The short term revenue they'd collect by picking up out-of-contract customers would not be worth it. Once one carrier makes a significant pricing change, all the others will follow suit, levelling out the playing field so that once again, nobody has a clear advantage.
All this will do is reduce the size of the greater pie by removing SMS revenue from the picture. Why would a business want to reduce their respective industry's potential revenue?
There are alternatives, it's not just one company providing the service to the end consumer. What we're seeing in the Telco industry is that they are simply avoiding engaging in a cannibalizing price-war. If they ever do (which is possible with new entrants or board changes, but completely undesired by every existing large Telco), you will see prices drop across the board.
Sure it's somewhat of an oligopoly because of the difficult barriers to entry (capital, regulation, availability of resources), but it's still overwhelmingly a 'free' market economy. Avoiding a price-war by intuition is not collusion.
I was a Cogeco user (in Hamilton) for about 5 years, until quite recently July 2007. I had the fastest service they could offer (5-7 Meg?).
I am 100% confident that they were practicing numerous phases of traffic and packet shaping, specifically targeted towards impeding Bit Torrent traffic. Both packet header encryption and using port 1720 seemed to "help" at first, but eventually all BT traffic seemed to trickle, with uploads never exceeding a few KB/s aggregate.
It was frustrating that I was unable to share my own torrents with the world (as a hopeful content producer).
I'm on TELUS 3 Meg DSL now in Edmonton, and I can safely say that there is no (or negligable) anti-Torrent traffic management going on.:)
Honestly, me too. Being able to derive models, equations, and solutions with a few rules and some mental sweat were always a very interestng and satisfying experience. Especially toward the end of Engineering school, when you actually understand why you learned the math you did, and how it explains physical phenomena on the micro or macro scale. Those moments of clarity and understanding during study sessions in the library, in classes, or nose-deep into a text book were more fun than all the lab time we spent coding, building circuits, or memorizing answer-methods/mental-processes for exam environments.
It already is a real business. $20 / month subscriptions to mp3 downloads to your mobile.
An example: http://www.telusmobility.com/bc/wweb/index.shtml
What the real business success story will be is when we finally have our converged communications and media access systems: one user account to rule them all. Integrating cell phone downloads with PC downloads, media access in the car, on the television; economies of scale-based subscription fees, and funds finally funneled into the appropriate pockets!... and now I'm waking up from my dream.:)
LOL, you totally got me on this. I was expecting to read something great, and I was surprised by something so great it even defied time itself! Awesome.
Hah! I was waiting to see if anyone would mention Dr Todd's solar mesh project at McMaster! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. It's definately a "research project" if they are workign on creating new power saving methodologies, including real-time handoffs of solar/battery supplies (take a look through the publications section). I do agree though that you could build a pretty functional unit with just standard off-the-shelf products.
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The short term revenue they'd collect by picking up out-of-contract customers would not be worth it. Once one carrier makes a significant pricing change, all the others will follow suit, levelling out the playing field so that once again, nobody has a clear advantage. All this will do is reduce the size of the greater pie by removing SMS revenue from the picture. Why would a business want to reduce their respective industry's potential revenue?
There are alternatives, it's not just one company providing the service to the end consumer. What we're seeing in the Telco industry is that they are simply avoiding engaging in a cannibalizing price-war. If they ever do (which is possible with new entrants or board changes, but completely undesired by every existing large Telco), you will see prices drop across the board. Sure it's somewhat of an oligopoly because of the difficult barriers to entry (capital, regulation, availability of resources), but it's still overwhelmingly a 'free' market economy. Avoiding a price-war by intuition is not collusion.
I guess there's no chance then they'll be Jack Bauer, eh?
I was a Cogeco user (in Hamilton) for about 5 years, until quite recently July 2007. I had the fastest service they could offer (5-7 Meg?).
:)
I am 100% confident that they were practicing numerous phases of traffic and packet shaping, specifically targeted towards impeding Bit Torrent traffic. Both packet header encryption and using port 1720 seemed to "help" at first, but eventually all BT traffic seemed to trickle, with uploads never exceeding a few KB/s aggregate.
It was frustrating that I was unable to share my own torrents with the world (as a hopeful content producer).
I'm on TELUS 3 Meg DSL now in Edmonton, and I can safely say that there is no (or negligable) anti-Torrent traffic management going on.
Honestly, me too. Being able to derive models, equations, and solutions with a few rules and some mental sweat were always a very interestng and satisfying experience. Especially toward the end of Engineering school, when you actually understand why you learned the math you did, and how it explains physical phenomena on the micro or macro scale. Those moments of clarity and understanding during study sessions in the library, in classes, or nose-deep into a text book were more fun than all the lab time we spent coding, building circuits, or memorizing answer-methods/mental-processes for exam environments.
An example: http://www.telusmobility.com/bc/wweb/index.shtml What the real business success story will be is when we finally have our converged communications and media access systems: one user account to rule them all. Integrating cell phone downloads with PC downloads, media access in the car, on the television; economies of scale-based subscription fees, and funds finally funneled into the appropriate pockets! ... and now I'm waking up from my dream. :)
I don't think the CIA has any legal right to have access to Canadian private data. :)
LOL, you totally got me on this. I was expecting to read something great, and I was surprised by something so great it even defied time itself! Awesome.
Hah! I was waiting to see if anyone would mention Dr Todd's solar mesh project at McMaster! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. It's definately a "research project" if they are workign on creating new power saving methodologies, including real-time handoffs of solar/battery supplies (take a look through the publications section). I do agree though that you could build a pretty functional unit with just standard off-the-shelf products.
:)
-- ECE 06