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An Algorithm To Facilitate Uber-Style Dynamic Phone Tariffs (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new paper proposes an algorithm to help network providers furnish 'surge' pricing for mobile data and other network communications, citing a 50% shortfall between demand and capacity over the next five years as an indicator that consumers may have to be shepherded out of the congested times and areas in order for normal service to continue to be maintained. Just don't tell any of the people in charge of airport wireless networks.
Everything that is old is new again.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Great, let's charge people 5000% of their rates when something terrible hits, like a terrorist attack or some sort of natural disaster, and penalize people for letting people know they are alright or trying to track down their loved ones to make sure they survived!
It's called herding. Like cattle to slaughter. When you own the processing plant and control the market price - it's a duopoly data-feedloting.
Maybe it would be better if they followed the Amazon model where they built the infrastructure to support the surges and turned the excess into a viable business instead of mimicking a glorified bandit taxi dispatcher that has never been profitable.
...The can just fucking upgrade their networks.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Doesn't anyone remember Enron and California's electricity demand pricing games that ripped off consumers for millions by manipulating the demand metrics?
Demand based pricing is just asking for a scam. Also who's bright idea was it to bring all the uncertainty of a dodgy stock market into the consumer space?
As for Uber, it's not just demand pricing but the age old nastiness of piecework with a deliberate lie of "ride sharing" on top. If the car wasn't going that way whether the customer was there or not then it is not "ride sharing". Uber is just the very old and nasty way to run taxis with a new dispatch system and demand based price gouging on top - it's normalizing the process of bribing a taxi driver to let you jump the queue at best.
They get paid more the worse their network is. Yeah, great idea, I am sure customers will love this.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The practices of nudging and variable rates need to DIAF and stay dead.
Fixed rates have served quite well.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Last year Uber quadrupled their prices for people trying to leave downtown Sydney during a hostage standoff. Uber style phone tariffs means that if terrorists kill 100-1000 people in a town, it will cost $50 for people to communicate their survival to concerned family members, because after all, that's what people will pay, right? So it's all good.
In this analogy, there are four competing processing plants (VZW, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile) that determine the wholesale price, and there are plenty of MVNOs that determine the retail price.
The whole point of "surge" pricing is to ensure that people that *really need* something can still get it (albeit at vastly increased cost) while the people who don't really need it decide it's too expensive. Unfortunately the assumption is that there is a direct relationship between how much someone wants something vs how much they are willing to pay. This is not actually the case...people who have more money can afford to pay more in absolute terms without having it impact their lives as much.
So hypothetically, in an emergency if cell time went to $10/minute you and I might decide to make our calls short, but Bill Gates could talk 24/7 and not care about the price.
The FCC regulates phone call pricing. Not completely, but to an extent where an Uber-style congestion based pricing would be a non-starter. Just like local government taxi regulations regulate taxi rates making Uber's congestion based pricing illegal.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
last time I was at O'Hare the wifi at the airport was a lot better than gogo in flight wifi.
Although that was a few years back.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
This would be a nightmare for users. When finding a ride using Uber, it is easy to decide if you accept the price. With phone/data surge pricing you will have to constantly check the rate every time you use the phone for something. The first provider that tries this will no longer have any capacity issues, not because the algorithm solves the problem directly, but because there will be a mass exodus of customers.
Any network implementing this can say goodbye to Common Carrier status and would likely lose all Universal Service Funds.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
"...citing a 50% shortfall between demand and capacity over the next five years..."
Assuming that even happens, that will more properly be known as an "unexploited opportunity," which in capitalism is like a vacuum, which is that thing nature abhors. And considering the fact that the costs of running a network of a given size, don't increase at all during demand peaks, I think someone who knows how to get the job done for a reasonable fixed price will step in and get it done. Might even snatch the market out from under any old congestion-pricing moo-cows who mistakenly think they're indispensable.
Personally, I like my current plan and I hope my provider doesn't adopt this. All that will become of it is that the average customer will pay more.
First it will be only major events like terrorist attacks that warrant surge pricing, next it will be major holidays and eventually it will be busy hours of every day. From a network point of view it makes sense but just like time based billing on electricity, the customer will never end up paying less
Basically all this does is provide further incentive to build sub-spec networks and oversubscribe the fuck out of them so that companies can eake every last cent out of the customer that's possible to get, while providing shit service.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, it means the greedy bastards who run the telcos need to invest in their damned infrastructure.
