It uses a special SIM to hand off between Wi-Fi, T-Mobile, and Sprint service. There's one other MVNO that supports both of those networks, Ting, though they don't support both networks on one device simultaneously (yet; I think they might be working on it). I'm on Ting and it's nice having a T-Mobile phone in my pocket while my wife has a Sprint phone, all on the same account and billing.
I don't know why this becomes an issue with every single service Google launches. It's pretty clear Google's strategy is not to launch Apps support for any product that is either beta or immediately post-beta, and it wants to wait a bit until things get stable enough to use for enterprise.
It's frustrating because Google Apps has been the solution for bring-your-own-domain email, and many people use it as such. If I could use my own domain on a consumer Gmail account, I would.
Google acts like it's just for enterprise customers, but that's not how a whole lot of people use it.
That's actually a much more logical explanation than I've heard before, but it seems to be based on a potential misunderstanding of who is using the service -- maybe it is mostly giant companies, but I bet there are a lot of tinkerers who just like having the custom email domain.
On that thread, for us early adopters who got permanently free Google domains for up to 50 users before Google Apps for Work was ever a thing, declined to upgrade, and kept the free service...
I have no point really, other than to be the one saying Thanks Google in a gripe thread. I have been bitten by this before, but now that the sting has eased I don't miss Google Apps on my personal vanity domain account even a little bit. I have a real gmail /g+ account that I can use to sign up for betas and giveaways like this, for mailing lists I'd rather keep separate from more personal comms, and for any other pseudonymous communication, etc. that saves me from a lot of hassle, and my employer is a paid subscriber to Apps for Work, so I even am really aware of all what I'm missing.
tl;dr: thanks for the free e-mail service, Google! You're a real bro
"No, we only support individual accounts during Project Fi's Early Access Program. If multiple people on your current wireless plan are interested in joining our early access program, each user is required to have a Project Fi account."
from the FAQ:
Does Project Fi have family plans or other plans for multiple users?
No, we only support individual accounts during Project Fi's Early Access Program. If multiple people on your current wireless plan are interested in joining our early access program, each user is required to have a Project Fi account.
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 compete in so many spaces and compete well? Isn't this how Microsoft started doing business and failed at? I just am at a lost of words at Google's diversification strategy. I don't want to be a hater, but do we really want a singular company being the market leader at everything if they do end up succeeding at everything?
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."
Leading in self-driving cars is debatable. They surely have the most visibility, but some car manufacturers and academic institutions like VisLab also have some impressive prototypes, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcyuApIlFw (the autonomous car is the one in front)
But they make a line of laptops, a line of mobile devices, and some software. There's no iSpaceship or Apple Submarine(TM) yet -- if you told me Google had a sub bouncing around San Francisco Bay, I wouldn't even question it.
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.
They are in everything but they aren't a leader in everything. In some markets they actually accelerate competition, especially in ones where there have been long-time monopolists (Google Fiber).
This looks to me like a pure "commoditize your complements" play. All of Google's products require great mobile internet everywhere. By getting involved in that market, they can help make it much more competitive (at the moment, cell reception is expensive and shit).
It's like Google Code. Google didn't particularly want to be in that business, but Sourceforge was complete shit, and the open source ecosystem was key to their business. So they competed, seriously improved on the status quo, and when something better came along (github), they backed away, job done.
So leading this market doesn't matter to google. If they got completely outcompeted, I'd say they'd be delighted.
I agree, and I always figured that's why they built Chrome. They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.
Quite the contrary. The other browsers did greatly improve their game. However, Google got spoiled with their ability to add a new feature to the browser whenever a Google product would benefit.
The cynical take on this is that Google just wanted to increase lock-in to its own browser; however, I think it's more a case that Chrome is a runtime environment for Google products as much as it is a web browser.
Hmm, if this is true, then we should be able to expect similar changes in Chrome like the changes made in Acrobat Reader when Adobe thought they had complete lock-in in the PDF reader space.
Yes they did. Firefox, Safari, IE all stepped up their game. Mozilla is building Servo. Microsoft is building project spartan. The browser is incredibly competitive.
The reason they built Chrome isn't just that - google pays/paid other browser vendors __hundreds of millions of dollars__ to be the default search providers ($300M to Mozilla per year for a while). Owning the web browser gives them tremendous power and saves them money.
I remember reading that they spent $100m on advertising chrome in one quarter, just in the UK. So I don't think $300m/yr really matters that much. I think with Chrome they were far more concerned about the risk of losing the default position for searches in Firefox (correctly, as it turned out!)
>>They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.
The actual reason is they have to pay browser vendors like Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars for having Google search as their default search plugin. Plus, they are at the mercy of other companies if they decide to change the default search plugin. All this plus the mobile game, if you have a browser and that has a major market share you can be rest assured to send the traffic to your sites.
Same with android, as long as you have your stuff(OS, Browser) installed on other people devices, getting traffic from their is easier. Which is why they give it away for free. Have a big market share and you win by default.
Spot on. Google Fi/Fiber both seeks to improve network connectivity for as many people as possible by accelerating competition from the incumbents (AT&T, Comcast, etc). When that happens, everyone benefits, including Google.
Other projects in this space include Android One and Loon.
Same with the new Pixel. A device to inspire Chromebook makers to make better, more powerful Chromebooks. And they (Google) themselves said that they don't aim to sell a ton of Pixels and make a lot of money out of it. I think they do it fairly.
Wasn't that the case with Nexus phones as well? If I remember correctly, Nexus One was partially built to show other manufacturers that a top of the line device can be built and ran on Android.
I can't easily think of an industry that the internet or computing hasn't yet touched. Makes sense that the company who made a name for themselves making sense out of data would do very well in a data-driven world and have plenty of places to go.
Not that I'm convinced it's always for the best. Throw all that control into somebody's hands and even if they think they're doing what's best, they might make mistakes with far-reaching consequences.
They are not really competing in all of those industries, they might have a crazy project they are attempting, but they aren't really competition.
Auto industry? I'm assuming you mean self driving cars, which, at this point, are still in the concept phase.
Space industry? Did I miss something, is Google launching rockets?
There are many other companies that are way more diversified than Google.
Plus, expanding into a wireless carrier makes way more sense for Google than any of their other ventures. One of the limiting factors of internet use in the first-world is terrible carriers with data caps.
This just comes down to your definition of concept. I consider a prototype as a concept car that exists to show the feasibility of the concept but it has a ways to go before it is ready for production.
Well, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt are both involved in Planetary Resources[0]. They are actively doing stuff even now[1] (their product is the Arkyd in this case). Not quite officially Google, but I can see where people would assume so.
Despite its impact on our lives it's important to remember that tech makes up just one segment of our massive economy. I have yet to see Google get into Aluminum smelting, residential construction or toothbrush manufacturing.
Doing stuff like this helps Google perpetuate their reputation as a company that's doing "cool things that matter" despite the fact that, financially, they're just a big internet ads company. By doing these types of things Google has developed has such a good employment brand that they can get as many CMU CS Masters and Harvard MBAs as they want. They don't need 53,000 of the best and brightest people on earth working on AdWords, so letting some of these people loose on other markets kinda makes sense. Better to let them do it under google's umbrella than someone else's. And besides, they might actually succeed!
To be fair, there's a big difference between marketing a new MVNO that runs on existing networks and actually expending capital to build network towers. So far Google is only doing the former.
Their strategy is simple: they are doing whatever it takes in order to squeeze the most dollars out of you. If that means engaging in backroom deals with wireless competitors and creating with technologically innovative/awesome solutions for you to always be connected at the most optimal speed possible, they are going to do it.
Looks like it blankets most of Canada with 2G service. I guess through roaming agreements from Sprint/T-Mo. I wonder if they are selling to Canadian residents?
If we didn't have so many rules for things like this, it would be great, but I honestly don't see this moving into Canada quickly at all.
On the East Cost, we have two companies who own towers and sell access to them to other companies like fido,virgin etc. I can't see them selling access to the towers any cheaper...
It's still pretty top-of-the line, I love mine. Best Android device in my opinion with the possible exception of the Moto X, which is very similar (just smaller and slower). The longer I have the N6, the more the size is an asset, rather than a liability.
I have been using one for the last 6 months and it's the best phone I've ever owned. Great screen (size is not a problem), stock Android (no bloatware) and decent battery (lasts till 10pm in the night with heavy usage).
In their FAQ they haven't addressed the security issues when connecting to public WiFi hotspots. The user's traffic would be flowing unencrypted, easily accessible to strangers. I wonder if they'll be providing free VPN service when connected to public WiFi.
Your data is secured through encryption when we connect you to open Wi-Fi hotspots. It's like your data has a private tunnel to drive through."
So that's a yes
ETA: Of course this does mean Google has the plaintext, but then, your ISP always has the plaintext unless you're bringing your own encryption, so this is really no different.
>When Project Fi automatically connects you to an open Wi-Fi network, we help protect your data by sending it through a secure connection, known as a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This secure connection protects your data from being looked at by other users on the open Wi-Fi network.
It only works specifically with the Nexus 6 (not other Google phones), apparently for technical reasons involving network-switching capabilities. Possibly that's BS, but assuming it's legit I'd imagine they'll try to get the technology into other makers' phones in the future.
Though even if they didn't, Google doesn't have a monopoly position in phone hardware so it's not clear antitrust would come into play.
This is doing the same things as Republic Wireless. Calls and texts over wifi to keep their carrier costs down. RW is cheaper at $10 a month without data and $25 for unlimited 3G.
With RW you need their customized android phone but they are cheap. $650 for the phone is steep (or a credit pull).
Agreed, currently with Republic Wireless, same model (kind of wondering if they had talks with RW at all). I have the unlimited 3G for $25 total and it has served me well thus far. Happy with the service and saved quite a bit after moving away from Verizon.
$650 is a steep buy in for the phone, but I expect they will on board cheaper phones as this takes off. RW is still more cost effective over all at this point, although the data service will probably be better with Fi's two networks (RW runs on the sprint network when not around wifi)
Yeah, I like Republic, they've got a 'refund your unused data' feature in beta, too, and it should make their service cheaper than this offering, though I don't know if they offer an automatic Wifi VPN tunnel.
True except if it's really just 3G that's not enough for some people who like to stream video and audio - ideal bitrates probably can handle it, but not realistically.
That said, anyone streaming Netflix on their LTE connection is going to want unlimited data to start with, so neither is a good bet.
RW's current pricing is $5 for wifi-only, $10 for cellular with no data, $25 for 3G data, and $40 for 4G data. Both data plans include throttling after 5GB. But the new pricing model they'll start testing in May is basically the same as what Google's promising, and they announced on Monday upcoming beta testing for basically everything else that Google Fi will include.
They've announced that they're adding another carrier, which is almost certainly going to be T-Mobile, who is providing the international service that Google's going to offer. Once RW has made it official that they'll be offering the Nexus 6 and T-Mobile backend, they'll probably add the same international service as Google, if they haven't confirmed an outright merger by then.
Do keep in mind they actively are against tethering, which stinks if your in a pinch and need internet for a laptop or w/e. Also afaik the phone you get from them can't really be used anywhere else. Other Sprint MVNO like ting won't accept RW phone. Maybe Spring themselves will but I'm currently in the process of moving and have a dud for a phone now.
Sell it on ebay to another RW person. I sold my two old ones when I moved to the Moto G and got some money for them. I was surprised because the Moto G is totally worth it and I would not have recommended those old models to anyone.
To offload to wifi, the wifi doesn't even need to be fast. Voice traffic uses very little bandwidth. The connection simply must have low packet loss and as little latency as possible.
When in non-T-mobile coverage areas, I use my Verizon hotspot for wifi calling with my T-Mobile iPhone, even if the hotspot can only provide 2/3G.
True, that's what I meant by fast. I think it's only something like 30kbs, but it needs to have low packet loss and low jitter or the call will be garbled.
When I had WiFi calling on T-mobile it still counted toward your minutes, so there was really no advantage to it in terms of billing, only in case of poor cell coverage.
And Republic announced earlier this week that they're going to be beta-testing basically everything that Google Fi will offer that isn't currently part of Republic's service: more flexible billing for data plans, adding a second cellular provider (almost certainly T-Mobile), a new handset (the Nexus 6 is the most likely candidate), cell-to-WiFi handover. The only thing Google's promising that Republic isn't is the international service.
