Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Plans $20 Upgrade Fee Even If You Pay Full Price For a Phone (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a memo leaked by MacRumors, Verizon is planning to introduce a new $20 upgrade fee starting next week. The new $20 flat rate charge will begin next Monday, April 4, and will be applied to smartphones purchased on a Device Payment financing plan, or at full retail price. The premium will also apply to those who take advantage of Apple's new iPhone Upgrade Program. Verizon cites "increasing support costs associated with customers switching their devices" as a reason for the new fees. The new fee is in addition to the existing $40 upgrade fee for customers renewing a two-year contract with a new device.
In the UK, all phones use GSM, which means that you can move service to a new device by moving the SIM card. The phone company actually has to do stuff on their side to switch service to a new CDMA device, which usually requires a phone call to their customer service team. So there's a decidedly nonzero cost to switching to new devices. With that said, they could probably set up an automated system if they wanted to drive the cost down into the single-digit cents range instead of the single-digit dollar range. There's just not enough competition in the pathetic U.S. cellular service market to force them to bother.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
How does free data for certain sites not violate net neutrality?
Yes, but the French claim that the Canadian French is unintelligible. I discovered this when living in China and one staff member accidentally send a sample product to a French customer with the Canadian French video tracks installed. I couldn't blame the Chinese staff member, I was impressed they spoke three languages already and could correctly tell the sound track was French. But the French customer kicked up all hell over being sent a 'foreign' language.
No, the rest of the world caught up to the U.S. You know that GSM vs CDMA war? CDMA won. GSM is the old tech, CDMA is the new tech.
Most 3G data service on GSM use CDMA or wideband CDMA. CDMA is just vastly superior at allocating bandwidth between users than GSM's original protocol (TDMA). GSM couldn't compete so they were forced to license CDMA and add it to their spec for data services. You know how you can talk and use data simultaneously on GSM phones? That's because it has a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for data. Pure CDMA phones like Verizon/Sprint originally couldn't do this because they only had a single CDMA radio which is used for both voice and data, but not simultaneously.
If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA networks, the data speeds on your GSM phone today would be down near 1 Mbps. We wouldn't have LTE today either - it is very similar to CDMA, using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. CDMA was needed as a "proof of concept" market test case that this orthogonality stuff really worked when scaled up to about a hundred simultaneous users per cell.