Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

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This all sounds great up until I get to the "How?" part. All of his suggestions are sane and sound reasonable, but I don't trust any of the current data providers to implement any of them in a sane way.

>Ruthless transparency from the telco as to how much you’ll pay for every MB.

When have any of the telcos even been translucent when it came to pricing? They hide real prices in pages and pages of fine print and don't offer any details on taxes or fees until they print them on the bill after you've signed up.

>A price-per-MB that, off the top, feels reasonable.

... like the rates we pay for text messages? Or existing wireless overages?

>A price-per-MB that falls during the course of the month as you use more and more.

Again, I don't trust any of the existing data providers to lower prices ... ever.

>A lightweight API so that you can obsessively check how much you spent in the last week or hour or ten minutes. So that after a while you won’t need to.

I foresee SOAP or invalid XML/JSON or servers that mysteriously go down at the end of the month due to "unexpected demand."

These are great ideas, but I think we need new competitors in the market before any of them will get implemented in a mildly sane way.

Telco companies in other countries are able to do this. Why shouldn't companies in the US then be able to offer such a model?

E.g., see "Bob" in Austria: http://www.bob.at/gigabob

The table (for one of their plans) says:

Included volume per month: 9 GB

Cost per month: 8.80 Euro

Each additional GB: 4 Euro

Fee to activate the plan: 0 Euro

Max. speed: 4 Mbit/s

Commitment period: None

I'd say this is pretty transparent to the user and there aren't really any "traps" in the plan (except that traffic gets a little bit more expensive once you are past 9 GB in a given month).

> Why shouldn't companies in the US then be able to offer such a model?

They don't have to because they are in a government regulated cartel. Classic case of regulatory capture. The only free market in the US is the wifi sprectrum, which is providing the most value to US citizens.

If the industry is heavily regulated, the government should also regulate what the comment above points. The price should be clearly stated. Fine print should be forbidden.

The hallmark of "regulatory capture" is that the regulated party is driving the relationship, and not the regulators.

So while we see occasional push back when public outcry gets too loud, most law and regulation is written by telco's, and hence telco friendly.

Yeah that's why i kind of rolled my eyes when i read this:

> I can sense Net-heads all over the world rolling their eyes and shaking their heads: “Nope, I gotta have flat-rate data”

In my experience the usage based billing is the norm everywhere (i generally buy a sim card for data everywhere i go).

Because the US has a duopoly (AT&T/Verizon), for the most part. We have two smaller national carriers (T-Mobile/Sprint) and many regional carriers, but they are not competitive, nationally.

With the duopoly, they can maintain the status quo as there's no real competition or innovation going on.

Very few countries in the world have more then a few national networks.

Very few nations are as big as the US.

I never argued that they couldn't offer such a model. I'm arguing that they won't because they're too averse to change and the short-term risk that they might lose money in the pursuit of more customers paying slightly less (or more?) in the long term.

Isn't this what Ting is doing in the USA? They use the Sprint network.

While I understanding your general cynicism, may I observe that except for the easy API part, Comcast already does all this transparency stuff. (Different pricing plan, but it is transparent, and mostly adequate.) If market pressure could get Comcast to comply, I don't think it's that hopeless that it can get the telcos to comply. Your cynicism is perhaps a little too cynical.

Which Comcast transparency are you talking about? I had Comcast in mind specifically when I was writing my cynical post.

Log in to your Comcast account, and on one of the primary tabs will be the amount of bandwidth you've used this month and the totals for the previous two months, along with a clear specification that you get 250GB/month (and how fuzzy they are willing to be about that), and some FAQs about why. Market-speak about why, yes, but still, it's there. It's all there now, and has been for at least a year. And they clearly announced this at the time they put it in. The only thing they don't have is the easy API for finding this out automatically.

Unfortunately my login details are not where am I am right now and I can not give you directions straight to it, but it's not that hard to find once you jump the hurdle of finding your login.

When I think of "transparency" I'm thinking more about transparency up front -- before you're a customer. If I can't make an informed decision without spending hours looking through terms and conditions information then I don't think it's "transparent".

Also, I just spent 15 minutes poking through the comcast.com website without finding any mention of a 250GB/month limit. I did a search for "250gb" (it even came up as a suggestion from their search engine) but it told me there were no results for that search query.

Um, no. Maybe they are transparent once you've signed up, but until you do, they are opaque. My best source of information on their actual speeds, rather than just the burst rates they advertise, was Wikipedia, and I'm sure that was at least a little out of date. As for pricing, I can't find any concrete information on that past their special offer period, even if I give them my exact address.

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