Why AT&T Should Dump the iPhone's Unlimited Data Plan 501
Pickens writes
"Farhad Manjoo has a provocative story at Slate asserting that while the iPhone has prompted millions of people to join AT&T, it has also hurt the company's image because all of those customers use their phones too much, and AT&T's network is getting crushed by the demand. The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month, while the typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. As more people sign up, local cell towers get more congested, and your own phone performs worse. He says the problem is that a customer who uses 1 MB a month pays the same amount as someone who uses 1,000 MB, and the solution is tiered pricing. 'Of course, users would cry bloody murder at first,' writes Manjoo. 'I'd call on AT&T to create automatic tiers — everyone would start out on the $10/100 MB plan each month, and your price would go up automatically as your usage passes each 100 MB tier.' He says the key to implementing the policy is transparency, and that the iPhone should have an indicator like the battery bar that changes color as you pass each monthly tier. 'Some iPhone fans will argue that metered pricing would kill the magic of Apple's phone — that sense of liberation one feels at being able to access the Internet from anywhere, at any time. The trouble is, for many of us, AT&T's overcrowded network has already killed that sense, and now our usual dealings with Apple's phone are tinged with annoyance.'"
Re:cell towers or WiFi routers? (Score:3, Informative)
How much space will one wifi access point cover? A 100 ft radius? For 20,000 access points, that's only 22 square miles - less than a typical US township (36 square miles).
Re:Invest (Score:5, Informative)
so at&t adds fake fees and deceptively labels them as government taxes?
You changed my wording, I said 'government tax' like fee. And yes, they do.
The exact wording on a bill was "Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge".
This is in addition to:
* Federal Universal Service Charge
* Texas Universal Service Charge
Keep in mind that these are separate from the actual tax section of the bill and are not counted in the total contract monthly charge, they are added on top of that.
do you think that might get them in a bit of trouble?
No it does not.
sheesh
Indeed.
Re:Flawed Premise (Score:3, Informative)
That is mostly because (a) the Japanese phone system is government supported rather than a competitor in a field of many companies, (b) Japan uses an entirely different type of phone system with lots and lots of very small cells, and (c) the traffic mix in Japan is very different - lots and lots of SMS, almost no voice traffic.
It's really NOT even about the 3G network anyway! (Score:5, Informative)
What so many people seem to be completely ignoring is the fact that AT&T is focused on the NEXT generation of networks... the "4G" if you will.
I attended an AT&T sponsored "lunch and learn" session on "The future of wireless", several months back. (I got a free invite from our AT&T business sales rep. at my work. It included a free lunch at a nice hotel, and it's not often AT&T gives you ANYTHING free, so I figured "What the heck?" and went.)
They made it abundantly clear at this session that AT&T sees "smartphones" as the future of their business. The speaker even made a point of emphasizing that they feel the idea of a "telephone" is outdated. The future they see is everyone carrying around pocket computers, essentially, which do happen to allow making/taking voice calls, but will be used just as much, if not more, for data-related purposes.
They went on to say that they were pretty much getting behind the iPhone as *the* premiere device for this future, with the Blackberry being supported strongly as well, as the "alternate". They felt that a large display screen was an essential component to making all of this work, and right now, the iPhone is the only "smartphone" in widespread use with a big enough screen. The Blackberry, by contrast, they felt was a big player for other reasons. (Some people prefer having a real keyboard, if they're going to do a lot of data entry from their device, and the Blackberry has obvious advantages right now from corporate standpoints, where secure communications takes precedence over all else.)
AT&T has some interest in expanding into selling software and services related to all of this. (They mentioned a partnership, for example, with a company that makes development software that allows someone to code an app once, and have it support many different smartphone devices, without the developer having to concern him/herself with details of the screen resolutions and input limitations of each specific device. They also wanted to move into the space of selling tools to companies, to enable the remote use of their internal databases from mobile devices.)
Although it was more implied than stated, I came away with a pretty strong "hint" that AT&T really doesn't want to spend TOO much on improving their admittedly sub-standard 3G data network, because they feel the future is with migrating people to the next generation of data networks instead. They have goals of rolling it out by some time in 2011, at least for trial use and testing. If they make any moves like eliminating "unlimited" plans for iPhones to get more revenue, you can bet the extra profits WON'T improve your 3G performance. They'd simply funnel that into future R&D and rolling out of the new network (which won't even be compatible with the current crop of iPhones anyway). Any improvements you'd see would ONLY be from people leaving AT&T for other networks, or people reducing their usage of their iPhones to try to save money.
