“Future, can you hear me now? Good.” Death of the ‘phone’ company.

http://joshrweinstein.com/post/26444725848

by joshwprinceton • 14 years ago

9 3 14 years ago

Josh2600hz• 14 years ago

This is a terrible article written without any grasp of the underlying realities of delivering the services the author discusses.

Applauding Verizon for instituting Draconian bandwidth practices may increase value for shareholders, but it is antithetical to the nature of development on the web and in the world. Can you imagine how development of the Internet might've fared if caps had been instituted in the 80's?

Capping wireless isn't the answer, and the author is ignorant to pursue justification through the lens of progression. Capped data plans are not an evolution, they are a regression.

joshwprinceton• 14 years ago

I'm not advocating for 'capping' data plans, I'm applauding the company's focus on charging customers by data plan instead of their call/text usage. As an aside, texting and phone use are not 'capped,' in the way you are defining it.

I also don't think this is Draconian by any means, it is a pay-per-use model...is github's pricing model Draconian in your view?

Smudge• 14 years ago

A friend once complained to me about how all of the "unlimited" plans are secretly capped (at, say, 3GB), which makes it very frustrating for anyone who would regularly go over the cap, as there are often no other options. He told me he would much prefer a pay-per-use model, which is apparently much more common in his home country (despite internet being much more expensive there).

At first, I was against this idea -- my gut told me that uncapped service is what enables us to use the internet to its full potential, and as soon as you start enforcing limits, you limit that potential -- but when I thought about it a bit more, it makes sense. You are paying for what you get, and if you need more, you pay more.

With all of this in mind, there is something to be said for treating everything as data instead of charging for 'minutes' and 'texts' and other abstract services on top of the data. (After all, it's data all the way down.)

“Future, can you hear me now? Good.” Death of the ‘phone’ company.

Related Stories