Consumers do NOT need to be fucking shepherded into making calls at 10pm, the people who keep gouging us for telecommunications need to actually spend some of the massive amounts they charge on maintaining their infrastructure instead of pretending they can keep doing nothing and collect the same money.
This is not a consumer scheduling problem, this is a failure to spend the money to maintain their infrastructure.
The problem is for years they've say back, collected the money, and pretended like continuing to do nothing wouldn't have long term implications.
Lazy, cheap and stupid is not a consumer scheduling problem. It's corporations failing to invest in their own business so they can artificially bump up profits.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Great, a new way to justify charging more for a service just when it's needed the most.
Will the wonders of marketing never cease??
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
As used by the Corporation Commissions of the various US states and the FCC, telecommunication carriers *must* publish a tariff, generally it must be approved [or if not specifically then it must be in line with previously approved guidelines], and only then charge consumers what it says.
Using the "uber model" of dynamic pricing -- whether a good idea or not -- is contrary to current US law and FCC regulations.
Really.
That brings up two questions:
1. SHOULD it happen?
2. What would be the result?
I'll get to #1 in a sec. first, what would be the result: In a free market, letting supply and demand control price and quantity makes sense. However, absent a notification method to let people know when they pick up the handset HOW MUCH THE CALL WILL COST people will be reluctant to make that call. Regulations forbid charging a number without informing people. If you let people know 'the cost is high" most of them will wait it out. Supply will stabilize but demand will reduce. Overall use will reduce. "Surge" pricing will lead to less demand, less calls, and lower overall product sold.
Given that, SHOULD it happen? No. A reasonably stable commodity price is what leads to consumer confidence to buy, buy now, buy later, and keep on buying. A fluid price leads to a lack of consumer confidence, which with things you can't "store up for later when they're more expensive" leads to less spending. Less spending = downturn economy.
Stupid idea. Regulatorily forbidden in the US.
Glad it's dead on the vine.
E
This is just another form of throttling.
I don't mind throttling, since I use it myself.
I throttle my payments to service providers, in 0.01 increments, I also, for convenience, insist on paper bills, very convenient, for me that is.
I also throttle my services, the more people raise prices, the more services I cancel to compensate. If discounts are offered, I try and get the best discount, all on no contract mind you. By using as much of the service rep's time as possible, I throttle their bonuses as well.
Throttle may data? I'll throttle yours too, making your ad servers wait, and wait, and wait.
Want to give me "surge" billing, I'll reverse-surge my services.
Carriers getting away with this will depend largely on the circumstances. During an emergency like a natural disaster (hurricane) this is currently illegal under US federal law (it's called price gouging). Now I can understand doing this during, say a protest rally. HOWEVER, if someone dials 911 for emergency services that person should not be charge a "premium rate" because he needs help and just happens to be in what the carrier defines as a "congested area". This is walking on thin ice legally speaking (disclaimer: not a lawyer).
Well, let me start by saying that I don't believe that the vast majority of data usage falls under anything other than personal entertainment, the big problem I'm seeing with comparing this to Uber is that Uber is fairly unambiguously a luxury. It is offered as an alternative to taxi's ( another luxury ) or walking/public transportation, which not subject to their business model. By making "surge pricing" you are not making it easier for people who aren't using it for entertainment to use it - you are making everything more expensive, and consequently harder to use. If data/network usage starting having surge pricing, there is no reasonable alternative - you are essential making a device useless if you can not afford to pay "luxury" rates for a service, on top of the already significant costs of being able to use this service at all. So, I think this comes more down to, do we classify all data usage as a luxury, or not?
Uber can get away with it because they offer a limited-time service with the price negotiated on a per-case basis. Most telcos demand an on-going contract which means a fixed rate so the prices can be posted in advance. So instating a peak-hour tariff every week-day is possible, tripling the rate because a road crash closed the local highway, isn't.
Surge pricing follows the pure capitalist model: It's also illegal under consumer laws and contract law in many situations.
It's irrelevant (at least for voice) as providers have already or are in the process of moving away from the voice billing model and towards the data billing model where people pay for data but not, in most cases, for voice.
If there's been a lack of investment in pure voice infra this move to data only billing would be the reason.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial