The pay-as-you-go business in the USA is about 3 years behind Europe. Expiry of minutes and minimum top-up fees in the USA mean that effectively most so-called pay-as-you-go plans still require a minimum monthly payment.
This is finally changing. Virgin just launched the first truly open-ended pay-as-you-go service in the USA. $100 to buy the phone, 25c for the first 3 minutes each day and 10c/minute thereafter. Minutes never expire, and there are no long distance or roaming charges. Virgin is using Sprint's PCS network.
The only other service that has come close to this so far in the USA is Tracfone, which offers 365 days of continuous service including 150 minutes of airtime for $100 or so. Great for emergency use, but the price of additional minutes is high.
The trend in Europe has been ubiquitous ownership of pay-as-you-go phones, used modestly. The trend in the USA has been to bundle huge amounts of night/weekend minutes into monthly plans to encourage heavy use. It will be interesting to watch the collision between these business models.
Rabbit didn't fail because cellular/mobile phones overtook it. It failed because it offered no compelling advantage over a conventional payphone.
Rabbit phones didn't take incoming calls, and were only usable close to a "hotspot" where payphones were plentiful. Call charges were similar, and payphone users didn't need to buy equipment.
Payphones killed Rabbit, and now cellular/mobile is killing payphones. Two separate battles, 10 years apart.
(One marginal benefit of Rabbit was the ability to use the same phone at home with your own personal base station connected to your POTS line, like a conventional cordless phone. This wasn't enough to sell the service though. After the service collapsed, Rabbit phones and home base stations were sold off dirt cheap as digital cordless phones, and very good they were too.)
This is not new. In 1997 I bought a VCR which automatically skips commercials, all by itself.
It does this by rewinding to the beginning of the recording and analyzing the tape looking for the moment of black screen and zero audio level that typically marks the beginning and end of commercial breaks. It places index marks on the tape at these points. It takes about 5-10 minutes per hour of recorded material to mark a recording.
When you watch the tape, it detects the index marks and automagically fast-forwards through the commercials, resuming normal speed at just the right point. It works like a charm, and only occasionally misses a mark, in which case you can recover quickly using the remote. I'd say it is 95-97% accurate.
The technology is called "Commercial Advance" and is trademarked and patented. Don't confuse it with the "commercial skip" function on some VCRs, which is simply a 30-second fast forward to be used manually.
To this day I continue to be amazed by 3 things:
(1) it works as advertised;
(2) it is still on the market and has not been suppressed by advertising interests;
(3) my VCR is made by RCA, and RCA is owned by GE, which also owns the NBC network, whose revenue stream this product subverts. (Panasonic also ships this feature on some of its VCRs).
> 5) Frank Sinatra "New York, New York". Wouldn't this be considered inspirational?
Scott Simon played this on NPR's Weekend Edition on Saturday, a show not usually big on music. He followed it with a comment along the lines of "I don't know, I just somehow needed to hear that".
Slashdot Mirror
Instead we get short, tall (I don't care about the height of the cup), grande, super-grande, etc... names that don't mean squat to me
Squat? I think you're on to something there.
"I'd like a squat skinny latte please."
The pay-as-you-go business in the USA is about 3 years behind Europe. Expiry of minutes and minimum top-up fees in the USA mean that effectively most so-called pay-as-you-go plans still require a minimum monthly payment.
This is finally changing. Virgin just launched the first truly open-ended pay-as-you-go service in the USA. $100 to buy the phone, 25c for the first 3 minutes each day and 10c/minute thereafter. Minutes never expire, and there are no long distance or roaming charges. Virgin is using Sprint's PCS network.
The only other service that has come close to this so far in the USA is Tracfone, which offers 365 days of continuous service including 150 minutes of airtime for $100 or so. Great for emergency use, but the price of additional minutes is high.
The trend in Europe has been ubiquitous ownership of pay-as-you-go phones, used modestly. The trend in the USA has been to bundle huge amounts of night/weekend minutes into monthly plans to encourage heavy use. It will be interesting to watch the collision between these business models.
Rabbit didn't fail because cellular/mobile phones overtook it. It failed because it offered no compelling advantage over a conventional payphone.
Rabbit phones didn't take incoming calls, and were only usable close to a "hotspot" where payphones were plentiful. Call charges were similar, and payphone users didn't need to buy equipment.
Payphones killed Rabbit, and now cellular/mobile is killing payphones. Two separate battles, 10 years apart.
(One marginal benefit of Rabbit was the ability to use the same phone at home with your own personal base station connected to your POTS line, like a conventional cordless phone. This wasn't enough to sell the service though. After the service collapsed, Rabbit phones and home base stations were sold off dirt cheap as digital cordless phones, and very good they were too.)
This is not new. In 1997 I bought a VCR which automatically skips commercials, all by itself.
It does this by rewinding to the beginning of the recording and analyzing the tape looking for the moment of black screen and zero audio level that typically marks the beginning and end of commercial breaks. It places index marks on the tape at these points. It takes about 5-10 minutes per hour of recorded material to mark a recording.
When you watch the tape, it detects the index marks and automagically fast-forwards through the commercials, resuming normal speed at just the right point. It works like a charm, and only occasionally misses a mark, in which case you can recover quickly using the remote. I'd say it is 95-97% accurate.
The technology is called "Commercial Advance" and is trademarked and patented. Don't confuse it with the "commercial skip" function on some VCRs, which is simply a 30-second fast forward to be used manually.
To this day I continue to be amazed by 3 things:
(1) it works as advertised;
(2) it is still on the market and has not been suppressed by advertising interests;
(3) my VCR is made by RCA, and RCA is owned by GE, which also owns the NBC network, whose revenue stream this product subverts. (Panasonic also ships this feature on some of its VCRs).
There are more details and a review here .
FWIW, Home Depot has regular 5e for $57/1000ft,
and plenum 5e for $155/1000ft.
Especially if our goals of taking over the computing world are realized, ...
Be careful. Putting thoughts like that in writing are what got Bill Gates in trouble.
No wait, I've just remembered: he got away with it. Never mind.
> 5) Frank Sinatra "New York, New York". Wouldn't this be considered inspirational?
Scott Simon played this on NPR's Weekend Edition on Saturday, a show not usually big on music. He followed it with a comment along the lines of "I don't know, I just somehow needed to hear that".
An inspired choice, if not inspirational.