I've been wondering for a long time why Google hasn't just bought Republic Wireless. It's especially puzzling now that Google has made it public that their interests are exactly the same as RW's.
It would be really stupid to announce a service with tethering limitations that will almost certainly be illegal by the time the service exits beta testing. The FCC net neutrality regulations will prevent service providers from doing anything to interfere with tethering.
Thanks. For me, unlimited data for $25 with Republic vs 1GB for $30 with Fi doesn't make a big difference. But being able to tether is a differentiator.
"We refund the data you don't use" is basically a way of saying "you pay by the megabyte for the data you do use" -- which is actually really great, I've been frustrated that everyone's settled on "all-you-can-eat" data as the standard, it doesn't align incentives well at all.
And they really are refunding it: if you use 1.2GB per month, it doesn't matter whether you sign up for 2, 5, or 10GB, your bill comes out exactly the same.
That's a good point. It's one thing to offer "unlimited data" for a fixed price - which is about ideal for a consumer, but that doesn't exist anymore. What you get is a fixed amount of data for a fixed price. But the provider has an incentive to make you use as little as possible, to increase its profits. But if instead you get the data returned to you, or you pay a reasonable amount by the MB, then the provider has an incentive to make you use as much data as possible. That could mean giving you a much faster service for example.
Also, notice that they're not charging extra for tethering, or care how many devices you tether to. As far as they're concerned, data is data because you're paying for it.
I was furious when I bought a Nexus 7 (first version) and found out that tethering wasn't available on the device (although there was no obvious reason it shouldn't be and rooting the device would have allowed me to enable it). Running into this on stock devices seems absurd.
Some rely on the device itself to enforce it, but that's obviously fragile if you can bring your own device.
Some check the TTL of your packets when they enter the carrier's network, because tethering is at least one more hop and so even if your computer's OS and phone's OS agree on what TTL starts at, the TTL will still be different than expected for your device's platform. Obviously this can still be mitigated by adjusting your TTL, but outside of software that'll handle this for them, that's already beyond a lot of customers.
Some even take the route of only checking HTTP traffic, and detecting tethering based on User-Agent, but I think a lot have abandoned that because it doesn't catch other protocols, and is easily bypassed even on HTTP.
Won't the new FCC net neutrality rules effectively prevent tethering charges when they go into effect? Specifically, since providers will no longer be allowed to do anything to interfere with tethering, any tethering fees will be completely optional to the consumer.
> It's one thing to offer "unlimited data" for a fixed price - which is about ideal for a consumer, but that doesn't exist anymore.
Yes it does; both Sprint and T-Mobile offer it (alongside their respective non-unlimited plans). The fact that Google Fi doesn't despite using those two carriers as its "partners" is incredibly disappointing.
To Be Clear, they offer it, but T-Mobile will throttle your speeds after a certain number of megs. Sprint also used to do so, but apparently has stopped doing so due to a need to try to get folks to at least check them out.
If bandwidth is scarce there's always an incentive to go towards "pay for what you use" schemes, though.
It's like an insurance "death spiral"[1] -- if one provider provides fixed-cost internet (or wide "bands"), the customers who use the least data will subsidise those who use the most. If another provider offers them internet at the true marginal rate, they'll move there. After they've moved on, the fixed-cost internet provider has to increase its rates, rinse and repeat.
Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual, and moving between providers may not be free, or they may just not care at all...
That's a big "if". And even if bandwidth is indeed scarce, then that's the problem that needs to be solved by building out one's network; punishing users for using the network is not viable in the long term (especially when folks like T-Mobile, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, are able to offer both throttled and unthrottled unlimited data plans without issue on a network that's probably nowhere near as built-out as those of AT&T and Verizon).
> Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual
This is exactly why the low-data users in networks like T-Mobile's and Sprint's typically don't mind subsidizing the high-data users (not that they're really subsidizing a whole lot, seeing as their respective unthrottled unlimited data plans cost more than their respective throttled unlimited and capped data plans). Having an unlimited data plan (throttled or otherwise) provides the peace-of-mind that you won't ever be charged extra based on your data usage, and that's a pretty big win for a lot of customers (especially when coupled with T-Mobile's data rollover).
Or better yet, some sort of dynamic pricing when, say, you're on a crowded subway platform. You'd really want solid software integration for that, though, so the user isn't unpleasantly surprised by it.
But I want my email and push notifications to happen the background without paying extra. Unless it's been a while, then I probably am willing to pay extra. Seems awfully tricky.
I think customers would be pissed about never knowing when data will suddenly surge in price, even if you warn them. It would also kill the user experience. And stuff like background updates and push messages would be a pain.
I'm sure the usage pattern is steady enough to make a pretty good model.
I have a lot of problems with surge pricing in general, not the least of which (in this example) is that it creates two classes of 'net users: those with enough disposable income to probably not care about surge pricing ever and those for whom it's a burden. Yes, that's a reflection on larger societal issues, but it's still there.
Worse, surge pricing is often a distraction for nearly everyone. IMO, it's not ethical to implement surge pricing without allowing a user some mechanism to opt-out of it and to understand why they aren't getting bandwidth at that time. But having put that stake in the ground, the UX now requires that the user waste mental decision energy on ... business bullshit[1].
Last not far from least, it aligns the incentives of carriers against providing enough coverage to handle capacity. We're learning how to handle higher density wireless scenarios (cf. articles on stadium and other heavy-use event network systems). Would we rather incentivize trickle-down of these systems into high-traffic public areas (e.g. commuter zones), or just further line the pockets of a few near-monopolist carriers at our own expense?
[1] This relates to why users rightly don't like metered billing -- it creates decision pressure. A payment structure that alleviates use of decision energy is a value add.
Sure, but there's no reason it will always be the case. It makes sense to start with a limited number of hardware devices, and only ones under your control.
But the comment I replied to was concerned that some users of the service might have more disposable income than others, which is an odd thing to bring to the table when discussing a convenience service that has a $650 entry price (I don't have a smartphone, so I'm not being a ridiculous hypocrite describing it that way).
I'm pretty skeptical of price controls, I never expect them to do me any good. The argument presented there is that surge pricing is bad because some people can't afford it. The other side of the coin is that if you ban surge pricing, you make it more difficult to charge less at other times.
In the context of the wider Net Neutrality conversation (Connectiveness Neutrality?), I'm glad it's so simple. $20 + $10/gb across the board is very sane, fair, and makes no assumptions about who you are, how you're using it, or what you're using it for.
I do think we eventually need to move to more flexible pricing though. Not all data is equally cheap to transit (i.e. runs on infrastructure of the same capital and maintenance costs). Commoditizing wireless access and allowing flexible pricing would allow more competition and innovation in how that wireless access is provided.
This plan actually makes no sense. Overage charges are the same rate ($10 / GB), so why am I buying a "plan" at all? Why don't they just charge $10 * x gigs / month instead of all this buying / refunding business?
> Project Fi will first alert you if you're getting close to
> your data budget. If you go over, you'll still get full-speed
> data and data is charged at the same $10 per GB rate. For
> example, if you go over your data budget by 350MB, $3.50 will
> be added to your next bill.
People think they don't want to pay by the megabyte, so they're calling it something else. Also the plan provides a cap so that you know you're not going to pay more than $X per month without going to some app and adjusting something.
A: Project Fi will first alert you if you're getting close to your data budget. If you go over, you'll still get full-speed data and data is charged at the same $10 per GB rate. For example, if you go over your data budget by 350MB, $3.50 will be added to your next bill."
Or better yet: why aren't they offering an unlimited data plan like what T-Mobile and Sprint (Google Fi's "partners") already offer? Why aren't they even at least going with T-Mobile's approach of "throttle the connection once you go past your data cap, but don't charge overages"?
It's like they're taking the best things of both carriers - their unlimited data plans - and pretending those things don't exist, that they're some figment of consumers' imaginations, and instead just taking the AT&T/Verizon approach, but using a soft and squishy dildo instead of a spiked rusty iron dildo to screw us with.
I see a lot of new offerings that have unlimited slow data. I doubt they regret it; it gives people peace of mind while still giving them incentive to upgrade.
Unlimited slow data is kind of cool. But unlimited, really slow, and free data (like the Kindle's Whispernet) is awesome. It's great to never actually be stuck completely without network access, even if you're somewhere your usual provider doesn't even exist.
I wish Google and Apple would copy the concept and just have their phones always be on the network, with cell plans just serving as a way to get voice service and get a decent download speed. Now that Google has built out an MVNO, they could definitely enable such a thing.
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 Verizon can have their fancy networks; they're moot compared to the millions of customers that pick Sprint and T-Mobile specifically because of the unlimited data plans.
Hell, T-Mobile's business model pretty much revolves around it at this point. "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. Oh, and we'll let you rollover your unused high-speed data and we won't make music streaming count toward it and we'll pay your current carrier's ETFs if you switch because we know that that's the only reason why you haven't already switched to us and you won't be locked into a contract anymore." They advertise all this every chance they get, and they deliver on those promises.
I switched to T-Mobile a year ago (from Sprint, which I switched to from AT&T) because of the zero overages, meaning that I wouldn't have to have an unlimited plan just for the peace of mind of not being shafted on a particular month because I watched one too many videos on YouTube or somesuch. A year later and I haven't looked back; definitely one of the better decisions I've made. Google Fi doesn't offer anything that would even remotely compel me to swtich (not even the dual-carrier stuff; I've found T-Mobile to be consistently better coverage-wise and speed-wise than Sprint in my area, so I'd probably just be on T-Mobile's network all the time anyway).
"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 an important omission.
> ... which slows you to 2G speeds after 5GB, instead.
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.
> Or better yet: why aren't they offering an unlimited data plan like what T-Mobile and Sprint (Google Fi's "partners") already offer?
Because they're acting as an MVNO, and have to pay Sprint and T-Mobile for each MB they deliver to the handset. Google is not trying to replace carriers, they're trying to improve the experience as an MVNO (they providing what Republic Wireless does on a much larger scale).
They ride on Sprint, who is desperate for revenue. Also, Republic retains the right to boot you if you use too much "unlimited" data on Sprint's network.
> They ride on Sprint, who is desperate for revenue.
Google Fi also rides on Sprint (and T-Mobile, though it doesn't seem like T-Mobile is nearly as desperate for revenue at this point). So there's not really a difference there.
> Also, Republic retains the right to boot you if you use too much "unlimited" data on Sprint's network.
Pretty much all carriers have that bit of legalese in their respective agreements (even T-Mobile does, IIRC, and I know for sure Sprint does). Usually that's reserved for extreme cases where one's use of the network significantly dwarfs that of the rest of the user base and is actually causing congestion issues; a few extra gigs is a drop in the pond in comparison.
Republic Wireless also has a roaming agreement with Verizon, for areas where Sprint's network is lacking. But they are really touchy about abusing that. I assume it's very expensive for them.
Unlimited data plans are actually bad. The incentives are all wrong. Consumers and websites have no incentive to fix any problem that causes them to use unnecessary data, clogging the network. Carriers actually have a perverse incentive to discourage use of the network, because increased use doesn't increase revenue, it just causes more congestion. This leads to stupidity like extra charges for tethering, blocking of VPNs, "traffic shaping" to kill "bandwidth hogs" like BitTorrent and Netflix, prohibitions on running servers, service termination for "excessive" use, cooperation with the MPAA to identify and stop BitTorrent users, etc.
With pay per gigabyte, incentives are aligned. Consumers and websites have an incentive to conserve data. Carriers have an incentive to encourage use and increase speeds. There's no reason to block servers or VPNs or tethering. There's no reason to throttle BitTorrent or Netflix or terminate anyone's service for "excessive" usage. In fact, with pay-per-GB carriers should encourage BitTorrent use and fight for consumers against the MPAA!
Historically unlimited data has been better for consumers because carriers have charged ridiculous prices for overages (e.g. per-KB prices that add up to hundreds of dollars per GB), and consumers don't have a good way of knowing how much bandwidth they're using when they use different services, so they can't predict their bills. If these two problems can be fixed, pay-per-GB is the best way forward. I'm glad Google realizes this.
You seem to have the word incentive confused with the word discourage.
Or it's an obnoxious euphemism.
