51–60 of 63 posts
Isn't this exactly the opposite of the way other metered services work? With residential electricity, for example, isn't it usual for the price per additional KWH to rise as one's monthly usage crosses the pricing tiers?
Isn't that exactly what you would want to encourage people to moderate their use of a supposedly scarce resource (like energy or bandwidth)?
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And the way to do that is: Fixed price for the first X GB, generous enough to cover ~90% of the users, variable pricing thereafter, and the aforementioned transparency about the status of your account. (In particular, text message alerts warning you when you've hit 90% of the limit, or some other active notification that you're going over, not just some abstract page that you could, theoretically, hit.)
This pricing model sounds to me like "the user is always punished." You bought XGB this month. You didn't use it all? Ooops, you overpaid. Punished. You used more? Ooops, you pay a higher rate for the overage. Punished. How about we treat this like any other commodity and I get exactly what I pay for?
This all sounds great up until I get to the "How?" part. All of his suggestions are sane and sound reasonable, but I don't trust any of the current data providers to implement any of them in a sane way. > Ruthless transparency from the telco as to how much you’ll pay for every MB. When have any of the telcos even been translucent when it came to pricing? They hide real prices in pages and pages of fine print and don'…
Telco companies in other countries are able to do this. Why shouldn't companies in the US then be able to offer such a model? E.g., see "Bob" in Austria: http://www.bob.at/gigabob The table (for one of their plans) says: Included volume per month: 9 GB Cost per month: 8.80 Euro Each additional GB: 4 Euro Fee to activate the plan: 0 Euro Max. speed: 4 Mbit/s Commitment period: None I'd say this is pretty transparent t…
> I can sense Net-heads all over the world rolling their eyes and shaking their heads: “Nope, I gotta have flat-rate data”
In my experience the usage based billing is the norm everywhere (i generally buy a sim card for data everywhere i go).
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Telco companies in other countries are able to do this. Why shouldn't companies in the US then be able to offer such a model? E.g., see "Bob" in Austria: http://www.bob.at/gigabob The table (for one of their plans) says: Included volume per month: 9 GB Cost per month: 8.80 Euro Each additional GB: 4 Euro Fee to activate the plan: 0 Euro Max. speed: 4 Mbit/s Commitment period: None I'd say this is pretty transparent t…
Because the US has a duopoly (AT&T/Verizon), for the most part. We have two smaller national carriers (T-Mobile/Sprint) and many regional carriers, but they are not competitive, nationally. With the duopoly, they can maintain the status quo as there's no real competition or innovation going on.
> A price-per-MB that falls during the course of the month as you use more and more. I sort of disagree with his pricing model. I think this is the best model for both data and voice: Charge me an account fee (say $10 per month for a phone with every feature enabled. Caller id, voicemail, data, text messaging etc, etc) and then charge me per minute of call time, per text sent and per MB of data. Here's the important…
From a technical perspective it's all just bytes. The fact that we (myself included) think of calls, texts and data as three separate things just shows how far off the rails things have gone. It's like if my home internet bill was divided into Skype Minutes, Emails Sent and Web Data.
Until you can introduce competition to the system, any bandwidth plan will be grossly oversold at huge markup profits to the telecoms, who will be complaining they have to build any towers at all while taking home huge profits off phone rates.
This guy doesn't get consumer pricing psychology. It has been shown over and over again that consumers prefer fixed price, even if they have to pay more to get it. They don't want to be on a meter, they want a predictable budget. The telcoms don't set the dominant pricing model, the consumer does. There have been plenty of iterations of $/min and $/MB telcom plans already tried in the marketplace. And telcoms would p…
I guess I don't get it either. "Fixed price" is always a floor, never a ceiling. How is that good for you? My power bill isn't the same every month. My water bill isn't either. I know my patterns and roughly the monthly cost, and I can use less if money is tight. You know how much cellular data I use per month? 0KB. Why? Because I don't want a giant fixed price add-on to my bill. If I could buy a smart phone, use WiF…
I think it's great, especially when travelling to different countries (which seem to all offer this option - only for iPad).
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Which Comcast transparency are you talking about? I had Comcast in mind specifically when I was writing my cynical post.
Log in to your Comcast account, and on one of the primary tabs will be the amount of bandwidth you've used this month and the totals for the previous two months, along with a clear specification that you get 250GB/month (and how fuzzy they are willing to be about that), and some FAQs about why. Market-speak about why, yes, but still, it's there. It's all there now, and has been for at least a year. And they clearly a…
Also, I just spent 15 minutes poking through the comcast.com website without finding any mention of a 250GB/month limit. I did a search for "250gb" (it even came up as a suggestion from their search engine) but it told me there were no results for that search query.