Comments on: Forget caps, here’s the next big thing in wireless pricing

By: Kevin Fitchard

Kevin Fitchard — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:33:37 +0000

Hi Roman, yep I agree. The tricky thing is establishing a baseline of what is a “standard” service. All mobile data — with the exception of a few carrier apps — is all best effort today, which can be good (such as when you get a 20 Mbps connection on LTE) or bad (when you get 100 kbps on a congested network). By suddenly creating a “premium” category, you aren’t boosting someone’s speed. Rather you’re downgrading someone else’s speed to ensure that the premium customer always gets speeds in the upper range of their typical service. I just don’t the see that concept gelling with consumers.

By: Kevin Fitchard

Kevin Fitchard — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:25:33 +0000

Hey Thomas, we’re already starting to see this overseas. Operators aren’t charging per app, but excepting certain apps from the cap. Orange is selling a Facebook phone in some countries which gives you unlimited Facebook but a bucket of MBs for all other Internet use. Would be interesting to see if they try that in the U.S.

By: Roman Geyzer

Roman Geyzer — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 04:58:00 +0000

Unless you can schedule traffic (which you can’t), this is just robbing from one user to give to the next. It will probably make money for the carriers, but result in lower quality for users.

By: Thomas Sachson

Thomas Sachson — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:43:36 +0000

“The per-app charging is even worse. Unless there is specific collaboration with the app/content co the network will make too many mistakes trying to guess what’s what.” — We totally agree that doing any byte tracking in the network (DPI) is very tough to do well for any large number of data sources (herding billions of cats). But if you move the tracking into the app itself (which reports to a billing server periodically — not real time) it is secure, accurate, and easy to implement for the carrier. Even better, the apps are not made by the carrier, but by the developers using a carrier supplied toolkit (e.g. modified Android ADK) who want to push content, so even less deployment costs to the carrier and in turn lower costs / greater choice to their customers.

By: Arvin Alba

Arvin Alba — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:22:34 +0000

In the Philippines, most ISPs and providers do this – all unlimited, but plans are based on speed. You pay this, your maximum speed is 1mbps, you pay this and it gets bumped to 2, and so on and so forth. Yeah, the speeds are pathetic, but we’re not really that well off…

By: Kevin Fitchard

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:55:41 +0000

Great points, Dean. And herein lies the problem of policy management (or at least trying to service plans around policies). With a shared network you can’t maintain a consistent baseline from which to base a premium service.

I’m curious, do you think operators will ever try to break out signaling from data consumption, charge for it separately or even charge the application developer?

By: Dean Bubley

Dean Bubley — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:42:20 +0000

A lot of this is very fine in principle, but unworkable wishful thinking in reality. There are hundreds of ‘gotchas’ for all of this. What happens when lots of people all hit Turbo during congestion? It can’t magically generate more capacity, so the speed uplift will be minimal and the carrier will need to process refunds & complaints. More generally, how does the customer know they got what they paid for?

The per-app charging is even worse. Unless there is specific collaboration with the app/content co the network will make too many mistakes trying to guess what’s what.

It’s telling that VZW says this is still ‘deep in the labs’ – they’ll have to go through multiple cycles of testing & problem-fixing, and then deal with the fact the mobile data goalposts keep moving at the same time.

Also none of this fixes the problem of signalling load

Dean Bubley
@disruptivedean

By: SpeedReality

SpeedReality — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:33:29 +0000

So, I’ve been annoyed in the past with mobile network performance, so I wrote an app to measure it, in terms of real world speed, over time, in different locations: free – enjoy.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.spdreality.SpeedReality

By: Thomas Sachson

Thomas Sachson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:04:32 +0000

There is another service that will soon be showing up to improve service — except it will be free to users. It is called the toll-free app (FreeBand) and works like a 1-800 voice call where a third party pays for the bandwidth consumed. So the carrier gets a new revenue stream and the user free bytes. And no one gets slowed down in the process (it’s just a subsidy — no throttling up or down). For more info visit Box Top Solutions at CES in Las Vegas this week. Thanks!