I have an unlimited data plan on T-mobile for 30 bucks. Paying by the megabyte would discourage me from using data, not "incentivize me to use less data".
>There's no reason to block servers or VPNs or tethering. There's no reason to throttle BitTorrent or Netflix or terminate anyone's service for "excessive" usage. In fact, with pay-per-GB carriers should encourage BitTorrent use!
Thank god for net neutrality, and unlimited/unmetered data, right?
I'm sorry I offended your sensibilities, but this is a perfectly cromulent use of the word "incentive". If you look in a dictionary under "incentive", you might find an example sentence such as "The rising cost of electricity provides a strong incentive to conserve energy."
Gigabytes/month is strongly correlated with consumption of the actual scarce resource under the assumption that most users have similar usage patterns. Variable pricing based on peak times and places would be too complex to actually work well for cellular data, unlike time-dependent pricing for wired broadband or electricity.
> Consumers and websites have no incentive to fix any problem that causes them to use unnecessary data, clogging the network.
Who says that my usage of data is a "problem" needing "solved"? 10GB (the highest Google offers on its Fi page) can be burned through pretty quickly just by watching videos on a road trip or somesuch. I'd much rather pay $80 for an unlimited plan from Sprint or T-Mobile than pay $120 (or more) for Google Fi.
"Clogging the network" would be solved by carriers actually bothering to invest in their networks to handle the load. That would solve a multitude of other problems, too.
> "Clogging the network" would be solved by carriers actually bothering to invest in their networks
This is exactly my point. With unlimited data plans, carriers have little incentive to upgrade their networks. It increases costs without directly increasing revenue. With pay-per-GB, the incentive is clear: upgrading the network increases usage which directly increases revenue.
The direct increase of revenue comes from more customers arriving now that you're combining a robust network with unlimited data. Both of those things even in isolation are pretty significant attractions; having both of them is even better.
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.
The real incentive is improving speeds makes shared-bandwidth networks more cost effective. You can serve the same number of customers for less cost. Each connection receives its data quicker then disconnects so someone else can use the air space.
Time is the more important measure of cellular network usage than bytes. I think it would be more convenient for customers to be billed per minute. At $10/GB if my average speed is 5 Mbps that's $0.30 a minute. Or $30 to watch a full-length movie in HD. Makes me wish Netflix still had mail delivery.
> You can serve the same number of customers for less cost.
No, upgrading the network allows you to serve more customers at higher cost (the cost of the upgrades). If you have unlimited data plans, you can only recoup those upgrade costs by recruiting more customers because existing customers pay the same regardless of the speed. Recruiting more customers is also costly and affected by many more factors than just network quality. The connection between network upgrades and increased revenue is tenuous and indirect.
In contrast, with pay-per-GB, network upgrades increase usage and thus increase revenue from existing customers as well as new ones. The connection between network upgrades and increased revenue is direct and immediate.
I agree that $10/GB is far too expensive; I'm sure Google would love for it to be cheaper but the pricing isn't their choice to make. When carriers get some competition from Project Loon and/or Elon Musk's satellite thingy, hopefully prices will go down.
> No, upgrading the network allows you to serve more customers at higher cost (the cost of the upgrades)
Upgrades are a one-time cost. You charge a higher rate for access to the faster network until the investment is paid off then you phase down to all customers. Then your operating cost is lower per subscriber in the long run.
These days, upgrades are a continuous cost. By the time you've paid off an upgrade it's time to upgrade again. Charging a higher rate costs you customers, and with fewer customers you don't even need the extra capacity you just bought. Also many customers are on contracts so you can't increase rates right away.
In contrast, with pay-per-GB, upgrades increase revenue automatically without losing customers. You don't have to increase your rates and you can probably even decrease them and still increase revenue.
I expect that it is prepaid and that they will require you to prepay an amount that matches your typical usage in previous months (based on whatever method of measuring).
I find this sort of thing really quite clever - I wonder how much of a factor it is in the decision process, do they tailor it in specifically or is it just a nice extra; what sort of money are we talking?
My best guess with 2mins of [re]search: Let's suppose they hold on average $10 per month per customer that's unused, Nexus 5 sold between 3-5 million units, apparently. So for Nexus 6's on their Fi plan they're likely only looking at the invested benefit of $30M (USD)? Google probably have that sort of cash down the back of the sofa, would they even bother investing the float? Or are my guestimations just way off??
UK utilities I've always assumed are doing this hence the wilder and wilder over-estimation of bills in order to hold more customers cash. Wonder how much Google will push the "let us hold your cash, you'll get back what you don't spend" line in order to have more cash to play with. How evil are they prepared to get to hold some extra pocket change?
They're equivalent plans, but people have cognitive biases. Here are a couple of explanations from Propspect Theory:
- refunds are perceived as gains (against the reference point of the monthly charge), whereas a fee is perceived as a loss (and losses hurt more)
- bills are capped so the the possibility of big fees (losses) is eliminated (people struggle with probabilities and fear extremely unlikely events)
I bet there would be a psychological impact. People would curtail their usage and frantically switch antennas on and off, resulting in an overall poor experience.
Perhaps having a big allowance in mind just encourages people to use their data!
Been using Ting for a while now. When you use a lot of data in a month, you definitely pay more. One month I used 10 GB of data, and my bill was $200. It's still less than when I had a contract, but I don't get phone upgrades unless I go buy a new phone.
It's incredibly useful for household budgeting purposes. Knowing that, at most, I can expect to pay $xxx per month for a service makes estimating expenses easier.
The service apparently alerts you when you get close the "limit". Which means that if you're disciplined you can cut yourself off or just realize that you need to increase your monthly budget.
Maybe it's a purchasing nuance with the data supply chain?
As in, it's more expensive to meter everyone's data and charge per 100 MB, and cheaper to charge in 10 GB blocks and then refund retroactively. They are piggybacking off of other networks, which may not accept 100 MB purchases.
I can see them doing a purchasing scheme with the suppliers and then transferring the savings to the customer.
Perhaps because all the other carriers sell you X GB per month, so they want their plans to be easily comparable to the layman?
To you or I it is easy to see the true nature of their "plans" but to someone who isn't quite sure how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, this probably makes it a lot easier to compare to, say, AT&T.
This carries benefit for both the business and consumer;
For the business: Google carries zero risk of post-pay billing as you are paid upfront + they are earning interest on the aggregated cash they will either refund or pay to the telco(s) at the end of a month.
For the consumer: You are effective pay as you go, so you don't pay for unused data plus you have an upper limit on spend. The interest loss for money in holding is minimal at the individual level. And given this is likely recurring billing (so I doubt for most people they will ever get actually paid back) you simply keep a float in your google account and top up the difference each month.
http://www.straighttalk.com/wps/portal/home/shop/serviceplan... has a 3GB plan for a year at $41.25 per month. Google's pricing for the same amount is $50 per month. So the question is whether all the new features (wifi calling, international roaming, pay-for-usage) justify the extra $9, plus the cost of a new phone for those without a Nexus 6.
(Wifi calling should probably be left out of that list, since it's most likely going to come to the other carriers later this year.)
It's not just international roaming. StraightTalk does not support international texting. There is no way to text canadian phones from StraightTalk US. If you want International calling you can get that, but it costs more.
You can get that for free with Google Voice already, though. If Google already offers something for free, we shouldn't count it in the value calculation.
It's worth pointing out that with Fi you only pay for the data you _actually use_, so if you only use 1G you end up saving a bunch, and if you need more you can still get it when it's required.
Ah, that's fair. I have good reception in my area, but I've definitely hit bad areas while traveling.
I do talk on the phone all the time at work, but for personal use it's pretty minimal. But even if I did, the Hangouts Dialer app will make GV calls over data, so I don't use any minutes, and I don't even use data when I'm on wifi.
Straight Talk is compatible with multiple carriers but still makes you select a single carrier though right? Google Fi will jump between carriers dynamically. Tmobile coverage is spotty around here but I've had good luck with Sprint in the past, so I'm optimistic.
I have this plan because I don't use a lot of voice service. I try to use Google Voice through Hangouts to avoid going over the limit anyway. IME call quality is garbage on both a good wifi or good a LTE signal.
Who handles support for this? Is it Google, or one of the carriers that Google's using? Who do you talk to if the handoff between carriers doesn't quite work? I've skimmed the FAQ and I didn't see that listed in there.
For context, I use Google Voice, and while it's really nice in a lot of ways, it has some unfortunate bugs that have persisted for years that it seems impossible to get support for. I no longer unconditionally recommend it to people because while being able to take calls from my computer and get transcripts of voicemails is great, it also pseudo-randomly decides to only direct some calls to devices where I'm not present with no notification on devices that I'm using and also drops a small percentage of texts (my guess is around 1%). Most people I talk to are horrified by the idea of texts getting dropped, and I don't recommend GV to those folks, although it's fine if that's a tradeoff you're ok with.
I understand that it's a beta and that bugs are expected, but it's a problem when you run into a bug that interferes with your ability to use your phone and there's no way to get support for it.
Phone carriers aren't exactly known for their stellar customer service, but at least with them, if you call back enough times or escalate to higher level support, you'll eventually get a resolution. As far as I can tell, that's not true of Google's phone related products.
Google Fiber customer here: it's not the best support I've ever interacted with, but other telcoms have set the bar so ridiculously low that it's comparatively great.
Their support for the Nexus line of phones has been outstanding. Anyone can phone and speak to real humans with good tech knowledge, arrange a free replacement for (first time) cracked screens, and get next day replacements.
I have no doubt that the support for this will be as good.
Now, their automated side of advertising is crappy unless you're a large spender, but then that's just economies of scale.
Basically you have to roll a dice whether you'll have sound in voice calls on a Nexus 4 running Lollipop. 500 comments, 1200 stars, and the issue is simply closed as "wrong forum" with no other comment than "contact customer support".
I mean, I'm glad that Google supports so many camera features, as that's clearly the most important function of a Nexus 4, but at the end of the day I still expect my phone to be able to, you know, make voice calls.
Android support != Nexus hardware support. It seems like you're much better off support-wise if your phone's screen is shattered than if you are having any sort of issue with the software...
If the past is any indication, Google will have really good support at first for this, similar to how it worked for Glass. Then once the product has been received well by early adopters (and received good publicity), they will layoff/downsize until everyone is unhappy.
Obviously I understand your trepidation regarding Google's support, and the proof will be in the proverbial pudding, but they at least claim they'll be providing better support than for most of their other products:
LIVE SUPPORT AVAILABLE AROUND THE CLOCK
If you need help, our support team is in the US and available all day, every day. Give us a call, and don't be surprised when you connect right away to a Fi Expert without pressing 0.
The price is a little disappointing. I expected Google to compete on price as well, but it may not even be its fault if its partners don't want to undercut it on prices, and they just allow Google to compete on services.
Same with Thailand - 5x the price of local 4G data, which caps to 384k after 20GB.
Even their roaming price doesn't compare well - for Asia I get ~$8 per day, for Europe, North America and Oceana it's $15 per day. This is for unlimited data, at full local network speed.
Last time I was in LA for a project (with half a dozen others, all came in from different countries) it often worked out cheaper/easier for them to all just ether to my phone than deal with a crappy prepaid data service each.
Quick nitpick, it's primarily 4g, not 3g. But in general, lots of things in the developed world cost multiple times what they cost in the developing world, especially things whose cost is tied to local labor costs.
I'm guessing the biggest cost of building and maintaining mobile data infrastructure is the labor, and physical and intellectual labor in India is just way cheaper on average than in the US.
Historically, though, the US carriers have operated in way that makes it harder for customers to switch between carriers (carrier-specific-frequency tied phones, contracts). Some argue that this is a natural technical outcome of covering an area as vast as the US, and others say this is deliberate collusion. Either way, MVNOs that disintermediate this seem like a healthy stimulus for competition in the US mobile data marketplace, and perhaps they will be able to reduce the cost/GB in the US.
Compared to what I can get from Verizon (US), the international usage is amazing:
> Pay one rate for data around the world
> In 120+ countries, data usage costs the same $10 per GB as it does in the US (data speed is limited to 256kbps/3G). Check email, get directions, and keep in touch with friends and family when on your trip. Also, call around the world for 20c per minute and send unlimited international texts.
> Pay one rate for data around the world
>
> In 120+ countries, data usage costs the same $10 per GB
> as it does in the US (data speed is limited to 256kbps/3G).
