The bandwidth overage fee for DataPro is a reasonable $10 for each extra gigabyte. Verizon and Sprint charge around $50 per extra gigabyte in overage fees. If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?
It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.
So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
People like to know how much they're paying every month and not have to worry about every kilobyte transferred, one of the reasons that many people prefer postpaid plans that include a certain number of minutes per month rather than prepaid ones where you have to keep track of how much you're using. It's stressful!
How are pre-paid plans any different than making sure that your car has enough fuel in the tank? People don't by gasoline on post-paid plans. The real issue here is that there is no standard/easy way of knowing how many minutes you have left (i.e. fuel gauge). People have a good handle on how long a minute is, and they could easily read a countdown ticker on their phone. People go for unlimited because, "if $10 for 250 minutes is a good deal, then $30 for infinity minutes is a better deal!" You also have to add in the laziness factor (i.e. If I have unlimited minutes, then I don't have to worry about buying more minutes if I ever need to use more minutes in a given month).
Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.
People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.
Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
Because the vast majority of people don't use enough bandwidth to make that option more profitable for the telcos than their current setup, where people buy much more bandwidth (if you measure it as being the maximum throughput times the amount of time in a month) than they need.
If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?
Question for Mr. Gruber: do you think pay-per-byte cable/DSL internet would be a good idea also? If not, why not? If yes, how do you explain the market's overwhelming preference for flat-fee over pay-go?
Obviously, ISPs could charge by the byte. To my knowledge none do, for reasons others have mentioned already. We don't like thinking about the marginal cost of web pages, and nobody wants a nasty surprise on their internet bill at the end of the month.
Tiered pricing isn't germane to metering. A power company might place me in one service tier, and a megawatt aluminum smelting operation in another. They might pay less per kWh than I do, but we both pay ~20% more if we use 20% more power. OTOH, while Time Warner will let me pay an extra $10 to upgrade from "5Mb" service to "15Mb" service, my monthly bill is fixed regardless of my usage level.
I'm actually finally getting sick of Gruber's incessant cheer-leading of every little move that apple/AT&T do. I know its his job, but seriously some of these moves are beyond stupid. And praising them with a straight face is ridiculous.
He refers to the tethering charge as "bullshit." Is that cheer-leading? If so, I what kind of language should he use to express vituperation? He also expresses contempt for changing the plan on a flagship product a month after release. This doesn't sound like cheer-leading to me.
More importantly, he isn't praising the moves so much as saying that he will save a few bucks with the new plans, and that for all of the problems 3G on an iPhone with AT&T is less shitty than another product a MiFi.
I get the sense you're reviewing other things he's written and not this specific post.
If 95% of people use less than 2GB per month, why did they need to change the plans? Surely the people using gigantic amounts of data are breaking the terms of service and can be dealt with.
"Unlimited data" isn't about data, or price, or value. It's about not having to worry -- or to even think about -- how much you use your phone. If I'm on a 2GB plan, even though I use less than 2GB per month on average, I'll start thinking about rationing my usage every single time I use my phone. That fundamentally changes the experience of having the internet in my pocket.
I am amazed that Apple allowed AT&T to make these changes. They go against the stuff Apple stands for -- the culture Steve was talking about at D8 yesterday.
I sent a (probably futile) email to Steve Jobs this afternoon expressing basically the same sentiment.
It's not Apple-like. I don't want to worry about the nitty gritty of how many bytes I'm sending and receiving. I just want to use my iPhone, and I pay to be able to do just that.
You emailed the wrong person. It's AT&T, not Apple. They're two very separate companies. To be honest, I've had less trouble with AT&T than any of the other telecoms. This change prompted me to check my data usage for the last six months and I was surprised to find that I actually use less than 200mb a month on my iPhone - these new plans are actually going to save me money.
This I realize. I also know that Apple has more influence in this than AT&T does, by sheer force of economy if nothing else. I somehow doubt this either happened without Apple's approval, or if it did, something will be changing with regards to AT&T's exclusive rights to the iPhone in the near future.
Besides, had I emailed AT&T's CEO, I may have received a cease and desist. Didn't want to chance that: http://9to5mac.com/ATT_FAIL
AT&T should realize that they'd be out of business (because of their poor customer support and poor network) without the iPhone. I would think that if they do realize that, then they would listen to what Apple has to say.
