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Shamed In Super Bowl Ads, Verizon Introduces Unlimited Data Plans (theverge.com)
A surprise announcement Sunday revealed that tomorrow Verizon will begin offering introductory plans with unlimited data.*
* Customers "will get full LTE speeds until they reach 22GB of usage," reports The Verge, "after which they'll be subject to reduced data speeds and de-prioritization."
An anonymous reader writes: Other carriers have similar limits. "For Sprint it's 23GB. T-Mobile has a slightly higher threshold of 26GB... AT&T matches Verizon at 22GB," reports The Verge. Verizon says their cap is "to ensure a quality experience for all customers... While we don't expect to do that very often, network management is a crucial tool that benefits all Verizon customers." The $80-a-month plan also includes hotspot tethering -- up to 10 gigabytes -- and "includes 'HD' video as opposed to the 480p/DVD-quality video that T-Mobile One customers get by default."
In a Sunday YouTube video, the head of Verizon's wireless effort says customer interviews found "Some of the heavier users of data -- the power users -- had data anxiety." But it's still a surprising move. Engadget reports that in the past Verizon "frequently tried its hardest to discourage unlimited data users," but today is "facing stiff competition from T-Mobile, which engineered a dramatic comeback in recent years and upped the ante by making unlimited data standard through the One plan."
Verizon's pricing was also targeted heavily last week in a barrage of Super Bowl ads by both Sprint and T-Mobile just last Sunday. T-Mobile showed a masochistic woman calling Verizon just to enjoying hearing about the overages, taxes and fees she incurred by exceeding her data limit, while Sprint showed a man who was trying to escape his Verizon contract by faking his own death.
* Customers "will get full LTE speeds until they reach 22GB of usage," reports The Verge, "after which they'll be subject to reduced data speeds and de-prioritization."
An anonymous reader writes: Other carriers have similar limits. "For Sprint it's 23GB. T-Mobile has a slightly higher threshold of 26GB... AT&T matches Verizon at 22GB," reports The Verge. Verizon says their cap is "to ensure a quality experience for all customers... While we don't expect to do that very often, network management is a crucial tool that benefits all Verizon customers." The $80-a-month plan also includes hotspot tethering -- up to 10 gigabytes -- and "includes 'HD' video as opposed to the 480p/DVD-quality video that T-Mobile One customers get by default."
In a Sunday YouTube video, the head of Verizon's wireless effort says customer interviews found "Some of the heavier users of data -- the power users -- had data anxiety." But it's still a surprising move. Engadget reports that in the past Verizon "frequently tried its hardest to discourage unlimited data users," but today is "facing stiff competition from T-Mobile, which engineered a dramatic comeback in recent years and upped the ante by making unlimited data standard through the One plan."
Verizon's pricing was also targeted heavily last week in a barrage of Super Bowl ads by both Sprint and T-Mobile just last Sunday. T-Mobile showed a masochistic woman calling Verizon just to enjoying hearing about the overages, taxes and fees she incurred by exceeding her data limit, while Sprint showed a man who was trying to escape his Verizon contract by faking his own death.
Yup, because without those subsidies and reugulations, coverage in areas with lower populations (much less landlines) would CERTAINLY be better and cheaper, because market forces.
TLDR: Shitfuck, Nebraska has services of most any kind because of government, not the free market.
So the unlimited plan is NOT unlimited. Filthy lying bastards.
And absent cartels and monopolies as well - the free market is essentially a prisoner's dilemma between corporations, where 'defecting' is 'cutting your price'. That means that the Nash equilbrium is low, but collusion and cooperation means the corporations can routinely get a better profit by agreeing to keep their prices high (at the expense of consumers).
Diamonds and oil are well known examples of large organizations being quite capable of agreeing to keep prices high, to avoid a competitive spiral.
Carriers just don't get it (or they do get it and won't admit it). All we want is for them to be a dumb pipe. Connect us to the network and then GET OUT OF THE WAY.
