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Comment by gst | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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