Just like Sprint's out of business. Just like T-Mobile's out of business. Just like Verizon's out of business. Wait, what?
They all have terrible customer support, and I've had zero complaints about AT&T's coverage while I've had my phone, with the exception of when I was at Lollapalooza a couple of years ago, where I got no signal at all, which added salty irony to all the AT&T sponsorship banners in Grant Park that year.
You can't possibly believe that "American Telephone & Telegraph" would so easily be out of the telephone business without the iPhone. That's an absurd notion.
That's why in every MMORPG I've played, I've ended up with an inventory full of potions I never use. Every time I might want to consume one, I worry that it might not be the best time to use it.
My phone does have limited minutes and that doesn't bother me, but that's because the limit is three orders of magnitude over my average use, and two orders of magnitude over the most I have ever used. I'm only at risk of hitting the limit if I undergo some major life changing event, which I'd probably notice.
That's exactly the intuition that led Cingular (now AT&T) to give rollover minutes. I doubt they will offer me any "rollover gigabytes" for my data plan, however.
yup, if I am on one of these plans, I no longer will try new apps when somebody mentions it, also, i will quickly uninstall /switch off(try to) all apps/settings which sends data to ATT and Apple to make "my" iPhone experience better
If 95% of people use less than 2GB per month, why did they need to change the plans? Surely the people using gigantic amounts of data are breaking the terms of service and can be dealt with.
I think it's a better policy to gently disuade, via pricing structure, people from going hog-wild on consuming a finite, shared resource. Trying to handle each case on the back end as a TOS violation sounds a lot more messy, expensive, and reactive to me.
You know there are probably guys out there who would torrent hundreds of movies over a tethered phone or share their MP3 collection over Limewire (ok, I'm dating myself), or perpetually stream video if they thought to themselves "hey, it's free". This pricing structure is designed to make those guys feel the pinch, as well they should. There's only so much spectrum in the neighborhood of a given tower.
> $15/month for the 200 MB/month “DataPlus” plan is a great starting price, and AT&T claims that 65 percent of their smartphone users use less than that. I thoroughly doubt that 65 percent of their iPhone users use less than that.
Actually, I don't doubt it, I'm one of them. Though it has more to do with the fact that coverage in my area is EDGE-only and that, except when I'm driving, I'm pretty much in a WiFi hotspot all the time.
I don't have wifi, rarely use it when out. I thought I was a heavy user of the 3g, but rarely go over 150mb a month. I am 3 weeks through this months allotment, and I have only used 50mb so far.
Of course, this does not take away form the fact that they changed the deal 1 month after the iPads release in the US.
Now it's only $15 for data, plus the existing $10 for an extra line, I can imagine there's going to be a lot of kids on family plans who will now be allowed to get iPhones.
If you use more than 2 GB per month, you deserve to pay more than the rest of us who do not. Why is this hard to understand?
So my real concern about these type of data plans is not that they are not fair, but that they will stifle inovation and the way people use their phones. If we are not pushing the phone networks to expand the amount of data that they can push out to phones and we are not encouraging every phone user to use as much data as possible inovation in how people use their phones will slow.
It is concerning to me that AT&T is now offering people a financial incentive to not look for new and interesting ways to use their phone...
While limiting bandwidth could restrict innovation, encouraging people to use 'as much data as possible' is not a driver of innovation. Using more bandwidth is a subset of people finding, 'new and interesting ways to use their phone.'
These changes save me $120 over 2 years so I can't complain too much about losing bandwidth I wasn't using anyway. AT&T could have probably made these changes without cutting prices by simply adjusting the definition of unlimited. For tethering if you figure $25 (base) + $20 (tethering) + $60 (overages, to match Verizon's 5GB cap) you're paying $105/month without the option to wifi tether. Looks like AT&T doesn't mind high usage customers going to another carrier.
While they're at it they need to break down voice plans a little further, too. I believe it was Dan Hesse that said he noticed people were using the phone part of their smartphone less. I don't see why I need to pay $40 for 400 minutes, most of which I don't use. I'd easily deal with half that. I just checked my account and I currently have ~4,000 rollover minutes.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 87.5 ms ] threadIt's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.