Oh, and for what it's worth, another "key point" they made (in response to a question from someone in attendance) was that AT&T still feels the "bread and butter" of the Internet should/will reside on land based connections. At the end of the day, they don't think much of the idea of everything "going wireless" to the point where T1 circuits and such cease to exist. They view the "wireless cellular network" as never being more than a "bridge" back to a wired network someplace nearby. (I happen to largely agree with them here, and think that's probably "common sense". Yet others would say that just reflects AT&T's long-standing mentality and interest in copper wires and land-lines ... and that they're incapable of "thinking far enough outside the box". Some might envision high-speed wireless comprised of everything from satellite to wi-fi repeaters placed all over as a future that would take the whole Internet into the wireless realm....)
Re:Sure.. that will build 1 thousandth of the towe (Score:3, Informative)
Have you EVER done anything related to cell site design? 40 mile RADIUS? That wiki states the LIMIT as 25 miles for GSM. In case you've never driving along a highway, there are towers a lot closer than every 50 miles. Wonder what the reason for that is? Oh, maybe it's because the radius of each cell site ISN'T 25 miles.
Let's try this. The signal being transmitted by the cell site, regardless of carrier or technology, travels at a certain frequency. When this signal hits any obstruction (yes, even air counts) it gets degraded and weakened by a certain amount. Buildings, trees, and ground are the main sources of signal degregation. If your tower is in a valley, you ain't getting signal from that tower on the other side of the mountain. The sad reality is that almost every tower is too low (either the height of the tower or it's ground elevation) to provide a 25 mile radius of coverage. Some mountain towers or towers along large bodies of water (Great Lakes for example) can get substantial line-of-site distances where calls can be made at 25 miles or more. So to assume that you can build towers to cover 6000+ square miles is absurd. Do the calculation assuming a radius of about 2 miles (most towers on highways in New England are spaced about 2-4 miles apart) and see how many towers you need to blanket the US. You could even go with a radius of 5 miles, because your towers in the Great Plains and other flat areas will get much greater radius of coverage and mountainous regious would have much smaller radius towers.
Either way, you can't have a valid calculation with an asinine assumption like each tower can cover 25 (or 40) miles in every direction. Nice try, though.
Sprint has high prices!? (Score:5, Informative)
You should be looking at the FCC (Score:3, Informative)
Everything the FCC touches is inflated. The actual cost of a radio, in active parts, that is stable and doesn't produce spurious output and interference: In the hundreds of dollars. Antenna, less. It's just folded and formed metal, very few active components, if any. Sturdy tower, 2-5 thousand, including a stable concrete base and mount. How do we know? Because ham radio operators put up very similar gear all the time. On many frequencies, some similar, some not, using many modes of transmission, again, some similar, some not.
Cost of "FCC type-approved" transmit equipment: In the tens of thousands. To which, as someone else pointed out, you have to add the cost of lawyers, licenses, land, VERY expensive type-approved towers, surveys, antennae, inspections, the hiring of FCC-approved engineers... it goes on and on. The benefit of all these extra processes? Basically zero. Well, other than lining the pockets of lawyers and vendors of type approved equipment, of course.
This is the cost of handing the government control of the spectrum. They make using it many times more expensive than it needs to be. The same thing they do to everything else. Why? Because they have absolutely no motive to bring down costs or make a profit, and if they fail to serve the people's needs, the people have no recourse -- we don't have any control over the FCC or any other embedded government operation.
For instance, you want to put a 100 watt FM broadcast station up at your house? It can be done for well under $500. You want to do it with FCC approval? Maybe, just maybe, you could do it for $50,000.00. But I doubt it. The difference in reliability, signal purity, stability, transmit coverage and quality because of cost alone? Zero.
The FCC's job here should be limited to coming out to the site before it's powered up, being there when that happens, taking a look at the output spectrum, taking a ride around to measure the coverage, measuring the tower/antennae assembly height to ensure it isn't in the way of the local aircraft patterns, if any, and handing over a signed operating license. For the cost of about half a day's pay for the inspector. The rest should be none of their business.
Re:Another failure to evaluate relevant concerns (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of points need to be clarified in your comment.
