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T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

nytimes.com

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Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#31

Post by rayiner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29
rayiner wrote: post #7

I really love T-Mobile, but its also a validation of all the ideas that traditional telecom regulation rejects. T-Mobile has focused its capital on urban areas and wealthier areas. My LTE download speeds in downtown Phila or DC are great. Service in the poor part of Wilmington where I live? I'm lucky to get 1-2 megabit on HSPA. People are rightfully excited about T-Mobile, but let's not forget that its success to dat…

> I really love T-Mobile, but its also a validation of all the ideas that traditional telecom regulation rejects. It's quite possible that traditional telecom regulation is ill conceived. Rural build out requirements are effectively a tax on providing service in urban areas used to subsidize providing service in rural areas. It's government interference in the market -- and maybe that's necessary to get what we want,…

I was thinking about this just the other day. Fixed subsidy per resident, and we see how far that gets you. The subsidy we have now is not a small thing. Even ignoring the cross subsidies intrinsic in build out requirements, we directly subsidize rural wired service to the tune of $4.5 billion per year via taxing long distance voice service. That's as much as TMobile spends on CapEx every year to build out an LTE network avaible to 200 million mostly urban customers.

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#32

Post by samstave »

jtchang wrote: post #5

The author of this article feels that he would be happy to see T-Mobile die trying. I personally have nothing but respect for T-Mobile. It is hard to change fundamental things such as pricing when you are such a large corporation. Doubly hard if your competitors have successfully proven contract pricing works. I hope T-Mobile continues to innovate. The telecom industry is overall a dinosaur. What keeps them alive is…

If I could meet the person who invented termination fees for month-to-month service, I would break their arms.

A provider who can cut your service off immediately for non-payment and charge you to cancel your plan, BUT which cannot be penalized for shitty/failed/falsely advertised service is lead by criminals.

Contract pricing, with termination fees and terms which do not allow for reciprocal credit for failure to provide the contracted service (i.e. without an SLA) should be fucking illegal.

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#33

Post by specialist »

primitivesuave wrote: post #21
SiVal wrote: post #13

How ironic. I'm packing for a brief trip to London, and I'd like to use my iPhone 5 while I'm there. T-Mobile offers terrific deals on sim cards in the UK. For about 15GBP or so, I could easily get a sim card with more talk minutes, texts, and data than I could possibly use during my short trip. It's so simple, I could get it from a vending machine at Heathrow. Perfect. The only bad news is that AT&T won't allow it.…

T Mobile will pay early termination fees if you switch. I haven't taken advantage of this yet, but I will, because I hate the slimy practices of AT&T.

If you switch AND get a new device.

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#34

Post by frenchman_in_ny »

coin wrote: post #2

T-Mobile's free 200MB/month for tablets is great, especially for text and email on the go. Side note: nytimes's website on mobile is totally annoying. No pinchzoom and double tap mucks with the font size. Just as we had Flash blockers back in the day, I look forward JavaScript blockers.

I had completely missed the fact that you can get a free 200MB/mo, all you have to do is pay $10 for the SIM. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#35

Post by jedberg »

SiVal wrote: post #13

How ironic. I'm packing for a brief trip to London, and I'd like to use my iPhone 5 while I'm there. T-Mobile offers terrific deals on sim cards in the UK. For about 15GBP or so, I could easily get a sim card with more talk minutes, texts, and data than I could possibly use during my short trip. It's so simple, I could get it from a vending machine at Heathrow. Perfect. The only bad news is that AT&T won't allow it.…

If you jailbreak your phone you can put in any sim you want. I did that when I went to Australia.

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#38

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #31
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really love T-Mobile, but its also a validation of all the ideas that traditional telecom regulation rejects. It's quite possible that traditional telecom regulation is ill conceived. Rural build out requirements are effectively a tax on providing service in urban areas used to subsidize providing service in rural areas. It's government interference in the market -- and maybe that's necessary to get what we want,…

I was thinking about this just the other day. Fixed subsidy per resident, and we see how far that gets you. The subsidy we have now is not a small thing. Even ignoring the cross subsidies intrinsic in build out requirements, we directly subsidize rural wired service to the tune of $4.5 billion per year via taxing long distance voice service. That's as much as TMobile spends on CapEx every year to build out an LTE net…

What I'm suggesting is a fixed subsidy amount ($X billion each year) which is split between all the carriers based on how many new customers that carrier serves who weren't served by anyone in any previous year. So on the one hand you have the carriers competing to increase their share of the subsidy pool every year by adding service for more new customers than their competitors, and on the other hand as the remaining unserved residents become those in ever more poor and rural areas and the rate of expansion slows overall, that causes the subsidy per new resident to increase and keep continued expansion attractive until the last unserved resident is served.

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#39

Post by lostlogin »

kabdib wrote: post #11

Certainly walking into my current provider's storefront and mentioning T-Mobile finally broke loose a long-standing warranty issue I had with AT&T. "Fix this, or I'm gonna walk." "Suuurrre you are." "No, really." [go to other end of the mall to the T-Mobile store, talk to sales guy -- who frankly almost got me to switch right then. Walk back to AT&T anyway.] "Hey, do you want me to still be your customer?" [Wave quot…

Do people buy online, own their phones outright and hop providers where you live? And if not, why not?

Re: T-Mobile Turns An Industry On Its Ear

#40

Post by derefr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
jtchang wrote: post #5

The author of this article feels that he would be happy to see T-Mobile die trying. I personally have nothing but respect for T-Mobile. It is hard to change fundamental things such as pricing when you are such a large corporation. Doubly hard if your competitors have successfully proven contract pricing works. I hope T-Mobile continues to innovate. The telecom industry is overall a dinosaur. What keeps them alive is…

> If we ever get a wireless alternative that is as fast as fiber (and easily deployable) we'd see the end of traditional telecoms as we know it. Like every Google Fiber set top box being a wireless access point accessible to other Google Fiber customers, as well as free to Android users? And Google using their fiber right of ways to deploy 802.11ac or picocells? Only in my dreams sir.

> Like every Google Fiber set top box being a wireless access point accessible to other Google Fiber customer...

There's a provider (Shaw) doing this part in Canada: http://www.shaw.ca/wifi/

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