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I always thought it was interesting that you can mention another product by name in a TV spot here in America. It is actually illegal in some other countries. You can't name a competitor directly. So most of the time you are left with references to a white box with a generic label like"Product X" or similar. The way they talk about it though, usually makes it clear which other company they are referring to. American advertisers do not have to go through such a loophole.
I dunno, it seems to me that at least in the case of the wireless industry, you have Verizon trying to make its services available where few people go in order to prove that it is providing a premium service for a premium price, while T-Mobile is trying to prove that it can provide the same services at a lower price.
Seems like good ol' fashioned competition to me.
Regulation, in many cases, does the opposite. Patents and copyrights are basically a form of regulation, with the former often inhibiting new, disruptive technologies hitting the market because somebody thought of a similar idea with a poor implementation.
Nice try, but the ideal market does not exist in the real world. Some markets are more "ideal" then others but none are perfect. As a result, government has to impose regulations to ensure the market is as close to ideal as possible. At this point capitalism can do its thing and optimize for efficiency. Without said regulations the market does not balance, corruption and/or monopolies emerge, and consumers are generally screwed.
Regulations should be minimized but never removed entirely. I personally support a system that regularly reviews regulations to ensure they still serve their original purpose. At times, updates will be required. So be it - regulations have to evolve with changing markets in order to ensure the market remains healthy. But any person (or organization) who claims that regulations have to be abolished is either horribly naive or has vested interests. All those lobbyists come to mind. Lobbyists are important because they inform government on the cost of regulations - but giving them all that they desire is never in the public's best interest.
The concept of a Free Market is a great teaching tool, but much like its counterpart, the infinite frictionless plain, it doesn't actually exist in reality in its theoretical form. That's because there is no free market where everyone involved has 100% access to all relevant information, and 100% freedom of action to buy or not, nevermind a complete absence of any consequence for behavior.
What is true, though, is that competition is a powerful force, and as long as that is kept reasonable/fair and free of anti-competitive forces, it can be harnessed to produce very positive results. Competition provides impetus for improvement and efficiency, where a noncompetitive market does not (and tends to lead to stagnation, arbitrary price increases, poor quality, and such).
Why this is important is that you need laws and regulations to make sure that the market is free and fair. Regulations can do things like make sure that weights and measurements are right (so you're not being cheated) or that companies aren't doing underhanded things to try and force competitors out of business or otherwise conspiring to scam the consumer (price fixing, cartelization, etc). That doesn't mean that every regulation is good, especially if they're being written by the competitors (regulatory capture), but they're not inherently evil either.
Nope sorry bullshit. If you had an actual free market (instead of the crony capitalism that passes for it in the USSA) then the people in those areas could form a co-op and pay for their area to have fiber and towers...but they will be crushed by lobbyists for the scumbag telecos that won't run out there but don't want any competition, no matter how small.
As long as you have corps big enough to buy their own laws you will have corruption and unfettered capitalism has been tried here before, it was called the age of the robber barons and ended up with corps having their own private armies and beating (and even killing) those that tried to unionize and blowing up rivals businesses...yeah lets go back to that, how about NO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They probably actually *can't* make it profitable. If the raise the prices, fewer will be willing to pay for it.
The problem with this is that they accepted money to provide the services, and planned from the beginning to not deliver. So any argument based on the idea that they telecom companies are at all trustworthy is clearly flawed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Now, if you want to build a log cabin on the top of a mountain, fine, maybe you're fine with no connection to the modern world. But a number of people live out in the "middle of nowhere" because their work requires a lot of open space in the "middle of nowhere". You know... like farming. Those are the 1% that feed the rest of the 99%. I think we can reach some reasonable compromise that ensures reasonable free market competition while still ensuring our farmers and ranchers, and those that support them, have access to technology and services everyone else takes for granted without being bankrupted in the process.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Two years ago AT&T tried to buy out T-mobile for way more than the market value of the company. Why? To get rid of the competition of course! Who stopped them? THE GOVERNMENT.
Thanks to government we have competition!
Surely they should be called Paulicans, no?
'unlimited' data plan.
This is especially bullshit because they HAD an unlimited data plan years ago and have spent the entire time since trying to kill it.