> Check email, get directions, and keep in touch with friends
> and family when on your trip. Also, call around the world
> for 20c per minute and send unlimited international texts.
This sounds incredible. Roaming cellular transmission costs are enormous. It's routine to pay several dollars per minute for voice and per megabyte for data. If the data roaming is really no-strings attached, this is a must-buy for me (if it ever becomes available in the UK).
FWIW, T-Mobile in the US already has the exact same offering [1]. Their plan has free texts and 2g data in 120+ countries. Calls cost 20 cents per minute.
It's not as many countries, but with 3 you can get unlimited data at a fraction of the cost (I currently pay £15/month with 3 for unlimited data, 5000 3 to 3 minutes, 5000 texts and 2000 minutes to other networks).
Likewise, although I'm finding that Telstra throttles me quite a lot. Turns out you can use any network in Australia (with no roaming fee from 3), so I've manually switched to Optus and my speed has dramatically increased.
in most countries i've been to (UK, Canada, India) 2G data came in handy for things like navigation. note that 2g is part of your plan and it does not cost anything extra.
nevertheless, they also have an option to upgrade to 3G data for a fee ($10 or so).
I am on T-Mobile and travelled outside the US late last year.
First off, I just want to say, the "free tier" of international data is extremely appreciated for two important reasons:
- Overage is literally impossible (i.e. no "bill shock").
- If you don't wish to pay, you get "something" for nothing.
So, now, the "bad." The reality is that T-Mobile's free tier is incredibly slow like "my 56K modem was faster than this" slow. A single modern web-site can literally take so long to load that my phone would fall asleep and then cut off the connection (meaning I'd have to start all over).
It is really only useful for push notifications and to check your email if you're really patient. Even for reading sites like Reddit, it would drive you up the wall. Looking at images (e.g. imgur) is a no-go and YouTube is definitely not even plausible.
Now, if you pay, you get more data per dollar than you do on most other big US networks and you legitimately get 4G speeds in many places (at least I certainly did). So if you pay you wouldn't even know you were abroad. And when you run out of paid data, you drop down to the slow speed again rather than being cut off (which is nice, so you feel safe to use 100% of your paid data with no risk).
So, to me, T-Mobile's free tier doesn't really change the formula for international travel. It just solves overage/bill shock and gives you some basic notifications and maybe email. Those aren't things to be sniffed at, they're legitimately nice, but people should manage their expectations.
PS - Protip: Restart your phone every single time you change countries. My phone got "confused" and would refuse to connect until I restarted. We did a cruise so a new country was daily, and I missed a day of data because I thought that country simply wasn't supported (rather than it being a phone problem).
Does the slow connection work for background reception of email? In that case, one would never wait interactively for email, only be notified when email had already been received.
Where did you travel to? When we went to France, I got great speeds (almost 3G-ish) roaming on several providers there (IIRC, SFR and Bouygues) in all sorts of locations, including very remote ones.
In the end, we paid $40 (all for calls @ $0.20/min) for 3 weeks of near-normal usage with 2 iPhones.
To me that's very much a game changer - previously I paid double that same amount as an accidentally access charge (forgot to turn off roaming on my AT&T phone). Not to mention I had to spend 30m with the AT&T rep to configure our accounts so we wouldn't get charged $2/min prior to our trip.
It was this cruise but in reverse (Aruba last, cayman first):
Ports: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida | Aruba | Cartagena, Colombia | Panama Canal, Panama (Gatun Lake) | Colon, Panama | Limon, Costa Rica | Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
When I paid for data I got good 3G or 4G speeds. With free data it was incredibly slow, like sub-56K modem slow, even at the same ports as the 4G speeds with paid.
Here's a YouTube video someone else took which accurately represents my experience:
I have to echo this comment. I recently travelled to Japan and Singapore, and I managed really well on the 3G speeds I got from T-mobile's free roaming. I'll admit I didn't spend my time there streaming youtube videos, but I did use instagram and occasionally google maps, although it was slow for maps sometimes (then again, maps is slow here in the US too, it's most likely my SG SIII not playing well with the latest and greatest maps version), moreover, I tethered from time to time. At the end, I paid a pittance (something like $2) because I had to make one call. For me, T-mobile's free roaming was a godsend.
I used TMO's free international 2G (with a 2013 Moto X) in Japan for two weeks. Maps was not a problem. It was slower then I was used to over 4G, but certainly fast enough to look up transit directions and search for places.
I was very satisfied and would gladly use them again. Having transit directions made spontaneous travel much easier.
> What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds?
"Unpleasant." What I'd strongly recommend is to download the map using offline maps before you leave. If you wait for Google Maps to download the data over the 2G/free tier you'll be in for a very long (10+ minute) wait.
I did not do offline maps before I left, but mostly we were on tours so we didn't really need them. But if I was e.g. exploring a city or doing something on my own, you'd definitely want to do offline maps if you wanted to use Google Maps on their free tier.
Fun thing to keep in mind when traveling in mainland China: maps for use outside China are shifted by a few hundred meters, presumably in a lame attempt to confuse an invading army.
I was in South Africa recently, and got a consistent 256kbps using the roaming data on t-mobile. It's not 4G, but it's significantly better than sub 56k.
The T-Mobile plan only offers you international data if you pass a credit check. I applied twice, once by phone and once in-person at a store. I got rejected twice. I have excellent credit and suspect the issue is something stupid like my first name being misspelled (something I experience a lot). However T-Mobile employees immediately enter stone wall mode and it's completely impossible to debug the issue. Probably it's a company policy that they should never ever start discussing failed credit checks with would-be customers.
Anyway, I'll be damn glad if an alternative appears as it'll give me an additional chance to qualify.
T-Mobile uses the same name ("Simple plan") for their different offerings, one of which is international roaming with a credit check. I tried to get this plan, and T-Mobile wasted hours of my time and money on satellite phone calls to them and royally pissed me off with their extremely incompetent support. Apparently I was given the wrong plan when I signed up initially in the US, and then they tried changing my plan to the correct one, but it never worked. I wouldn't touch T-Mobile with a 10 foot pole.
Is $10/GB and $0.2/min normal within the US? I'm not familiar with American (non-roaming) pricing.
For comparison:
In Germany I have an LTE data plan for my tablet where I pay €24.99 for 7.5GB (~$3.57/GB), the lowest plan being €6.99 for 1GB (~$7.50/GB). Unlimited calls in Germany including 1GB data would cost me €19.99/month (~$21.48) at the same provider and unlimited text in Germany would be an additional €4.99/month (~$5.36), otherwise texts are €0.09 each (~$0.10). Many German providers offer pre-paid (or post-paid) plans with €0.09/minute and €0.09/text.
My current plans work out as follows:
Tablet with 7.5GB LTE data plan: €24.99 / ~$26.83 (~$3.57/GB)
Smartphone with 1GB LTE data, 200 minutes and 200 texts: €11.90 / ~$12.87
Overages per minute: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages per text: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages for data: free (at significantly reduced speed; "high-speed" extra data can be added for €3-9/GB depending on the plan and provider)
The next closest plan for my smartphone would be 1GB LTE data, 400 minutes and 400 texts at €15.90 / ~$17.07, the difference works out to €0.01 (~$0.01) per minute or text.
I'm using my own devices, so the plans don't include the cost of the devices themselves.
My mobile phone bill over the past months mostly ranged from €14-20 and my tablet bill was mostly fixed at €24.99 (turns out 7.5GB is generally sufficient unless I use Netflix outside WiFi a lot).
Also, tethering isn't a problem either, but obviously roaming is excessively expensive even in the EU.
A carrier in germany has to build 26 times less towers than a carrier in the US, because germany is more than 26 times smaller than the US.
I would think the increased expenditure of 26 times more towers would increase the cost of plans.
Europe also never had the culture of carrier subsidized phones, and so were never accustomed to paying more in monthly fees in exchange for low to no cost upgrades of hardware.
Tethering varies by carrier in the US - Verizon is legally obligated to allow tethering due to the result of a lawsuit, so they do not charge any extra for this, i believe t-mobile also does not charge for tethering, but it is not related to a lawsuit AFAIK
A final point is that pricing for data is fundamentally different in europe as i understand it. Most plans i am familiar with in europe tier data prices by speed - in the US almost all plans get the fastest speeds available, but it is tiered but amount of data used. You cannot pay for faster speeds on a typical US plan, only for greater amounts of data. The european side of that may have changed, as its been a year or so since i was last in europe looking into this
> Europe also never had the culture of carrier subsidized phones, and so were never accustomed to paying more in monthly fees in exchange for low to no cost upgrades of hardware.
I live in the Netherlands and subsidized phones are the norm here, don't think other countries are that different.
My experience in NL was differentiated pricing based upon the phone you got - ie it was subsidized by financing. In the states it was a massive flat out discount that wasn't explicit financing.
There are considerably more providers than actual carriers in Germany. The way frequencies are assigned in Germany probably plays into this, but in a nutshell: many if not most people don't have contracts with the actual network operators (i.e. carriers) but with companies that are merely service providers. There are a lot of spin-off companies offering discounted monthly or pre-paid plans contracts compared to the expensive 2 year plans offered by their parent companies (e.g. Congstar is a subsidiary of Telekom Deutschland).
What you say about subsidized phones is patently false. I don't recall unsubsidized phones being a thing at all in Germany when mobile phones first became popular. Even today many if not most Germans seem to prefer subsidized phones -- in my experience buying your phone separately is only common in the more tech savvy or higher end markets, although the growing popularity of discounted month-to-month mobile plans may be changing that.
AFAIK tethering and jailbreaking/rooting is, generally speaking, always legal in Germany. For subsidized phones things can be different if you're not actually purchasing the phone but only leasing it (because it isn't your property and therefore you're not allowed to modify it), but I think these days most contracts have you actually purchase the phone. Not sure whether this is due to market demand, but I think there's also a decline in carrier branded phones, so it might simply be that.
Except for pre-paid/post-paid (i.e. no fixed plan, pay-as-you-go) contracts, I think all German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data. As far as I can tell, most if not all providers these days offer their fastest speeds as "high-speed" on all contracts with only the amount of data being the difference, not tiered speed caps (this definitely used to be different).
So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date. At least with regard to Germany -- I don't know enough about other EU countries to say anything about them.
Just to clarify the "spin-off" companies are called mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). We have a lot of them in the UK too, but in our case they are usually seperate companies (e.g. the Tesco supermarket has its own mobile brand which runs on the O2 network). Strangely they are usually cheaper than the parent companies too - anyone know how the financials of that work?
In Germany we have supermarket mobile brands, too. They're usually just white-label services provided by other brands (e.g. ALDI Talk is owned by E-Plus, which is an actual carrier).
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.
>What you say about subsidized phones is patently false
You are most likely talking about carriers allowing people to finance their phones in europe. Where you can pay an additional 20 euros a month to get the new iphone or whatever.
This is not at all what i'm talking about.
In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price. You sign a contract and you get to choose from the carriers selection of phones, older phones being completely free, newest phones costing 200 dollars.
The rest of the cost of the phone is hidden inside of the cost of the plan itself. There is no line item for how much you are paying for the phone each month, it is simply part of the pricing of the service itself. When your phone has been completely paid off, you will never know because your plans price will not change.
In europe, you finance phones, when they are paid off you stop paying for the phone and you then own the phone. your bill goes down. This is not at all the same behavior as the subsidized phone system in the US.
>German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data
This is what im talking about, this does not exist in the US. There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
There is some subversion by carriers using 'throttling' where they slow certain lines down to a crawl when the carrier decides they've used too much data for the month, but that is by no means a part of how plans are priced.
>So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date
admittedly so, i haven't been in europe for more than a week since 2013 - and have never spent much time in germany
It is also throttling in the EU (At least in NL). If I pay for an 'unlimited' data plan it's usually something like 2GB at 4G and then "2G" speeds (64kbps) after that. It's just throttling, as your phone remains connected at "4G".
Now many providers have dropped the "unlimited 2G" data claim and just stating the rate limit after you use your high-speed bucket.
Maybe Finland is an exception here, but they are definitely tiered by speed, with no 'buckets' of data - Finland is the only country I've personally purchased an actual plan in, I've only used prepaid plans elsewhere in europe.
> In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price.