So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.
People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.
Because the vast majority of people don't use enough bandwidth to make that option more profitable for the telcos than their current setup, where people buy much more bandwidth (if you measure it as being the maximum throughput times the amount of time in a month) than they need.
Question for Mr. Gruber: do you think pay-per-byte cable/DSL internet would be a good idea also? If not, why not? If yes, how do you explain the market's overwhelming preference for flat-fee over pay-go?
Obviously, ISPs could charge by the byte. To my knowledge none do, for reasons others have mentioned already. We don't like thinking about the marginal cost of web pages, and nobody wants a nasty surprise on their internet bill at the end of the month.
Tiered pricing isn't germane to metering. A power company might place me in one service tier, and a megawatt aluminum smelting operation in another. They might pay less per kWh than I do, but we both pay ~20% more if we use 20% more power. OTOH, while Time Warner will let me pay an extra $10 to upgrade from "5Mb" service to "15Mb" service, my monthly bill is fixed regardless of my usage level.
More importantly, he isn't praising the moves so much as saying that he will save a few bucks with the new plans, and that for all of the problems 3G on an iPhone with AT&T is less shitty than another product a MiFi.
I get the sense you're reviewing other things he's written and not this specific post.
"Unlimited data" isn't about data, or price, or value. It's about not having to worry -- or to even think about -- how much you use your phone. If I'm on a 2GB plan, even though I use less than 2GB per month on average, I'll start thinking about rationing my usage every single time I use my phone. That fundamentally changes the experience of having the internet in my pocket.
I am amazed that Apple allowed AT&T to make these changes. They go against the stuff Apple stands for -- the culture Steve was talking about at D8 yesterday.
It's not Apple-like. I don't want to worry about the nitty gritty of how many bytes I'm sending and receiving. I just want to use my iPhone, and I pay to be able to do just that.
You emailed the wrong person. It's AT&T, not Apple. They're two very separate companies. To be honest, I've had less trouble with AT&T than any of the other telecoms. This change prompted me to check my data usage for the last six months and I was surprised to find that I actually use less than 200mb a month on my iPhone - these new plans are actually going to save me money.
Besides, had I emailed AT&T's CEO, I may have received a cease and desist. Didn't want to chance that: http://9to5mac.com/ATT_FAIL
They all have terrible customer support, and I've had zero complaints about AT&T's coverage while I've had my phone, with the exception of when I was at Lollapalooza a couple of years ago, where I got no signal at all, which added salty irony to all the AT&T sponsorship banners in Grant Park that year.
You can't possibly believe that "American Telephone & Telegraph" would so easily be out of the telephone business without the iPhone. That's an absurd notion.
My phone does have limited minutes and that doesn't bother me, but that's because the limit is three orders of magnitude over my average use, and two orders of magnitude over the most I have ever used. I'm only at risk of hitting the limit if I undergo some major life changing event, which I'd probably notice.
I think it's a better policy to gently disuade, via pricing structure, people from going hog-wild on consuming a finite, shared resource. Trying to handle each case on the back end as a TOS violation sounds a lot more messy, expensive, and reactive to me.
You know there are probably guys out there who would torrent hundreds of movies over a tethered phone or share their MP3 collection over Limewire (ok, I'm dating myself), or perpetually stream video if they thought to themselves "hey, it's free". This pricing structure is designed to make those guys feel the pinch, as well they should. There's only so much spectrum in the neighborhood of a given tower.
Actually, I don't doubt it, I'm one of them. Though it has more to do with the fact that coverage in my area is EDGE-only and that, except when I'm driving, I'm pretty much in a WiFi hotspot all the time.
Of course, this does not take away form the fact that they changed the deal 1 month after the iPads release in the US.
So my real concern about these type of data plans is not that they are not fair, but that they will stifle inovation and the way people use their phones. If we are not pushing the phone networks to expand the amount of data that they can push out to phones and we are not encouraging every phone user to use as much data as possible inovation in how people use their phones will slow.
It is concerning to me that AT&T is now offering people a financial incentive to not look for new and interesting ways to use their phone...