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It’s sucks when What should be considered a utility is being treated with “some people will be willing to pay more for the full experience”.

This quote from att shows exactly why this idea that private companies will provide the best experience to the largest number of users for something which is effectively necessary to function in society is incredibly misguided.
No company has ever claimed mobile data is a "utility"; people just want it that way.
 
And how do you think that is going to work out in 2 years? Every phone will be 5G.

you are the weak consumer sheep.
even in 10 years you will find lte phones around - WE have the power, just dont buy 5G

I dont see the point in financing another hobby of the network operators - they dont give me even fulll lte speed allthough I have the most expensive tariff
 
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Electricity is far lower on my cost per month than telecommunications. I obviously use electricity more than telecommunications, as many times I am heating stuff.

My utilities costs haves stayed far more consistent year to year than my ever expanding telecommunications budget.

Quite simply, there are no quotes from my utilities about how they plan to start charging for more services in the future, whereas each few weeks we see such quotes from telcos.

Also, my point originally was more about equality of access rather than simply a price concern.

Yeah but how much quicker has your electricity got over the last 20 years?
 
ATT is greedy no doubt. But who are you to complain at their strategy and decide what is and what isn’t a utility? Did you take the business risk to build out their towers and network infrastructure? The idea that government, stealing money and resources from people and allocating them to disciplines and industries in which they have no expertise whatsoever is the definition of misguided. Private markets are inherently always superior. Always. Government monopolies cannot be efficient.
Government fight with efficacy and private companies with greed and inability to provide services for all. As usual, cities get the service first and the rest of the country (hopefully) later. 3G still is often the only option where I live. Big failure from the private sector in my opinion. EU got free roaming only after EU threatened to fine the companies not complying. Market forces was not sufficient to get free roaming between countries.

The private market only work if there is sufficient real competition and often it is not, particularly in the IT sector but also in water, electricity, heat due to private ownership of infrastructure leading to vendor lockin based on geography.
 
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It’s sucks when What should be considered a utility is being treated with “some people will be willing to pay more for the full experience”.

This quote from att shows exactly why this idea that private companies will provide the best experience to the largest number of users for something which is effectively necessary to function in society is incredibly misguided.

The network infrastructure that you use your phone, computer, and other connected devices on doesn’t just magically appear out of nowhere.

The internet has no inherent speed. It has no inherent “full experience.” Both are determined by the technological capability of available hardware and equipment at a particular moment. On the network side, those are provided and maintained by private companies. It costs lots of money to change out, upgrade, and service entire networks as large as the ones we have here in the States.

If you want free internet and communal sharing of internet speed, it’s called public WiFi.
 
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At first pass this seems to me like a load of crap. He’s using the prospect of amazing new speeds to charge more. They don’t charge more for LTE vs 4G, so why would it suddenly make sense for them to charge more for 5G vs LTE? And what if your phone flips down to LTE or less because your 5G signal is poor. As a reward for that poor signal, they’d still get top dollar because of your speed potential?
 
France here. I pay 10 euros/monthly.

Unlimited phone/sms

30 gigs data per month in France. plus 4 gigs when i'm elsewhere in Europe (no roaming of course).
 
The network infrastructure that you use your phone, computer, and other connected devices on doesn’t just magically appear out of nowhere.

The internet has no inherent speed. It has no inherent “full experience.” Both are determined by the technological capability of available hardware and equipment at a particular moment. On the network side, those are provided and maintained by private companies. It costs lots of money to change out, upgrade, and service entire networks as large as the ones we have here in the States.

If you want free internet and communal sharing of internet speed, it’s called public WiFi.
Hold on a sec. who’s suggesting it should be free? No one thinks your electricity or water should be free either. You’re aware that mobile telecoms already get lots our money, right? And with those (huge) profits, they’re building better infrastructure, as they should.
 
you are the weak consumer sheep.
even in 10 years you will find lte phones around - WE have the power, just dont buy 5G

I dont see the point in financing another hobby of the network operators - they dont give me even fulll lte speed allthough I have the most expensive tariff
You and a handful of people not buying 5g phones is not going to stop predatory practices.

Net Neutrality was correct way to stop the lower and higher tier internet pricing (to which likely customers will be forced to upgrade). Once ATT does it, Verizon will do it and so on, along comes the false capitalism.