This has definitely been a thing in Germany in the past. In fact, I don't think I've seen ever the "pay $(x+y)/month for 24 months for the plan and phone, then pay only $x/month" model. Usually after 24 months you'd be offered a new phone (again for "free" or a radically "discounted" price). This may have changed since I stopped paying attention to long-term plans but you're wrong in thinking we never had what you have in the US.
> There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
We also had hard data caps very early on. We just replaced that with "unlimited" plans with a cap on "high-speed" data at some point.
That said, the low-speed data might as well not be available at all -- most people I know buy extra if they hit their high-speed cap. It's barely sufficient for checking your e-mail.
Europeans never paid for speed, that's completely incorrect. There's no tradeoff - mobile phone usage in Europe is simply much, much cheaper because there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US (thanks to government intervention and much stricter competitivity laws).
That's an interesting attempt to justify the price, but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live. Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations, while the UK has 23,000. (Despite the fact that the UK is ~30 time smaller than the US). So your argument does not hold.
On another note, I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware. You don't. You're literally paying _more_ to upgrade your phone/get a new phone in the long run, than just buying one outright.
The reason you can buy an iPhone for 99 USD is because you'll be paying ~27 USD "extra" for the next 2 years, which is exactly the same as if you had just spent 600 outright and saved that amount (or even more, 99% of the time) over the next 2 years. There's no "subsidization" going on, if anything, you're subsidizing the company.
Current stats show 205,000k[1] towers - not base stations, I'd estimate closer to 410,000-840,000 mobile base stations. Figure most of those are not all four carriers on each site, some are just one carrier, some are all four, and if I were to pick a single number, 585,000. Previously, I'd suggest that you can really only compare the US with Canada, Australia in terms of population density and spread.
I understand that theres a lot of variety in Europe, but to say that tiers by speed doesn't happen is factually incorrect.
>There's no tradeoff
I never said there was, I am simply pointing out differences in how the markets are set up and function in these vastly different continents
>there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US
This is true, this is the biggest problem with the US cellular market today
>That's an interesting attempt to justify the price
I'm not trying to justify anything, just explain some of the differences.
>but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live
It depends on hundreds of factors - population density, building density, building materials, types of cellular radios used (CDMA vs GSM have different ranges), terrain, interference, number of carriers, etc
The difference in land area is definitely a factor - i never said it was the only one. My mistake was obviously saying '26 times more towers', which i admit was a careless thing to say, but i think it still made my point. The US has significantly more infrastructure than any single european country, in part due to its much larger coverage area.
>Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
Much truer in Europe than in the US - US: 32.65/sq km UK: 262/sq km [1]
>If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations
I see 205,000[2] - which puts the US at ~10 times the towers of the UK
>So your argument does not hold.
do you think that the cost of ~10 times more infrastructure is not part of the higher prices in the US compared to the UK?
My argument was that having to spend much greater amounts on infrastructure is one of the reasons for a price difference, i didn't say it was the only reason or explanation just that it's worth noting.
>I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware.
This is just the psychology of purchasing. People don't like spending a lot of money at once and would prefer to spread costs out over time - I completely agree that the 'subsidized' model is garbage, but i haven't been able to convince a single family member to switch to buying phones outright no matter how many times i show them the lower cost after the full two years.
Of course by low to no cost i meant when you walk into the provider's location after two years, you walk out with a new phone that you paid very little for during that transaction. It doesn't seem to matter to most people that they end up paying more than the phones full retail cost over the course of two years.
Finland accounts for around 1% of the EU population, that's hardly enough to make claims about "Europe". Speed tiers don't happen in most countries (I can say this with certainty for the UK and Germany).
There are HUGE, VAST swathes of the US with zero coverage whatsoever - there's literally 2 million square miles with no population or coverage - that's nearly 58% of the lower 48. So that'd reduce your ratio to 13 times. Then you figure that the US population is 4 times that of Germany, so saying that it's 26 times more painful for a US carrier to tower the US than a German is entirely inaccurate.
I live in a country with low population density and mobile is quite cheap here IMO. I have an unlimited data plan from an MVNO for around $10. It's limited to 1 Mbit/s though (but it's 4G), and no phone is included.
When it comes to carrier subsidizing, we actually have both non-subsidized and subsidized, as well as "semi-subsidized" (e.g. pay half price of the phone, but you can't change operator for 2 years).
The downside IMO with mobile in Europe is that we have so many small countries, so occasionally you have to leave your country (=roaming fees) for some reason.
Roaming is almost non-existent in the US now among the four major networks. Not sure if you mean domestic or international though.
I pay about $65 / month with AT&T, for unlimited talk & text, and 5gb of LTE data (10gb shared on a two person family plan). That includes the cost of the device.
What is domestic roaming? I guess you mean state-to-state within the US? I wouldn't have thought that that would have ever been a thing (at least not after domestic long distance calls stopped being a thing).
I always hear Americans say they have unlimited talk and text. Is this really the most popular option or do most plans just include it by default? Might explain why American mobile plans always sound so incredibly expensive to me (i.e. "pay for what you use" a la Ting is actually a disruptive idea in that market because everybody overpays by default).
In France we have a €19.99/mo plan with unlimited talk for domestic (land and mobile) and a huge selection of international countries (land), unlimited SMS/MMS, and 20Go of Data (yes, twenty). That plan can go down to €15.99/mo if you also go with this carrier for your home's broadband access.
That same carrier (called "Free mobile") offers a €2.00/mo plan for 2h talk, unlimited SMS/MMS and 50Mo data, which is €0/mo (free) if you're subscribed to their broadband.
And if the contract did not change, tethering is included. In addition with their ADSL offering you're allowed to host a server at home on your ADSL connection (which others did explicitly forbid when I chose Free over them a few years ago.)
Let me join the international domestic mobile plans pricing party.
In Latvia we have unlimited calls and messages for 9.95€. Add unlimited 2G/3G/4G data for 9.99€. That's roughly 20€ for unlimited everything. Tethering is not disabled, however, you could get downgraded to slower speeds for abuse (torrents & alike; never heard of this being enforced).
Roaming charges in while in EU are regulated at 0.19€ per minute, messages for 0.09€ per minute. Data is still expensive, though - 0,20€ per MB. Mobile operators provide roaming data packages, which might lower your data bill to 0.14€ per MB.
There is a upcoming EU roam-like-home regulation, which would mean that you never pay more than at home for anything - including data.
Ouch. I didn't notice that it's limited to 256k/3G.
T-Mobile offers unlimited data internationally as part of their simple choice unlimited plan. It's limited to 256k speeds (Which in my experience, I have gotten basically exactly 256k when I've used it in the Netherlands and South Africa). You have the option of buying 4G speed bandwidth for a fairly reasonable price - though still a bit higher than the Google Fi data rates.
I didn't notice the rate limiting asterisk until your comment, and this kind of kills it for me. It was much more appealing when I thought I would be charged the same for data in the US and abroad.
> You have the option of buying 4G speed bandwidth for a fairly reasonable price - though still a bit higher than the Google Fi data rates.
About 10-15x higher, it looks like. :/ Around $100-150/GB, depending on the pass length, e.g. 100MB usable in 24 hours for $15, or 500MB usable in 2 weeks for $50.
Ouch. I was completely misremembering the cost on the international data passes. I thought it was about $30/GB, but I have no idea where that came from.
I suppose it's still better than Google - the rate limited data is still free, as opposed to paying full price for it, and nothing forces you to buy the full throughput data passes.
Without unlimited data, this is useless to me. If T-Mobile and Sprint can pull off unlimited data plans, then so should Google (especially if Google Fi uses - you guessed it - both Sprint and T-Mobile as its partner carriers). The least they can do is offer a "you get so-and-so gigabytes of 4G data before we throttle you down to 2G, and we won't charge you anything extra" like what T-Mobile does for its non-unlimited plans.
I'm pretty sure the accountants and engineers at Google got together and figured out that "unlimited data" plans are going to go bye-bye. For everyone. All providers.
As people use more and more data, it just won't make economic sense to offer your customers unlimited data.
If Google had offered unlimited data, and then later canceled it, everyone would be bitching about them killing the competition, anti-competitive behavior, etc.
> As people use more and more data, it just won't make economic sense to offer your customers unlimited data.
It makes perfect economic sense. Users who expect to need a lot of data (e.g. anyone who watches or wants to watch HD videos over a cellular connection, which is a lot of people) would be better served by T-Mobile's or Sprint's unlimited (non-throttled) data plans (which run for somewhere between $70 and $90 per month, IIRC), and everyone else would be better served by T-Mobile's throttled data plans, since you'll never be charged overages.
At least AT&T and Verizon can claim that they have a stronger network with better coverage than T-Mobile or Sprint (which is why a lot of people go with them and are willing to be screwed over by them). Google Fi can't even offer that if it's going to be using Sprint and T-Mobile as its backends; combine this with the lack of unlimited data plans and only supporting the Nexus 6 with zero indication of when other phones will be supported (if ever), Google Fi's dead in the water.
In other words:
> I'm pretty sure the accountants and engineers at Google got together and figured out that "unlimited data" plans are going to go bye-bye. For everyone. All providers.
Then I'm pretty sure all the accountants and engineers at Google are incompetent.
I'm not sure you're getting me. I'm saying that eventually T-Mobile and Sprint will not be able to offer $70 or $90 a month for unlimited data. Or if they do, it will be so throttled as to be completely meaningless.
I'm predicting that as more people use more of their data, the network will not grow fast enough to support the total bandwidth. The fact that they can currently offer "unlimited" is a temporary condition, based on the distribution of network users' bandwidth. As consumption grows, it gets to the point where they can't actually offer it any more.
That's my prediction, and I bet Google made the same prediction.
Instead, you're acting like I don't understand that people WANT unlimited data, especially at the prices it's being offered at today.
And I'm saying that getting rid of unlimited data doesn't solve the problem of network congestion. Actually putting work into the network does solve the problem of network congestion.
Don't punish users because you're too lazy to provide them with a network that's actually designed to handle current/future data demand.
And I'm predicting that it will be economically impossible to handle future data demand, if you allow "unlimited data."
Even with the best intentions. You would need to be subsidized by the government to provide it.
Since so few people TODAY currently make use of their unlimited data, the network can afford to offer those terms. And they found that by offering those terms, they attracted a disproportionate number of customers. In short, it was popular and profitable.
But at some point, the aggregate network demand will exceed even the THEORETICAL network capacity, if you offer your customers unlimited data, and demand goes up the way I think it will.
Or in essence, you will need to limit bandwidth to the point that calling it "unlimited" is just ridiculous.
> But at some point, the aggregate network demand will exceed even the THEORETICAL network capacity, if you offer your customers unlimited data, and demand goes up the way I think it will.
At which point you build out the network so that it can handle the increased demand. The problem of congestion doesn't magically go away if you ditch unlimited plans for pay-per-gigabyte plans.
Even barring that, the wired broadband world already addresses this by making speed the useful commodity instead of quantity, and there's very little reason why the wireless world couldn't do the same. "Our networks are getting congested, so we're going to switch to a new model where you can pay cheap rates for 2G speed or pay more for 4G speed or pay something in between for 3G speed or pay top-dollar for our newfangled 5G" is a much better answer than "our networks are getting congested, so we're going to just cap users' usage of it and hope the problem goes away".
That, in short, is what Google Fi should be doing. That would be an actually-compelling reason to switch to it instead of T-Mobile.
Until then, T-Mobile will continue to get my business, and T-Mobile will therefore be at least that much more incentivized to provide unlimited data plans.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadGood start.
EDIT: Only if the window is sized small enough to trigger the mobile layout for the navbar. Kind of funny in view of Mobilegeddon.
Google acts like it's just for enterprise customers, but that's not how a whole lot of people use it.
This is exactly why I don't just phone@josh[.mn]
I have no point really, other than to be the one saying Thanks Google in a gripe thread. I have been bitten by this before, but now that the sting has eased I don't miss Google Apps on my personal vanity domain account even a little bit. I have a real gmail /g+ account that I can use to sign up for betas and giveaways like this, for mailing lists I'd rather keep separate from more personal comms, and for any other pseudonymous communication, etc. that saves me from a lot of hassle, and my employer is a paid subscriber to Apps for Work, so I even am really aware of all what I'm missing.
tl;dr: thanks for the free e-mail service, Google! You're a real bro
It also only supports the Nexus 6, so I guess you won't want to switch 3 lines over.
https://fi.google.com/about/faq/#plan-and-pricing-8
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.
