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The Telecom Digest for May 11, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 114 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we
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we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands
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Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 22:42:40 -0400
From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Cellular data on NetZero
Message-ID: <cl4u1jx9iuxz$.59qtbry4f7hf.dlg@40tude.net>
An email ad has come my way offering cellular data service by NetZero.
"NetZero 4G Mobile Broadband ... [offering] ... hotspot device ... USB
modem ... data plan of $9.95 or more ... " --
http://www.netzero.net/
.
Questions that the web site seems not to answer: (i) whose cellular data
network is Netzero reselling? -- at&t? T-Mobile? VZW? Sprint? other? and
(ii) whose hotspot device and USB data modem are NetZero offering?
TIA for any answers; and cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 19:52:57 -0400
From: Ron <ron@see.below>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cellular data on NetZero
Message-ID: <a2loq79rengtcuuqh7sspo3n9vhh75slmd@4ax.com>
tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> wrote:
>An email ad has come my way offering cellular data service by NetZero.
--snip of questions --
An email ad...
Aren't any questions about the service moot?
Would you actually buy something from a spammer?
--
Ron
(user telnom.for.plume
in domain antichef.com)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 02:04:48 +0000 (UTC)
From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: AT&T Chief Regrets Offering Unlimited Data for iPhone
Message-ID: <jof7o0$4rb$1@reader1.panix.com>
Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote:
:
:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/att-randall-stephenson/
:
:AT&T Chief Regrets Offering Unlimited Data for iPhone
:By BRIAN X. CHEN
:MAY 4, 2012
:When Randall Stephenson, AT&T's chief executive, spoke about the
:state of the wireless industry at a conference this week, he shared
:some surprisingly frank comments about the iPhone. In particular, he
:said that he wished the company had never offered an unlimited data
:plan for the device and that he loses sleep over free texting
:services like Apple's iMessage.
My heart bleeds! They can't bill 1000 times the cost of providing a
service! How horrible for them, to have to compete in a relatively
free market.
:If AT&T hadn't offered unlimited data, it would have been able to get
:people who used more data to pay up for it, as opposed to having the
:light data users subsidize the heavy ones, he said.
:"My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning,
:because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all
:you can eat," he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken
:Institute's Global Conference on Wednesday. "And it's a variable cost
:model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to
:invest capital."
Nonsense, at best. Flat out deliberate falsehood at worst. The marginal
cost of data is only the infrastructure it requires. At peok periods,
there might be capital costs, where the network is overloaded, and
requires building new cell sites or expanding existing ones. Off peak,
it's remarkably close to zero. Cellular companies know this, and they've
known it forever. Voice traffic is exactly the same; and that's why, in
the early days of (US at least, I'm not familiar with the rest of the
world's history) cellular peak usage minutes cost several times what off
peak did. Busy hour traffic drives the fixed costs of the network (how
many towers they need, and where they need them, and so on); the rest of
the time, it's in their interest to get people to use the infrastructure
at essentially any price.
There are, of course, real costs of unlimited data. People with
unlimited data use more, and they're probably more likely to use it at
peak periods. And it really is easier to use huge amount of data than
it is unlimited voice. The failure of anyone in the industry to adopt some
sort of tiered pricing, where high usage periods cost more than lower
usage periods, suggests that it's not really as big as a problem as
they'd like us to think.
--
sig 92
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