I think if it’s going to be a Duopoly, they might as well be regulated, and be considered a utility.
 
Personally I don't think that is that bad an idea. If it was tiered by speed, then I'm quite sure most of us can get by with 4G and pay a lower cost in line with that. 5G works for businesses and for replacing fixed lines, but I can't see where it fits in for the public or mass consumer use. 4G when you have a full signal is more than enough for almost anything you can do on a phone.
 
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It's for suburban, that large spectrum between rural and dense city.
Yeah, proof will be in the pudding. Look at the kind of select cities for 5G deployment. Carriers are not stupid, they are after dense areas so they can get more revenue per tower. And in those areas, more likely there’s fiber, so the excuse to use 5G for home is a bit of a stretch, unless if you just love paying more money for it.

The more people blindly jump into the 5G bandwagon, the more ridiculous schemes the carriers will do to squeeze out money from people. But I guess people love it. :shrug:
 
Personally I don't think that is that bad an idea. If it was tiered by speed, then I'm quite sure most of us can get by with 4G and pay a lower cost in line with that. 5G works for businesses and for replacing fixed lines, but I can't see where it fits in for the public or mass consumer use. 4G when you have a full signal is more than enough for almost anything you can do on a phone.

Except that 5 G is mostly a marketing ploy : it's made of 2 things :

* mmwave antennas whose deploiement will be minimal (due to technical constraints such as extremely limited range, and the mmwaves being stopped by.........pretty much anything
* various technical (software/hardware) upgrades to the 4G standards

And here comes the rub...you will pay more not for some pie in the sky 5g.....but to have a slightly more updated 4G ...

cool, no?
 
I would prefer to pay for 5 megabit service with no cap than get 100 megabit service with a cap. I don't need fast wireless Internet. I don't do streaming music or video. I want the pages to load and yelp results to come in when I'm traveling without being nickel and dime for going 1 gigabyte over.
 
I don't want a 5G handset anywhere near me so hopefully this helps out.

If you're one of these people that claim "5g is dangerous for your health", you SERIOUSLY need to do some scientific research.
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5G is not as much for the consumers, but for the industry. Machines talking to each other real-time. Such as doing surgery remotely, robots communicating within a building, self-driving cars talking to each other and the traffic lights, and so on. You're not going to notice much difference in speed, except in the latency.

Finally! Someone gets it!
 
What he's saying is you pay for having the chip on your phone even though you're not getting any 5G signal, just like what they did on 3G. But this time you cannot even justify of not having 5G because you got the 5GE which according to Apple and AT&T it's a 5G which means they need a price increase.
 
Hold on a sec. who’s suggesting it should be free? No one thinks your electricity or water should be free either. You’re aware that mobile telecoms already get lots our money, right? And with those (huge) profits, they’re building better infrastructure, as they should.

I used to work for a contractor to AT&T and Verizon, so I can tell you first hand they spend vast sums of money every year on their networks here in the US. You're correct that most of the profits go towards new infrastructure.

I suppose "free" was not the right term, but typically those who advocate for services becoming utilities want a base level of service made available to all. We already have that. You can pay relatively little (or nothing at all if you thrive on public WiFi) and get base level speed access to the internet. It's no different than any other utility you currently pay for.

There's this false notion that people are somehow entitled to blazing fast internet. To use your example, I pay for my utility water. That doesn't mean the water coming out of my faucet is Poland Springs quality water (which would be nice, but it's not realistic). If I want that I have to pay a little extra at the store.
 
FTFY
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What part of the state are you in? I get great LTE on TMo all over the seacoast.
I live in the Lakes Region. Service is okay around I93 but traveling between towns on any of the back roads and especially going to the west side of the state - so many dead spots. I have ATT but friends with Verizon also have poor service. So for me, I’d be more happy with better 4G LTE.
 
Hopefully 4g becomes the "budget" option and my bill goes down. 5g seems utterly useless, I don't get what I need that kind of connection on my smartphone for, especially with the US data plans which have no truly unlimited option. You are going to suck your data up in a millisecond.

Explain to me how this works, because this statement leaves me confused and I've seen similar statements on here before. The reason that I'm confused is that a 5 gigabyte movie is still 5 gigabytes whether downloaded over 4G or 5G so why would 5G use up data quicker? It's going to download it faster obviously but you're still only downloading 5 gigabytes.

What am I missing here?
 
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