Browser, email, self-driving cars. Lots of other stuff too...
Leading in memory usage perhaps
not a sub, but there was/is? this http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/07/google-launches-...
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.
It's like Google Code. Google didn't particularly want to be in that business, but Sourceforge was complete shit, and the open source ecosystem was key to their business. So they competed, seriously improved on the status quo, and when something better came along (github), they backed away, job done.
So leading this market doesn't matter to google. If they got completely outcompeted, I'd say they'd be delighted.
The cynical take on this is that Google just wanted to increase lock-in to its own browser; however, I think it's more a case that Chrome is a runtime environment for Google products as much as it is a web browser.
The actual reason is they have to pay browser vendors like Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars for having Google search as their default search plugin. Plus, they are at the mercy of other companies if they decide to change the default search plugin. All this plus the mobile game, if you have a browser and that has a major market share you can be rest assured to send the traffic to your sites.
Same with android, as long as you have your stuff(OS, Browser) installed on other people devices, getting traffic from their is easier. Which is why they give it away for free. Have a big market share and you win by default.
Other projects in this space include Android One and Loon.
Power corrupts...
Not that I'm convinced it's always for the best. Throw all that control into somebody's hands and even if they think they're doing what's best, they might make mistakes with far-reaching consequences.
Having a goose who lays golden eggs (search + adsense) to subsidize development?
They don't dominate every industry but they have to diversify in industries to keep their shareholders happy which in turn is good for everyone.
Auto industry? I'm assuming you mean self driving cars, which, at this point, are still in the concept phase. Space industry? Did I miss something, is Google launching rockets?
There are many other companies that are way more diversified than Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_Corporation
Plus, expanding into a wireless carrier makes way more sense for Google than any of their other ventures. One of the limiting factors of internet use in the first-world is terrible carriers with data caps.
Multiple generations of prototypes and hundreds of thousands of miles driven is well past the concept phase.
[0]-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources
[1]-http://www.miningweekly.com/article/planetary-resources-laun...
"Google, which has its logo on the side of the rocket, has exclusive online mapping use of its data."
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye-1
Despite its impact on our lives it's important to remember that tech makes up just one segment of our massive economy. I have yet to see Google get into Aluminum smelting, residential construction or toothbrush manufacturing.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/introducing-our-smart...
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-collect-data-to-define...
Obligatory Raster Tragedy link: http://www.rastertragedy.com/
Looks like it blankets most of Canada with 2G service. I guess through roaming agreements from Sprint/T-Mo. I wonder if they are selling to Canadian residents?
On the East Cost, we have two companies who own towers and sell access to them to other companies like fido,virgin etc. I can't see them selling access to the towers any cheaper...
Attempted to request an invite but it doesn't allow Canadian postal codes (ie: V5H 2T3), only stuff like 90210.
Sigh.
Ting Mobile is US-only, also resells Sprint and T-mobile, and their headquarters are in Toronto (!).
It's a certain kind of schadenfreude when you talk to a Customer Service Representative in Ontario for a service that doesn't actually work there.
The best thing about it is the fact that it comes with no bloatware. My S3 had 2 or 3 bloatware apps that would crash on startup every single time.
Your data is secured through encryption when we connect you to open Wi-Fi hotspots. It's like your data has a private tunnel to drive through."
So that's a yes
ETA: Of course this does mean Google has the plaintext, but then, your ISP always has the plaintext unless you're bringing your own encryption, so this is really no different.
Quoth the source:
Know your data is safe
Your data is secured through encryption when we connect you to open Wi-Fi hotspots. It's like your data has a private tunnel to drive through.
http://www.pocketables.com/2015/03/exclusive-google-is-worki...
https://fi.google.com/about/faq/#wifi-connection-and-calls-2
Though even if they didn't, Google doesn't have a monopoly position in phone hardware so it's not clear antitrust would come into play.
Second of all the N6 is one of the few phones with dual GSM and CDMA radios, and T-Mobile/Sprint are GSM/CDMA, respectively.
With RW you need their customized android phone but they are cheap. $650 for the phone is steep (or a credit pull).
$650 is a steep buy in for the phone, but I expect they will on board cheaper phones as this takes off. RW is still more cost effective over all at this point, although the data service will probably be better with Fi's two networks (RW runs on the sprint network when not around wifi)
That said, anyone streaming Netflix on their LTE connection is going to want unlimited data to start with, so neither is a good bet.
https://republicwireless.com/
Their unlimited 3G plan is $25.
Republic Wireless is owned by Bandwidth.com which also manages Google Voice numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth.com
When in non-T-mobile coverage areas, I use my Verizon hotspot for wifi calling with my T-Mobile iPhone, even if the hotspot can only provide 2/3G.
I've been wondering for a long time why Google hasn't just bought Republic Wireless. It's especially puzzling now that Google has made it public that their interests are exactly the same as RW's.
Can you comment on tethering? IIRC, my Moto X through Republic doesn't allow tethering.
Fi makes money on tethering. Republic Wireless loses money on tethering.
And they really are refunding it: if you use 1.2GB per month, it doesn't matter whether you sign up for 2, 5, or 10GB, your bill comes out exactly the same.
Is that a thing in some countries?
Some rely on the device itself to enforce it, but that's obviously fragile if you can bring your own device.
Some check the TTL of your packets when they enter the carrier's network, because tethering is at least one more hop and so even if your computer's OS and phone's OS agree on what TTL starts at, the TTL will still be different than expected for your device's platform. Obviously this can still be mitigated by adjusting your TTL, but outside of software that'll handle this for them, that's already beyond a lot of customers.
Some even take the route of only checking HTTP traffic, and detecting tethering based on User-Agent, but I think a lot have abandoned that because it doesn't catch other protocols, and is easily bypassed even on HTTP.
Yes it does; both Sprint and T-Mobile offer it (alongside their respective non-unlimited plans). The fact that Google Fi doesn't despite using those two carriers as its "partners" is incredibly disappointing.
It's like an insurance "death spiral"[1] -- if one provider provides fixed-cost internet (or wide "bands"), the customers who use the least data will subsidise those who use the most. If another provider offers them internet at the true marginal rate, they'll move there. After they've moved on, the fixed-cost internet provider has to increase its rates, rinse and repeat.
Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual, and moving between providers may not be free, or they may just not care at all...
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_spiral_(insurance)
That's a big "if". And even if bandwidth is indeed scarce, then that's the problem that needs to be solved by building out one's network; punishing users for using the network is not viable in the long term (especially when folks like T-Mobile, as I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, are able to offer both throttled and unthrottled unlimited data plans without issue on a network that's probably nowhere near as built-out as those of AT&T and Verizon).
> Of course, customers may prefer to be insulated in the months they use more data than usual
This is exactly why the low-data users in networks like T-Mobile's and Sprint's typically don't mind subsidizing the high-data users (not that they're really subsidizing a whole lot, seeing as their respective unthrottled unlimited data plans cost more than their respective throttled unlimited and capped data plans). Having an unlimited data plan (throttled or otherwise) provides the peace-of-mind that you won't ever be charged extra based on your data usage, and that's a pretty big win for a lot of customers (especially when coupled with T-Mobile's data rollover).
Those who use the least, can then feel that it is easier to slightly overpay for fixed pricing.
Download updates and podcasts at 4AM.
Maybe ask before doing interactive high-bandwidth things, depends on user preference.
I'm sure the usage pattern is steady enough to make a pretty good model.
Worse, surge pricing is often a distraction for nearly everyone. IMO, it's not ethical to implement surge pricing without allowing a user some mechanism to opt-out of it and to understand why they aren't getting bandwidth at that time. But having put that stake in the ground, the UX now requires that the user waste mental decision energy on ... business bullshit[1].
Last not far from least, it aligns the incentives of carriers against providing enough coverage to handle capacity. We're learning how to handle higher density wireless scenarios (cf. articles on stadium and other heavy-use event network systems). Would we rather incentivize trickle-down of these systems into high-traffic public areas (e.g. commuter zones), or just further line the pockets of a few near-monopolist carriers at our own expense?
[1] This relates to why users rightly don't like metered billing -- it creates decision pressure. A payment structure that alleviates use of decision energy is a value add.
Also, discounts when network utilization is low?
Broadly speaking, few do. There are a lot of cheap Android phones out there.
But the comment I replied to was concerned that some users of the service might have more disposable income than others, which is an odd thing to bring to the table when discussing a convenience service that has a $650 entry price (I don't have a smartphone, so I'm not being a ridiculous hypocrite describing it that way).
I'm pretty skeptical of price controls, I never expect them to do me any good. The argument presented there is that surge pricing is bad because some people can't afford it. The other side of the coin is that if you ban surge pricing, you make it more difficult to charge less at other times.
It is going to requi
Q: What happens if I go over my data budget?
A: Project Fi will first alert you if you're getting close to your data budget. If you go over, you'll still get full-speed data and data is charged at the same $10 per GB rate. For example, if you go over your data budget by 350MB, $3.50 will be added to your next bill."
source: https://fi.google.com/about/faq/#plan-and-pricing-4
It's like they're taking the best things of both carriers - their unlimited data plans - and pretending those things don't exist, that they're some figment of consumers' imaginations, and instead just taking the AT&T/Verizon approach, but using a soft and squishy dildo instead of a spiked rusty iron dildo to screw us with.
I wish Google and Apple would copy the concept and just have their phones always be on the network, with cell plans just serving as a way to get voice service and get a decent download speed. Now that Google has built out an MVNO, they could definitely enable such a thing.
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 Verizon can have their fancy networks; they're moot compared to the millions of customers that pick Sprint and T-Mobile specifically because of the unlimited data plans.
Hell, T-Mobile's business model pretty much revolves around it at this point. "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. Oh, and we'll let you rollover your unused high-speed data and we won't make music streaming count toward it and we'll pay your current carrier's ETFs if you switch because we know that that's the only reason why you haven't already switched to us and you won't be locked into a contract anymore." They advertise all this every chance they get, and they deliver on those promises.
I switched to T-Mobile a year ago (from Sprint, which I switched to from AT&T) because of the zero overages, meaning that I wouldn't have to have an unlimited plan just for the peace of mind of not being shafted on a particular month because I watched one too many videos on YouTube or somesuch. A year later and I haven't looked back; definitely one of the better decisions I've made. Google Fi doesn't offer anything that would even remotely compel me to swtich (not even the dual-carrier stuff; I've found T-Mobile to be consistently better coverage-wise and speed-wise than Sprint in my area, so I'd probably just be on T-Mobile's network all the time anyway).
... 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 an important omission.
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.
Because they're acting as an MVNO, and have to pay Sprint and T-Mobile for each MB they deliver to the handset. Google is not trying to replace carriers, they're trying to improve the experience as an MVNO (they providing what Republic Wireless does on a much larger scale).
Google Fi also rides on Sprint (and T-Mobile, though it doesn't seem like T-Mobile is nearly as desperate for revenue at this point). So there's not really a difference there.
> Also, Republic retains the right to boot you if you use too much "unlimited" data on Sprint's network.
Pretty much all carriers have that bit of legalese in their respective agreements (even T-Mobile does, IIRC, and I know for sure Sprint does). Usually that's reserved for extreme cases where one's use of the network significantly dwarfs that of the rest of the user base and is actually causing congestion issues; a few extra gigs is a drop in the pond in comparison.
With pay per gigabyte, incentives are aligned. Consumers and websites have an incentive to conserve data. Carriers have an incentive to encourage use and increase speeds. There's no reason to block servers or VPNs or tethering. There's no reason to throttle BitTorrent or Netflix or terminate anyone's service for "excessive" usage. In fact, with pay-per-GB carriers should encourage BitTorrent use and fight for consumers against the MPAA!
Historically unlimited data has been better for consumers because carriers have charged ridiculous prices for overages (e.g. per-KB prices that add up to hundreds of dollars per GB), and consumers don't have a good way of knowing how much bandwidth they're using when they use different services, so they can't predict their bills. If these two problems can be fixed, pay-per-GB is the best way forward. I'm glad Google realizes this.
Or it's an obnoxious euphemism.
