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Sprint Begins Punishing Customers For FCC's Net Neutrality Rules
ourlovecanlastforeve writes: A few days ago Sprint announced their intent to stop throttling certain customers' bandwidth in the wake of the FCC fining ATT $100,000,000 for doing the same. Sprint has now begun circulating an internal memo to their front-line reps that the 12-month warranty on non-branded accessories, a featured selling point, will be eliminated. Additional rumors are emerging that Sprint may increase prices on unlimited data plans and stop offering wireline long distance service.
And that would be accurate if we were actually talking about a limited resource for free.
But we aren't.
You left out the part where the profit margin is flexible. The consumer costs will only rise because Sprint wants to keep the profit as high as it was. Bandwidth is NOT a limited resource in this case.
I can only imagine how much better the service will be...
AT&T's was fined for "deceptive business practices". It had nothing to do with "net neutrality". If Sprint is reacting to and is concerned about AT&T's fine then that tells me a lot about how Sprint executives truly view their own business practices behind closed doors.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Dear god no. Lots of different companies all trying different things is exactly what you want amidst technological uncertainty. They thoroughly search the solution space, with the companies that find the better solutions becoming more successful. Cellular data is a perfect example. If the U.S. had fallen in line with the EU in mandating the formed-by-committee GSM standard, then CDMA would've been stillborn and we would still be stuck on 56 kbps data speeds. (CDMA automatically divides bandwidth between all users who are actually using data at that moment. GSM is time-slotted, and each device gets a timeslice whether or not they actually use it to transmit data.) Nearly all 3G GSM data implementations used wideband CDMA (which is why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GSM phone - they had to have two different radios for voice and data, while CDMA phones did both with a single radio). 4G LTE uses bandwidth-sharing technology very similar to CDMA (orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes), and its development would've taken several years longer without CDMA to lay down the groundwork, if people had even believed it was viable without real-life trials among millions of users.
Public utilities are good when the technology has pretty much peaked and is stable - the best solution has been found, and there aren't any improvements on the horizon. Long distance electrical transmission initially had people advocating both AC and DC as superior. It turned out high voltage AC as the most effective way to transmit power over long distances, so that standard won out. Nothing better has been found in a century so that's a good service to turn into a utility - the optimal solution has probably been found. Likewise, cable TV/Internet is getting to that point. Initially there was lots of uncertainty about how best to hook up houses and subnet the network, so lots of different cable companies tried different things. But now pretty much everyone is using the same solution (it's even been standardized as DOCSIS), and the only looming future improvement is fiber to the home. So the Cable industry should probably be turned into a public utility soon.
But Cellular is still a rapidly developing industry with lots of technological innovations still being made. Turning it into a public utility would be the worst thing you could do to it.
If you want to fix Cellular, prohibit vertical integration. A company can own towers but can't provide service. A company can provide service but they can't own towers or make phones. A company can make phones but can't own towers or provide service. Then make it so you can buy any phone and subscribe to any service provider (as long as the phone supports their technology). The service providers would lease time on different tower networks. If a manufacturer made a good phone, people would buy it without regard for whether or not a carrier sold it. If a tower company put together a good network, lots of service providers would contract with them. And if a carrier had good plans, people would subscribe to them. None of the current BS where a carrier basically leverages their advantage in tower network into restrictions on phone interoperability and plan selection.