Verizon Says It Knows You Don't Need Unlimited Data (digitaltrends.com)

Ed Oswald, writing for DigitalTrends: While the wireless industry is moving back to unlimited data, one carrier is not. Verizon chief financial officer Fred Shammo told attendees at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York on Thursday that his company doesn't think you need it, and slammed current offerings. "At the end of the day, people don't need unlimited plans," Shammo said. While this is not the first time he's said this -- in March he claimed unlimited data "doesn't work in an LTE environment," and in 2011 he helped Verizon move away from unlimited plans -- it's now an entirely different market.

Comments

But he has a point!

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't "need" unlimited data, what they need is "unmetered" data.

In a LTE environment, someone can saturate the hell out of the cell and thus render everyone in a one mile radius of it unable to use it. That is the tradeoff of CDMA-based technology (LTE is a CDMA technology) TDMA-based do not have this limitation because you're limited to a time slot. TDMA however doesn't allow for low-latency applications and the more users there are, it slows down for everyone equally. So TDMA forces carriers to actually have enough capacity, while CDMA only forces carriers to make cells small enough to not be blown away by one user monopolizing it.

At the end of the day, "unmetered" is what all carriers should be aiming for, and only differentiating their plans by bandwidth pipes. eg a GSM/LTE 5G path would allow users to pay for "voice","voice, text and data", or "voice, text, data, video" or "voice, text, data, video 4K" Someone paying for a "4K" connection and not using it with a 4K TV still gets the bandwidth of a 4K connection to use, but a "IPTV" offering by the same carrier would suck up all the bandwidth allocated. 4K would be kinda wasteful on LTE, but beside the point.

Same with landlines. It doesn't matter that fibre is in the neighborhood, you want to differentiate the plan based on what the user intends:
A) 4$/mo Home security (approximately 5Mbps, bi-directional, good enough for a single HD stream at 10fps)
B) 15$/mo Basic Internet (Asymmetric 25mbps down, 5 up, good enough for two 1080p HD streams at 30fps or one 60fps (ATSC is 19Mbps, ATSC QAM-256 Cable is 38.8)
C) 25$/mo Basic Internet Family (Symmetric 80mbps, good enough for two 4K streams or 4 HD streams, essentially "4 20Mbps streams")
D) 50$/mo Deluxe Internet (Symmetric 160mbps, 4 4K streams, good enough to have family members stream to each other at 4K television quality)
E) 100$/mo Professional Internet ( Symmetric 1Gbit , basically capacity for 25 4K channels, or 100 HD channels, simultanously, basically this option is "I'm hosting everything at home, the cloud hosting can bite me")

In the case of C,D and E, it's assumed that people would be doing backups over the internet, likely to other family member locations, if not a cloud service. Once you get over 100Mbps it becomes viable to do so. So if you live in Seattle and your family lives in New York, you could effectively use each other as a backup and cut all the cloud storage providers out of the picture.

So when you're on your LTE device, you can access the storage from either location or while on the road.

Captcha: asinine

Re:Makes more sense

[bondsbw]

I'm not sure why you think so, it's pretty standard to pay according to what you consume when supply (capacity) is limited. It would be silly to say:

The entire concept of paying per multiple of gallons of gasoline is ridiculous anyway.

or

The entire concept of paying per multiple of hamburgers is ridiculous anyway.