The fact is they don’t burn coal to make the heat but they do need to buy the bandwidth to provide the dumb pipe you want?

Going back to the coal to make heat analogy you only get one lump of coal per day. How much heat can you provide for your customers?

do you REALLY advocate using a cell phone to access the internet to make phone calls via VoiP? WHY don’t you just use the (wait for it…) CELL phone to make your calls!

metro offers unlimited use – if netflix isn’t included, have you considered that this is a technical/software issue? why not check that out before you write nonsense like in this article.

i really suspect the entire attack has to do with the threat felt by the “big boys” in this game. you know which ones – the ones who charge by the minute, limit access to 5g a month, have outrageous prices, demand huge deposits, etc.

i’m a long time user of metro and find their service the best in the market for price and services. no minutes. no limit. multiple offerings of services – i pick and i choose what i want to use.

And for you Bill: at one point you say you don’t care what MetroPCS charges: “it’s NOT about telling MetroPCS or Verizon or any other pig of a company what they can charge per month. If MetroPCS wants to charge a million dollars per month for 1 meg download limit, fine, go ahead and do it.”

Well if you don’t care what they charge, pay for the most expensive plan that has no restrictions. Problem solved. But don’t ask the FCC to take away options for other people that want cheaper plans just because they aren’t good enough for you. And if that still isn’t what you want, guess what: you can choose from at least 4-5 other carriers. What is the problem again?

On the $40 plan, you won’t be able to root because Androids will only be allowed on the $50 plan, just like now. I have MetroPCS CDMA Android and it has to be on the $50 plan or above. LTE Androids will be the same. $40 plan will be for simple candybar or flip phone LTE phones. Parents will be getting those for kids just to stay in touch. They have locked down proprietary broswers, no apps…

This article is much ado over nothing. Smartphones at Metro right now start at $50 and higher. That remains the same. Only difference is the LTE $50 plan will have a cap instead of being totally unlimited.

I am so glad OM and its commenters have found MetroPCS liable mere on the basis of a Free Press allegation. That will spare the rest of us poor unwashed the drudgery of waiting for the results of the FCC’s actual investigation.

I mean really, why waste time with the FCC when Free Press has already given us the answer?

It isn’t discrimination but reality. Everything has a cost. If you load up a cellphone plan with lots of features, unlimited access to everything, and so forth, it will cost more. That’s a fact. That’s reality. It is you who doesn’t care about the poor, not I. The poor do not have the luxury of spending what little money they have on non-necessities. For the poor, they need to be able to call and text people FAR more than they need to surf the net. For a cellphone company like MetroPCS that designed itself to be a low-price cellphone company (they were also the first to offer no-contract plans which allowed illegal aliens to get an unlimited cellphone plan), they need to strip down their cellphone plans so they can price them low enough so poor people buy what they can afford.

It isn’t that people might not want access to any site they want. It is that the poor cannot afford that luxury but can afford a cheap stripped-down plan. That’s what they want FAR more than seeing some baby laugh on YouTube. Would they like unlimited access to everything? Sure. They would also like to drive a Ferrari, vacation in Paris, and eat T-bone steaks every night. But they cannot because they cannot afford to do so. They have to watch what they spend their money on and make choices. You don’t want to give them choices. You want them to pay more because YOU think they want access to stuff you want access to. And if they cannot pay more, then what, Ben? What do you say to them then? Too bad? What?

And if you’re a cellphone company that sells unlimited cellphone plans and you want to sell a very cheap plan that poor people can afford, you have to restrict what they can do and access. No international calls. No YouTube. And things like that. If you restrict how much people can download, you’re just exchanging minute limits for download limits. Their plans are unlimited within the confines they make subscribers very well aware of. And those subscribers are happy because they either can afford it or are not paying for something they don’t want to and wouldn’t use.

Once again, setting up a pricing tier based on amount of data you want to download INSTEAD of the type of data you want to download is the only acceptable solution.