Re:iPhone (Score:4, Informative)
It's the most visible because it's the only one that gets advertised by the media
It's most visible because it was radically different from other platforms and single-handedly changed the market. Go ahead, show me 3D gaming on phones before the iPhone. For that matter, look at phone interfaces, capabilities, and internet usage on them before the iPhone. The iPhone raised the bar, and very little has caught up with it yet. State of the art used to be Windows Mobile 6 and PalmOS - yes, Palm OS. Windows Mobile has blown it ever since [networkworld.com], LiMo never went anywhere [current.com], and Google Android and Palm Pre very likely would not have been developed if the iPhone hadn't radically changed the market. It gets recognition for that, and it's well-deserved.
sales figures show a different story
Really? It's at 23% in the US, and 14% worldwide [businessinsider.com]. And it only came out two years ago, with its famously limited capabilities at the time.
Personally I'd much rather to see a future that continues with multiple companies (of which Apple can be one), with choice, and most importantly, compatible standards so that I can release an application that Just Works on all phones
Yeah, that worked out so well on Windows and the PC world. Multiple vendors never makes things Just Work - it's the antithesis of it. Protocol incompatibilities, inconsistent hardware support, no platform direction.
Look at Apple. For example, they want to support something like OpenCL. They make sure their hardware has the proper GPU's, the OS supports it, GrandCentral is created, the compiler toolchain adds blocks, and oh yeah, they've been working on LLVM/Clang for years. NONE of that happens when you have a heterogeneous environment and no one is coordinated. Apple wants to get rid of legacy ports and bus systems - so they do it. In two years, Apple abandoned floppies, SCSI, ADB, serial, NuBus, etc. Here we are over ten years later and PC's STILL have PS/2 ports and serial ports, right next to USB 3.0. Such progress.
Note that all phones can run so called "apps". Running applications on phones has been common on all but the most basic phones for at least 5 years, and note that the market of Java smartphones is estimated at two billion.
I'm sorry - you can't possibly compare Java Midlets to iPhone applications. Nice that it has two-billion phones. I'd bet that a fraction of a percent of those users have ever cared that it's there, and those that have used it (like I used to on my PalmOS Treo - KMaps and Opera Mini) can easily see what crap it is. Ugly, slow, non-native, battery-hungry, low-performance - that's Java on a phone, and one of the reasons it's not on the iPhone. Ditto for Flash, really.
Sadly, the only thing in your post that made any sense was that Apple should be more open. And it's "should", as in it would be nice. The market has shown that they certainly don't "need" to.
Re:Invest (Score:2, Informative)
American cars today very well made, and can compete in quality with anyone), that they let it happen again by placing all their eggs in the SUV basket while not just ignoring, but actively fighting fuel efficiency standards and slow walking the development of hybrids and all-electrics. Guess who owns that market now?
As a mechanic I cannot agree with this statement. While American cars aren't necessarily a bad idea to buy, they are some of the most PITA cars to work on. I am a freelance mechanic on the side (mostly doing jobs for friends, everything from oil changes to engine rebuilds) and let me tell you, I'd rater work on a 2000, or 2009 honda, toyota, nissan... hell even a BMW any day than a 2000 or 2009 ford or chevy (or any year except the pre-70s models, and those certainly aren't reliable due to age). Example of a car i worked on recently: to get to the slave cylinder on a 2009 ford focus you have to UNBOLT THE TRANSMISSION, compare to almost any other car where you just drop the exhaust and have at it, if that. I have an associate who is full time at a ford dealership, and he told me one day why the designs suck so horribly to work on and maintain (this plays into reliablilty and TCO a lot. im not just talking about jobs you need to hire a mech for). Two reasons come to mind, one is that Ford has not stuck with old designs and improved them, they insist on coming out with some new model every few years, imagine if they had stuck with and refined the nova, for example. Toyota has had the Corolla (ok it was called the the Corona before) for how long? How long has the focus been around? Consumers associate names with reliability, and the longer something has been known to be reliable, the more this is reinforced (civic and corolla being great examples). Second reason is under-skilled engineers. American car companies are known for hiring green engineers fresh out of school, rather than more seasoned professionals like the foreign companies do. Why? Short term cost cutting I'm sure, just more of the same mentality that has been wrecking this country for the last 20-30 years.
Re:400 MB? Really? (Score:1, Informative)
You stream? Really?
64000 bits per second for 8 hours a day 5 days a week for a four week month is 4,394 MiB. Thats something of an extreme example but 300 MiB only averages to 22 minutes per day of 64kbit/sec streaming or 11 minutes per day of 128kbit/sec streaming.
Less confused now?