591–600 of 608 posts
Does anyone know if they are data-mining the phone calls?
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What I don't get is, what's in this for Sprint and T-Mobile? Currently a user of their network is a customer they "own" -- they deal with that customer directly. Now they have Google sitting between them and the user, which effectively commoditizes their service; Google could switch them out for another network down the road without the user ever knowing or caring. That's great for Google, and probably also great for…
Google is charging a significant markup over T-Mobile's existing rates ($30/month for 5Gb vs $70/month through Gooogle.) So Fi is really only interesting for people doing significant international roaming.
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> It increases costs without directly increasing revenue. Attracting more customers because you offer unlimited data and other carriers don't sounds like a pretty-damn-direct increase of revenue to me. See also: how T-Mobile makes money off me and millions of others.
The quote is talking about upgrading the network increasing costs without directly increasing revenue.
Barring that, however (as I mentioned elsewhere in this topic), congestion issues are already resolved in the wired broadband realm by selling speed rather than data quantity. There's little reason why the wireless world can't do the same by selling access to 2G/3G/4G separately, then making every plan unlimited (or, at the very least, have way bigger caps for everyone, as is the case currently with some of the not-so-great broadband ISPs).
Basically, you'd have T-Mobile's approach, but with a lot more flexibility. In combination with a no-contract carrier (like T-Mobile) or reseller (like Google Fi), a customer could, say, subscribe to a 2G or 3G plan for normal usage, but then subscribe to the 4G plan for a day or so if he/she wants to binge-watch Game of Thrones or somesuch. This way, the congestion issues are addressed (there's a direct monetary incentive for carriers to build more robust networks, since the faster data subscriptions would cost more and generate more revenue) while not imposing arbitrary caps on the quantity of data "used" by a customer. Win-win.
This could be even further extended by providing the 2G and 3G plans with an optional scheme of "we'll give you $X days of 4G per month" (similar to T-Mobile's "we'll give you $X gigabytes of 4G per month"). That way, our Game of Thrones bingewatcher doesn't have to deal with changing the subscription; he'd instead have a week's worth of 4G per month that he could activate on a per-day basis (for example). An even sweeter deal would be for these unused days of 4G to roll over to the next month up to a year (or some other suitably-reasonable length of time), like what T-Mobile already does for its non-unlimited plans.
There's more than one way to do it :)
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If they regret offering it, then they'd get rid of it like AT&T did. No, T-Mobile and Sprint embrace it. It's what differentiates them from their competitors. They know that the claims of "oh no, unlimited data would cause congestion issues!!!!11one" were a poor excuse even a decade ago, let alone in the present day, and are thus unafraid to offer customers something that doesn't result in total shafting. AT&T and Ve…
"We'll give you a couple gigs of high-speed data; if you go over that, we'll just throttle you to 2G speeds without charging overages or any such nonsense. If you want more high-speed, pay for more of it or go with our actual unlimited plan." ... which slows you to 2G speeds after 5GB, instead. I want to like T-mo, I've been a customer in the past until coverage made me give them up, but that point above is somewhat…
You do realize they really do offer an unthrottled unlimited plan, right? $100/mo. for 2 lines (so $50/mo./line) as of five minutes ago when I double-checked their site.
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http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans If you scroll down, there's: $30 per month — Unlimited web and text with 100 minutes talk 100 minutes talk | Unlimited text | First 5GB at up to 4G speeds I'm considering switch from that plan to Google Fi for Canada data.
No tethering with that plan.
For those who don't want to read the FAQ or find the video incredibly unhelpful [1]: a. It only supports the Nexus 6 out of the gate. b. It automatically switches you to the "fastest" network available. Partners out of the gate are Sprint and T-mobile. Sounds like it prefers Wifi, then 4G LTE, and then degrades down to 3G or 2G. c. Pricing is $20 for unlimited talk (domestic) and text (domestic and international) and…
Ahhh soooo annoying that it requires a Nexus 6. This sounds so awesome but I do not want a 6" phone. I'm hoping the next Nexus phone will have a smaller variant (and it will undoubtedly support Project Fi)
Probably that Nexus 5 reboot people are talking about.
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That was a question I had: where's the money for Google? Are they in this to force competition only, or do they see this as a viable business model? For those in the know: how much would they get per subscriber, assuming $20 for the "basics" as they call it, and $10 per Gig for data? This is likely difficult to calculate, given they are using both T-Mobile _and_ Sprint, and they refund unused data. But I'd be curious…
They don't need to make money; they earn more money off of advertisements served. This plan enables people to be 'more online' while mobile, even in other countries. Google has always been trying to lower the barriers to the internet (slow javascript -> Chrome (v8 engine), the internet baloons in africa, and now a global cellular/mobile internet service at decent rates).
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That was a question I had: where's the money for Google? Are they in this to force competition only, or do they see this as a viable business model? For those in the know: how much would they get per subscriber, assuming $20 for the "basics" as they call it, and $10 per Gig for data? This is likely difficult to calculate, given they are using both T-Mobile _and_ Sprint, and they refund unused data. But I'd be curious…
They don't need to make money; they earn more money off of advertisements served. This plan enables people to be 'more online' while mobile, even in other countries. Google has always been trying to lower the barriers to the internet (slow javascript -> Chrome (v8 engine), the internet baloons in africa, and now a global cellular/mobile internet service at decent rates).
This is insane. I can't think of an industry that google is not trying to compete in. Auto industry, space industry, internet of things industry (Nest), internet/media industry, cable/internet provider industry, automobile industry, robotics industry, software industry, smartphone industry, pc industry now the telecom industry. I'm starting to expect Google to launch an airline here pretty soon. How can they possibly…
They won't be a market leader in everything. What do they lead aside from search, ads, and mobile OS? The really funny bit is that near the end of Steve Jobs's life (per the biography), Larry Page asked him for advice and of course he said "focus on doing a few things really well, cut out everything else." Seems Larry decided he knew better.
Apparently he did. In the same biography, Isaacson wrote that "asking for advice to run a company" was just a clever way for Larry to visit Jobs in peace, playing to his ego, so to speak, as Jobs still held a grudge against Android.
Google is a very different company from Apple anyway. At Apple, innovation runs top-down, from the likes of Jobs and Ive to Foxconn workers. At Google, innovation runs bottom-up.
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"Most"? I've not had a single Android phone where the buttons have been part of the display. A few tablets, but no phones. I'm sure there are plenty of phones that do that too, but I've somehow managed to avoid them for the 6-7 or so Android phones I've owned.
Pretty much every Android phone released in the last 2 years besides those made by Samsung (which is admittedly a large percentage) have had on screen keys.