Gruber on AT&T's Change in Data Plans
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
"Unlimited data" isn't about data, or price, or value. It's about not having to worry -- or to even think about -- how much you use your phone. If I'm on a 2GB plan, even though I use less than 2GB per month on average, I'll start thinking about rationing my usage every single time I use my phone. That fundamentally changes the experience of having the internet in my pocket.
I am amazed that Apple allowed AT&T to make these changes. They go against the stuff Apple stands for -- the culture Steve was talking about at D8 yesterday.
It's not Apple-like. I don't want to worry about the nitty gritty of how many bytes I'm sending and receiving. I just want to use my iPhone, and I pay to be able to do just that.
You emailed the wrong person. It's AT&T, not Apple. They're two very separate companies. To be honest, I've had less trouble with AT&T than any of the other telecoms. This change prompted me to check my data usage for the last six months and I was surprised to find that I actually use less than 200mb a month on my iPhone - these new plans are actually going to save me money.
Besides, had I emailed AT&T's CEO, I may have received a cease and desist. Didn't want to chance that: http://9to5mac.com/ATT_FAIL
They all have terrible customer support, and I've had zero complaints about AT&T's coverage while I've had my phone, with the exception of when I was at Lollapalooza a couple of years ago, where I got no signal at all, which added salty irony to all the AT&T sponsorship banners in Grant Park that year.
You can't possibly believe that "American Telephone & Telegraph" would so easily be out of the telephone business without the iPhone. That's an absurd notion.
My phone does have limited minutes and that doesn't bother me, but that's because the limit is three orders of magnitude over my average use, and two orders of magnitude over the most I have ever used. I'm only at risk of hitting the limit if I undergo some major life changing event, which I'd probably notice.
I think it's a better policy to gently disuade, via pricing structure, people from going hog-wild on consuming a finite, shared resource. Trying to handle each case on the back end as a TOS violation sounds a lot more messy, expensive, and reactive to me.
You know there are probably guys out there who would torrent hundreds of movies over a tethered phone or share their MP3 collection over Limewire (ok, I'm dating myself), or perpetually stream video if they thought to themselves "hey, it's free". This pricing structure is designed to make those guys feel the pinch, as well they should. There's only so much spectrum in the neighborhood of a given tower.
Question for Mr. Gruber: do you think pay-per-byte cable/DSL internet would be a good idea also? If not, why not? If yes, how do you explain the market's overwhelming preference for flat-fee over pay-go?
Obviously, ISPs could charge by the byte. To my knowledge none do, for reasons others have mentioned already. We don't like thinking about the marginal cost of web pages, and nobody wants a nasty surprise on their internet bill at the end of the month.
Tiered pricing isn't germane to metering. A power company might place me in one service tier, and a megawatt aluminum smelting operation in another. They might pay less per kWh than I do, but we both pay ~20% more if we use 20% more power. OTOH, while Time Warner will let me pay an extra $10 to upgrade from "5Mb" service to "15Mb" service, my monthly bill is fixed regardless of my usage level.
More importantly, he isn't praising the moves so much as saying that he will save a few bucks with the new plans, and that for all of the problems 3G on an iPhone with AT&T is less shitty than another product a MiFi.
I get the sense you're reviewing other things he's written and not this specific post.
It's perfectly reasonable for heavy users to pay more than light users. But the same holds true for water, sewage, electricity, etc.
So why do we have such a complicated mess of data plan options? Why is 3G bandwidth not just a simple metered service where everybody pays the same rate?
Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.
People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.
Because the vast majority of people don't use enough bandwidth to make that option more profitable for the telcos than their current setup, where people buy much more bandwidth (if you measure it as being the maximum throughput times the amount of time in a month) than they need.
So my real concern about these type of data plans is not that they are not fair, but that they will stifle inovation and the way people use their phones. If we are not pushing the phone networks to expand the amount of data that they can push out to phones and we are not encouraging every phone user to use as much data as possible inovation in how people use their phones will slow.
It is concerning to me that AT&T is now offering people a financial incentive to not look for new and interesting ways to use their phone...
Actually, I don't doubt it, I'm one of them. Though it has more to do with the fact that coverage in my area is EDGE-only and that, except when I'm driving, I'm pretty much in a WiFi hotspot all the time.
Of course, this does not take away form the fact that they changed the deal 1 month after the iPads release in the US.