now give me your damned wallet and shut up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is not a commodity problem like molecules of water flowing through a pipe or electrons moving down a wire (although electricity does have a little bit of a dual issue with respect to concurrent use since power generation has to be ramped up or down to meet demand). If you send or receive a packet at 3AM when nobody else is using the lines, it doesn't matter. What matters are those packets you want to send and receive at 5PM in the city when everybody is trying to stream pandora or watch a youtube clip on their commute home.
If you aren't going to support unlimited, its actually kind of a hard problem to solve. Things that made sense with the voice paradigm--local calls being free since there are lots of local interconnects while long distance calls were charged per minute since they only had a limited number of lines in and out of your community--don't make sense in the digital age of packets and little chunks (since you don't need continuous monopoly over a piece of wire). Any sort of price put on data transfer is not related to the cost of sending a packet at all, it is merely an attempt to thwart usage to a point where peak usage is less than peak capacity.
Bottles.