I have an unlimited data plan on T-mobile for 30 bucks. Paying by the megabyte would discourage me from using data, not "incentivize me to use less data".
>There's no reason to block servers or VPNs or tethering. There's no reason to throttle BitTorrent or Netflix or terminate anyone's service for "excessive" usage. In fact, with pay-per-GB carriers should encourage BitTorrent use!
Thank god for net neutrality, and unlimited/unmetered data, right?
Carriers acting like data is scarce and in need of conserving are discouraging users from using their product...
Who says that my usage of data is a "problem" needing "solved"? 10GB (the highest Google offers on its Fi page) can be burned through pretty quickly just by watching videos on a road trip or somesuch. I'd much rather pay $80 for an unlimited plan from Sprint or T-Mobile than pay $120 (or more) for Google Fi.
"Clogging the network" would be solved by carriers actually bothering to invest in their networks to handle the load. That would solve a multitude of other problems, too.
This is exactly my point. With unlimited data plans, carriers have little incentive to upgrade their networks. It increases costs without directly increasing revenue. With pay-per-GB, the incentive is clear: upgrading the network increases usage which directly increases 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.
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 :)
Time is the more important measure of cellular network usage than bytes. I think it would be more convenient for customers to be billed per minute. At $10/GB if my average speed is 5 Mbps that's $0.30 a minute. Or $30 to watch a full-length movie in HD. Makes me wish Netflix still had mail delivery.
No, upgrading the network allows you to serve more customers at higher cost (the cost of the upgrades). If you have unlimited data plans, you can only recoup those upgrade costs by recruiting more customers because existing customers pay the same regardless of the speed. Recruiting more customers is also costly and affected by many more factors than just network quality. The connection between network upgrades and increased revenue is tenuous and indirect.
In contrast, with pay-per-GB, network upgrades increase usage and thus increase revenue from existing customers as well as new ones. The connection between network upgrades and increased revenue is direct and immediate.
I agree that $10/GB is far too expensive; I'm sure Google would love for it to be cheaper but the pricing isn't their choice to make. When carriers get some competition from Project Loon and/or Elon Musk's satellite thingy, hopefully prices will go down.
Upgrades are a one-time cost. You charge a higher rate for access to the faster network until the investment is paid off then you phase down to all customers. Then your operating cost is lower per subscriber in the long run.
In contrast, with pay-per-GB, upgrades increase revenue automatically without losing customers. You don't have to increase your rates and you can probably even decrease them and still increase revenue.
edit: Removed reference to cash conversion cycle because it doesn't really have anything to do with that.
My best guess with 2mins of [re]search: Let's suppose they hold on average $10 per month per customer that's unused, Nexus 5 sold between 3-5 million units, apparently. So for Nexus 6's on their Fi plan they're likely only looking at the invested benefit of $30M (USD)? Google probably have that sort of cash down the back of the sofa, would they even bother investing the float? Or are my guestimations just way off??
UK utilities I've always assumed are doing this hence the wilder and wilder over-estimation of bills in order to hold more customers cash. Wonder how much Google will push the "let us hold your cash, you'll get back what you don't spend" line in order to have more cash to play with. How evil are they prepared to get to hold some extra pocket change?
- refunds are perceived as gains (against the reference point of the monthly charge), whereas a fee is perceived as a loss (and losses hurt more) - bills are capped so the the possibility of big fees (losses) is eliminated (people struggle with probabilities and fear extremely unlikely events)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics#Prospect_t...
Perhaps having a big allowance in mind just encourages people to use their data!
The service apparently alerts you when you get close the "limit". Which means that if you're disciplined you can cut yourself off or just realize that you need to increase your monthly budget.
As in, it's more expensive to meter everyone's data and charge per 100 MB, and cheaper to charge in 10 GB blocks and then refund retroactively. They are piggybacking off of other networks, which may not accept 100 MB purchases.
I can see them doing a purchasing scheme with the suppliers and then transferring the savings to the customer.
You get incremental costs per CC charge. Better, in Googles mind, to overcharge and refund rather than a new charge every 100mb.
To you or I it is easy to see the true nature of their "plans" but to someone who isn't quite sure how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, this probably makes it a lot easier to compare to, say, AT&T.
For the business: Google carries zero risk of post-pay billing as you are paid upfront + they are earning interest on the aggregated cash they will either refund or pay to the telco(s) at the end of a month.
For the consumer: You are effective pay as you go, so you don't pay for unused data plus you have an upper limit on spend. The interest loss for money in holding is minimal at the individual level. And given this is likely recurring billing (so I doubt for most people they will ever get actually paid back) you simply keep a float in your google account and top up the difference each month.
(Wifi calling should probably be left out of that list, since it's most likely going to come to the other carriers later this year.)
It only has 100 minutes, but you can use Google Voice or similar over data. And who talks on the phone anymore anyway?
>And who talks on the phone anymore anyway?
I know a number of people who wouldn't buy a plan unless it had unlimited minutes. Some people use their phones for talking heavily.
I do talk on the phone all the time at work, but for personal use it's pretty minimal. But even if I did, the Hangouts Dialer app will make GV calls over data, so I don't use any minutes, and I don't even use data when I'm on wifi.
For context, I use Google Voice, and while it's really nice in a lot of ways, it has some unfortunate bugs that have persisted for years that it seems impossible to get support for. I no longer unconditionally recommend it to people because while being able to take calls from my computer and get transcripts of voicemails is great, it also pseudo-randomly decides to only direct some calls to devices where I'm not present with no notification on devices that I'm using and also drops a small percentage of texts (my guess is around 1%). Most people I talk to are horrified by the idea of texts getting dropped, and I don't recommend GV to those folks, although it's fine if that's a tradeoff you're ok with.
I understand that it's a beta and that bugs are expected, but it's a problem when you run into a bug that interferes with your ability to use your phone and there's no way to get support for it.
Phone carriers aren't exactly known for their stellar customer service, but at least with them, if you call back enough times or escalate to higher level support, you'll eventually get a resolution. As far as I can tell, that's not true of Google's phone related products.
I have no doubt that the support for this will be as good.
Now, their automated side of advertising is crappy unless you're a large spender, but then that's just economies of scale.
That hasn't been my experience, particularly with this issue:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949
Basically you have to roll a dice whether you'll have sound in voice calls on a Nexus 4 running Lollipop. 500 comments, 1200 stars, and the issue is simply closed as "wrong forum" with no other comment than "contact customer support".
I mean, I'm glad that Google supports so many camera features, as that's clearly the most important function of a Nexus 4, but at the end of the day I still expect my phone to be able to, you know, make voice calls.
Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8898669
LIVE SUPPORT AVAILABLE AROUND THE CLOCK If you need help, our support team is in the US and available all day, every day. Give us a call, and don't be surprised when you connect right away to a Fi Expert without pressing 0.
Even their roaming price doesn't compare well - for Asia I get ~$8 per day, for Europe, North America and Oceana it's $15 per day. This is for unlimited data, at full local network speed.
Last time I was in LA for a project (with half a dozen others, all came in from different countries) it often worked out cheaper/easier for them to all just ether to my phone than deal with a crappy prepaid data service each.
I'm guessing the biggest cost of building and maintaining mobile data infrastructure is the labor, and physical and intellectual labor in India is just way cheaper on average than in the US.
Historically, though, the US carriers have operated in way that makes it harder for customers to switch between carriers (carrier-specific-frequency tied phones, contracts). Some argue that this is a natural technical outcome of covering an area as vast as the US, and others say this is deliberate collusion. Either way, MVNOs that disintermediate this seem like a healthy stimulus for competition in the US mobile data marketplace, and perhaps they will be able to reduce the cost/GB in the US.
EDIT: wording
> Pay one rate for data around the world
> In 120+ countries, data usage costs the same $10 per GB as it does in the US (data speed is limited to 256kbps/3G). Check email, get directions, and keep in touch with friends and family when on your trip. Also, call around the world for 20c per minute and send unlimited international texts.
[1] http://www.t-mobile.com/optional-services/roaming.html
It seems like UK carriers are lagging behind rather badly in this regard.
http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home
It's not as many countries, but with 3 you can get unlimited data at a fraction of the cost (I currently pay £15/month with 3 for unlimited data, 5000 3 to 3 minutes, 5000 texts and 2000 minutes to other networks).
nevertheless, they also have an option to upgrade to 3G data for a fee ($10 or so).
First off, I just want to say, the "free tier" of international data is extremely appreciated for two important reasons:
- Overage is literally impossible (i.e. no "bill shock").
- If you don't wish to pay, you get "something" for nothing.
So, now, the "bad." The reality is that T-Mobile's free tier is incredibly slow like "my 56K modem was faster than this" slow. A single modern web-site can literally take so long to load that my phone would fall asleep and then cut off the connection (meaning I'd have to start all over).
It is really only useful for push notifications and to check your email if you're really patient. Even for reading sites like Reddit, it would drive you up the wall. Looking at images (e.g. imgur) is a no-go and YouTube is definitely not even plausible.
Now, if you pay, you get more data per dollar than you do on most other big US networks and you legitimately get 4G speeds in many places (at least I certainly did). So if you pay you wouldn't even know you were abroad. And when you run out of paid data, you drop down to the slow speed again rather than being cut off (which is nice, so you feel safe to use 100% of your paid data with no risk).
So, to me, T-Mobile's free tier doesn't really change the formula for international travel. It just solves overage/bill shock and gives you some basic notifications and maybe email. Those aren't things to be sniffed at, they're legitimately nice, but people should manage their expectations.
PS - Protip: Restart your phone every single time you change countries. My phone got "confused" and would refuse to connect until I restarted. We did a cruise so a new country was daily, and I missed a day of data because I thought that country simply wasn't supported (rather than it being a phone problem).
In the end, we paid $40 (all for calls @ $0.20/min) for 3 weeks of near-normal usage with 2 iPhones.
To me that's very much a game changer - previously I paid double that same amount as an accidentally access charge (forgot to turn off roaming on my AT&T phone). Not to mention I had to spend 30m with the AT&T rep to configure our accounts so we wouldn't get charged $2/min prior to our trip.
It was this cruise but in reverse (Aruba last, cayman first):
Ports: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida | Aruba | Cartagena, Colombia | Panama Canal, Panama (Gatun Lake) | Colon, Panama | Limon, Costa Rica | Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
When I paid for data I got good 3G or 4G speeds. With free data it was incredibly slow, like sub-56K modem slow, even at the same ports as the 4G speeds with paid.
Here's a YouTube video someone else took which accurately represents my experience:
https://youtu.be/PISKCPFu3iU?t=26s
It takes a minute to load Gizmoto's homepage.
What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds? That would be my first question when it comes to travel.
I was very satisfied and would gladly use them again. Having transit directions made spontaneous travel much easier.
"Unpleasant." What I'd strongly recommend is to download the map using offline maps before you leave. If you wait for Google Maps to download the data over the 2G/free tier you'll be in for a very long (10+ minute) wait.
I did not do offline maps before I left, but mostly we were on tours so we didn't really need them. But if I was e.g. exploring a city or doing something on my own, you'd definitely want to do offline maps if you wanted to use Google Maps on their free tier.
It's a long list, but there's some notable / surprising absences (e.g. Brazil, Spain).
https://polastre.com/2013/02/what-the-map/
Anyway, I'll be damn glad if an alternative appears as it'll give me an additional chance to qualify.
For comparison:
In Germany I have an LTE data plan for my tablet where I pay €24.99 for 7.5GB (~$3.57/GB), the lowest plan being €6.99 for 1GB (~$7.50/GB). Unlimited calls in Germany including 1GB data would cost me €19.99/month (~$21.48) at the same provider and unlimited text in Germany would be an additional €4.99/month (~$5.36), otherwise texts are €0.09 each (~$0.10). Many German providers offer pre-paid (or post-paid) plans with €0.09/minute and €0.09/text.
My current plans work out as follows:
Tablet with 7.5GB LTE data plan: €24.99 / ~$26.83 (~$3.57/GB)
Smartphone with 1GB LTE data, 200 minutes and 200 texts: €11.90 / ~$12.87
Overages per minute: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages per text: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages for data: free (at significantly reduced speed; "high-speed" extra data can be added for €3-9/GB depending on the plan and provider)
The next closest plan for my smartphone would be 1GB LTE data, 400 minutes and 400 texts at €15.90 / ~$17.07, the difference works out to €0.01 (~$0.01) per minute or text.
