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AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

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Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#4

Post by heresy »

Pray that this mindset does not infect your ISPs and tempt them to introduce traffic caps.

Having your users be paranoid that they're going to go over their cap and get absolutely reamed for overage charges is not exactly how you build an advanced, high-bandwidth content delivery system.

Even less are going to be "data pigs" that use a trivial 1.5GB after such a change, high prices guarantee that.

Silly buggers.

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#7

Post by thethimble »

I disagree with the author's points. AT&T doesn't care how integrated a mobile device is into their customers lives. All they care about is the money the customers pay them. And the more customers they have, the more money they make. However, instead of building a robust mobile infrastructure that can support all users, they try to cram as many low-usage customers they can on their outdated network.

Alienate one network "hog" and you'll find 49 others who will pay the same amount of money for a fraction of the usage. And for all the users they lose, they'll recoup millions in overcharging.

I love how customer satisfaction is one of AT&T's most important goals...

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#9

Post by potatolicious »

I too dislike how AT&T foisted these prices on us - but I disagree with the author here.

He seems to be advocating that there's something wrong with not consuming 1.5-2GB a month. He's a heavy user - cool, but I see no reason for the majority of the world to be just like him.

> "Why are so many people using so little bandwidth? Or, put another way, you should be ashamed of yourself if you sell a device like the iPhone and then encourage people use it so lightly that they only consume a couple hundred megs of data a month."

Honestly, I don't think anyone has been encouraging people to use less bandwidth. For most users a few hundred megs a month is plenty, and there's nothing wrong with that. Unlike us geeks they're not constantly chained to their gizmotrons, and do not live like cybernetic organisms. That's perfect okay, and in fact I'm jealous of that lifestyle sometimes.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's very short-sighted to cap bandwidth - we may very well be killing the next world-changing app in the crib. The world will find use for all of this bandwidth if we let them, but at this point in time I don't think one can look at the bandwidth usage numbers and proclaim that people aren't using their phones enough.

At what point does the phone stop working for us, and instead we for them?

Re: AT&T Learns Exactly the Wrong Lesson About Data Usage

#10

Post by awa »

potatolicious wrote: post #9

I too dislike how AT&T foisted these prices on us - but I disagree with the author here. He seems to be advocating that there's something wrong with not consuming 1.5-2GB a month. He's a heavy user - cool, but I see no reason for the majority of the world to be just like him. > "Why are so many people using so little bandwidth? Or, put another way, you should be ashamed of yourself if you sell a device like the iPhon…

I think he wants to say AT&T should get the users hooked to using lot of data, so they as a subscription company can keep making money from users for a longer time.
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