They're just freaked out that T-Mobile is now cheaper AND has a better network.
Denmark is smaller than even a single of the 50 states in the United States of America. This is not a comparison.
Why yes, I'd love latency in excess of 800 ms! That works very well with real time protocols like SIP & RTP. And "affordable" for various values of "affordable" ($125 for 30 GB per month sounds "affordable to you?). Also, notice how you only said affordable, not "reliable", because that it most certainly is not.
Satellite internet access is so shitty. It goes out constantly, doesn't deliver on promised speeds, and has ridiculous data plans. I had one of the largest data plans at 10 GB a month. I had hunted to find the best satellite provider and got Wild Blue. The customer service, ugh, that was the worst. They knew you literally had no other options besides dialup so I would get charged with random shit and have to spend 5 days on the phone trying to get my money back. Eventually I had my internet cut off because they said I downloaded the Matrix (?) and demanded $200 as a settlement offer and I told them to duck off.
I hope you don't count "You can't dump toxic sludge from your factory into the local river" as "ridiculous."
The enforcement of property rights is not regulation. You have every right to use your own property as you please, but others have exactly the same right—implying that you do not have the right to use their property without their permission. If you dispose of your pollutants in such a way that they end up harming others' property, including but not limited to their bodies, then you have infringed on their property rights and owe the victims redress. This is not some arbitrary regulation regarding how you may use your own property, but rather the natural consequence of others' rights to determine the use of their property.
As a term of art in political discussions, the term "regulation" refers to a restriction above and beyond simply respecting the property rights of others. Some regulations are indeed "ridiculous", but most are simply wrong, a product of politicians making a nuisance of themselves in situations where they have no standing to interfere.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Customers on the veritable last mile should have essential services whether they are are profitable or not, but that would certainly fall far from being described as ridiculous regulation. Nonetheless, paying for additional towers in BFE and Shitfuck, NE so that people can download data to sketchy 3G service probably encourages companies like Verizon to attempt cap limits.
The free market keeps Verizon competitive when upstarts that do not cover quite as unprofitable rural area begin to cut into their bottom line.
I think you've got it but you're missing a leg to the logic... The up-front cost(s) of getting land allowance, setting up a hut, raising a tower, and getting electricity to it are the costs that are set at whatever they are (unless negotiable). Allowing for more bandwidth requires (possibly, depending on the installation) more panels on the tower, more bandwidth delivered by directional beam from another location or utility-based landline upgrade of speed, or both. The cost is usually fixed per month on the second part of it, after the basic location layer 0 setup. Installation charges vary. Here's the kicker: if they get a shit ton of business in a city nearby, the net profit (financially-speaking) offsets the cost of the "BFE people". Those people may move. Whether or not Verizon keeps the networking (wireless or wired) at the level it is with less people (due to move) is their choice. In the mean time, those that move may keep their service if they're happy with it and be sucked into the massive black hole of city-level service. The costs offset. Population and housing will increase; it's a given unless there's a war or disease outbreak, natural disaster beyond comprehension, etc. Population increase would fit better into an enabled network, meaning the upgrade costs for the layer 1/2 services don't have to be constant costs with installation/service charges from the provider/contractors/etc - it's in place and requires only maintenance like any other site.
This is the thinking from someone who has suggested this as a business model, but the idea was rejected because the up-front costs and lower net profit were overriding the decision-makers' minds. Once service increased at an exponential rate, clients (customers) got pissed at the shitty service and the cost to upgrade to make them happy was higher than the overall cost over time because it was an "immediate need" and rushed. The amount of service increase was also a good guess and not set in stone, so there was over-provisioning, leading to removal of components. Then, the removal was enough to piss people off and require more installation at a high cost to compensate, but this time they weren't taking growth into mind. It's stupid in my opinion. Just create a wonderful thing up front where the gross profit is less and the net profit is way less, but watch it spike over time. I was fired from that job, BTW. "Higher-ups" and decision-makers hate having someone around that makes them not look like the center of the Universe of best practices. Anyhow, it isn't about me, I'm just sharing that to paint the story clearly.