I'm using my own devices, so the plans don't include the cost of the devices themselves.
My mobile phone bill over the past months mostly ranged from €14-20 and my tablet bill was mostly fixed at €24.99 (turns out 7.5GB is generally sufficient unless I use Netflix outside WiFi a lot).
Also, tethering isn't a problem either, but obviously roaming is excessively expensive even in the EU.
I would think the increased expenditure of 26 times more towers would increase the cost of plans.
Europe also never had the culture of carrier subsidized phones, and so were never accustomed to paying more in monthly fees in exchange for low to no cost upgrades of hardware.
Tethering varies by carrier in the US - Verizon is legally obligated to allow tethering due to the result of a lawsuit, so they do not charge any extra for this, i believe t-mobile also does not charge for tethering, but it is not related to a lawsuit AFAIK
A final point is that pricing for data is fundamentally different in europe as i understand it. Most plans i am familiar with in europe tier data prices by speed - in the US almost all plans get the fastest speeds available, but it is tiered but amount of data used. You cannot pay for faster speeds on a typical US plan, only for greater amounts of data. The european side of that may have changed, as its been a year or so since i was last in europe looking into this
I live in the Netherlands and subsidized phones are the norm here, don't think other countries are that different.
What you say about subsidized phones is patently false. I don't recall unsubsidized phones being a thing at all in Germany when mobile phones first became popular. Even today many if not most Germans seem to prefer subsidized phones -- in my experience buying your phone separately is only common in the more tech savvy or higher end markets, although the growing popularity of discounted month-to-month mobile plans may be changing that.
AFAIK tethering and jailbreaking/rooting is, generally speaking, always legal in Germany. For subsidized phones things can be different if you're not actually purchasing the phone but only leasing it (because it isn't your property and therefore you're not allowed to modify it), but I think these days most contracts have you actually purchase the phone. Not sure whether this is due to market demand, but I think there's also a decline in carrier branded phones, so it might simply be that.
Except for pre-paid/post-paid (i.e. no fixed plan, pay-as-you-go) contracts, I think all German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data. As far as I can tell, most if not all providers these days offer their fastest speeds as "high-speed" on all contracts with only the amount of data being the difference, not tiered speed caps (this definitely used to be different).
So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date. At least with regard to Germany -- I don't know enough about other EU countries to say anything about them.
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.
The same is true in the US, they are called MVNO's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_vi...
>What you say about subsidized phones is patently false
You are most likely talking about carriers allowing people to finance their phones in europe. Where you can pay an additional 20 euros a month to get the new iphone or whatever.
This is not at all what i'm talking about.
In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price. You sign a contract and you get to choose from the carriers selection of phones, older phones being completely free, newest phones costing 200 dollars. The rest of the cost of the phone is hidden inside of the cost of the plan itself. There is no line item for how much you are paying for the phone each month, it is simply part of the pricing of the service itself. When your phone has been completely paid off, you will never know because your plans price will not change.
In europe, you finance phones, when they are paid off you stop paying for the phone and you then own the phone. your bill goes down. This is not at all the same behavior as the subsidized phone system in the US.
>German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data
This is what im talking about, this does not exist in the US. There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
There is some subversion by carriers using 'throttling' where they slow certain lines down to a crawl when the carrier decides they've used too much data for the month, but that is by no means a part of how plans are priced.
>So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date
admittedly so, i haven't been in europe for more than a week since 2013 - and have never spent much time in germany
Now many providers have dropped the "unlimited 2G" data claim and just stating the rate limit after you use your high-speed bucket.
https://kauppa.saunalahti.fi/#!/matkapuhelinliittymat https://www.dna.fi/liittymat
This has definitely been a thing in Germany in the past. In fact, I don't think I've seen ever the "pay $(x+y)/month for 24 months for the plan and phone, then pay only $x/month" model. Usually after 24 months you'd be offered a new phone (again for "free" or a radically "discounted" price). This may have changed since I stopped paying attention to long-term plans but you're wrong in thinking we never had what you have in the US.
> There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
We also had hard data caps very early on. We just replaced that with "unlimited" plans with a cap on "high-speed" data at some point.
That said, the low-speed data might as well not be available at all -- most people I know buy extra if they hit their high-speed cap. It's barely sufficient for checking your e-mail.
That's an interesting attempt to justify the price, but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live. Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations, while the UK has 23,000. (Despite the fact that the UK is ~30 time smaller than the US). So your argument does not hold.
On another note, I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware. You don't. You're literally paying _more_ to upgrade your phone/get a new phone in the long run, than just buying one outright. The reason you can buy an iPhone for 99 USD is because you'll be paying ~27 USD "extra" for the next 2 years, which is exactly the same as if you had just spent 600 outright and saved that amount (or even more, 99% of the time) over the next 2 years. There's no "subsidization" going on, if anything, you're subsidizing the company.
[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/
https://www.dna.fi/liittymat https://kauppa.saunalahti.fi/#!/matkapuhelinliittymat
I understand that theres a lot of variety in Europe, but to say that tiers by speed doesn't happen is factually incorrect.
>There's no tradeoff
I never said there was, I am simply pointing out differences in how the markets are set up and function in these vastly different continents
>there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US
This is true, this is the biggest problem with the US cellular market today
>That's an interesting attempt to justify the price
I'm not trying to justify anything, just explain some of the differences.
>but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live
It depends on hundreds of factors - population density, building density, building materials, types of cellular radios used (CDMA vs GSM have different ranges), terrain, interference, number of carriers, etc
The difference in land area is definitely a factor - i never said it was the only one. My mistake was obviously saying '26 times more towers', which i admit was a careless thing to say, but i think it still made my point. The US has significantly more infrastructure than any single european country, in part due to its much larger coverage area.
>Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
Much truer in Europe than in the US - US: 32.65/sq km UK: 262/sq km [1]
>If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations
I see 205,000[2] - which puts the US at ~10 times the towers of the UK
>So your argument does not hold. do you think that the cost of ~10 times more infrastructure is not part of the higher prices in the US compared to the UK? My argument was that having to spend much greater amounts on infrastructure is one of the reasons for a price difference, i didn't say it was the only reason or explanation just that it's worth noting.
>I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware.
This is just the psychology of purchasing. People don't like spending a lot of money at once and would prefer to spread costs out over time - I completely agree that the 'subsidized' model is garbage, but i haven't been able to convince a single family member to switch to buying phones outright no matter how many times i show them the lower cost after the full two years. Of course by low to no cost i meant when you walk into the provider's location after two years, you walk out with a new phone that you paid very little for during that transaction. It doesn't seem to matter to most people that they end up paying more than the phones full retail cost over the course of two years.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de... [2]http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/
When it comes to carrier subsidizing, we actually have both non-subsidized and subsidized, as well as "semi-subsidized" (e.g. pay half price of the phone, but you can't change operator for 2 years).
The downside IMO with mobile in Europe is that we have so many small countries, so occasionally you have to leave your country (=roaming fees) for some reason.
I pay about $65 / month with AT&T, for unlimited talk & text, and 5gb of LTE data (10gb shared on a two person family plan). That includes the cost of the device.
I always hear Americans say they have unlimited talk and text. Is this really the most popular option or do most plans just include it by default? Might explain why American mobile plans always sound so incredibly expensive to me (i.e. "pay for what you use" a la Ting is actually a disruptive idea in that market because everybody overpays by default).
That same carrier (called "Free mobile") offers a €2.00/mo plan for 2h talk, unlimited SMS/MMS and 50Mo data, which is €0/mo (free) if you're subscribed to their broadband.
EDIT: typo
Probably more in other countries.
I think what's interesting here is that Apple tried to do something similar years ago and carriers revolted.
In Latvia we have unlimited calls and messages for 9.95€. Add unlimited 2G/3G/4G data for 9.99€. That's roughly 20€ for unlimited everything. Tethering is not disabled, however, you could get downgraded to slower speeds for abuse (torrents & alike; never heard of this being enforced).
Roaming charges in while in EU are regulated at 0.19€ per minute, messages for 0.09€ per minute. Data is still expensive, though - 0,20€ per MB. Mobile operators provide roaming data packages, which might lower your data bill to 0.14€ per MB.
There is a upcoming EU roam-like-home regulation, which would mean that you never pay more than at home for anything - including data.
Even limited to 256k/3G, that is still insane. Coverage list here: https://fi.google.com/about/rates/
That's enough of a perk that I'm considering moving to a Nexus 6.
T-Mobile offers unlimited data internationally as part of their simple choice unlimited plan. It's limited to 256k speeds (Which in my experience, I have gotten basically exactly 256k when I've used it in the Netherlands and South Africa). You have the option of buying 4G speed bandwidth for a fairly reasonable price - though still a bit higher than the Google Fi data rates.
I didn't notice the rate limiting asterisk until your comment, and this kind of kills it for me. It was much more appealing when I thought I would be charged the same for data in the US and abroad.
About 10-15x higher, it looks like. :/ Around $100-150/GB, depending on the pass length, e.g. 100MB usable in 24 hours for $15, or 500MB usable in 2 weeks for $50.
I suppose it's still better than Google - the rate limited data is still free, as opposed to paying full price for it, and nothing forces you to buy the full throughput data passes.
As people use more and more data, it just won't make economic sense to offer your customers unlimited data.
If Google had offered unlimited data, and then later canceled it, everyone would be bitching about them killing the competition, anti-competitive behavior, etc.
It makes perfect economic sense. Users who expect to need a lot of data (e.g. anyone who watches or wants to watch HD videos over a cellular connection, which is a lot of people) would be better served by T-Mobile's or Sprint's unlimited (non-throttled) data plans (which run for somewhere between $70 and $90 per month, IIRC), and everyone else would be better served by T-Mobile's throttled data plans, since you'll never be charged overages.
At least AT&T and Verizon can claim that they have a stronger network with better coverage than T-Mobile or Sprint (which is why a lot of people go with them and are willing to be screwed over by them). Google Fi can't even offer that if it's going to be using Sprint and T-Mobile as its backends; combine this with the lack of unlimited data plans and only supporting the Nexus 6 with zero indication of when other phones will be supported (if ever), Google Fi's dead in the water.
In other words:
> I'm pretty sure the accountants and engineers at Google got together and figured out that "unlimited data" plans are going to go bye-bye. For everyone. All providers.
Then I'm pretty sure all the accountants and engineers at Google are incompetent.
I'm predicting that as more people use more of their data, the network will not grow fast enough to support the total bandwidth. The fact that they can currently offer "unlimited" is a temporary condition, based on the distribution of network users' bandwidth. As consumption grows, it gets to the point where they can't actually offer it any more.
That's my prediction, and I bet Google made the same prediction.
Instead, you're acting like I don't understand that people WANT unlimited data, especially at the prices it's being offered at today.
Don't punish users because you're too lazy to provide them with a network that's actually designed to handle current/future data demand.
Even with the best intentions. You would need to be subsidized by the government to provide it.
Since so few people TODAY currently make use of their unlimited data, the network can afford to offer those terms. And they found that by offering those terms, they attracted a disproportionate number of customers. In short, it was popular and profitable.
But at some point, the aggregate network demand will exceed even the THEORETICAL network capacity, if you offer your customers unlimited data, and demand goes up the way I think it will.
Or in essence, you will need to limit bandwidth to the point that calling it "unlimited" is just ridiculous.
At which point you build out the network so that it can handle the increased demand. The problem of congestion doesn't magically go away if you ditch unlimited plans for pay-per-gigabyte plans.
Even barring that, the wired broadband world already addresses this by making speed the useful commodity instead of quantity, and there's very little reason why the wireless world couldn't do the same. "Our networks are getting congested, so we're going to switch to a new model where you can pay cheap rates for 2G speed or pay more for 4G speed or pay something in between for 3G speed or pay top-dollar for our newfangled 5G" is a much better answer than "our networks are getting congested, so we're going to just cap users' usage of it and hope the problem goes away".
That, in short, is what Google Fi should be doing. That would be an actually-compelling reason to switch to it instead of T-Mobile.
Until then, T-Mobile will continue to get my business, and T-Mobile will therefore be at least that much more incentivized to provide unlimited data plans.