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Phone companies rip us off on everything. Even for my basic landline with caller ID and no long distance I'm paying $35/month. FFS - we need a free market here!



$99 a month for cable triple play. Traditional phone service is too expensive to drop in price
 
Phone companies rip us off on everything. Even for my basic landline with caller ID and no long distance I'm paying $35/month. FFS - we need a free market here!

Why don't you just switch to a voip service? I have and it only cost me 20$ a month for both local/long distance plus 60 min international free.
 
$179.99 for the iPhone family plan without texting. So $209.99 for 2 iPhone's with unlimited everything*.

It just seems to be so outrageously overpriced with the text messaging plan. With taxes, that probably comes out to be at least $225 a month for two lines.
 
Because texts are not the same as sending data over a data connection.

Texts are tiny phone calls and thus are charged pretty much like a minimum one minute call.

Therefore what you should be asking is: why aren't texts included in unlimited calling.

Umm, the way I understand it, phone calls are not even phone calls anymore.
Calling is packetized and sent over the internet like a normal VoIP provider like Skype or Vontage.

This is much cheaper for the phone companies because of not having to use a switching service to have a physical limit to how many conversations can be going on at once, VoIP solutions have only theoretical limits based on the bandwidth and ping any particular tower can get.

If I remember correctly, 3G phones packetize that for you. Meaning your 3G phone sends "data" to the phone network that contains your voice, and the tower sends back "data" your phone interoperates as the other persons voice.

Older phones send the tower some kind of analog "voice" that the servers at the tower turn into "data" and away it goes.

So that sound you here when you get an old phone (or iphone with 3G turned off) when it gets near speakers is the sound (TDMA interference) of you costing ATT more money per call.
 
I have been on an unlimited plan from the very beginning...

I just want to be able to place and receive calls without drops...
 
Umm, the way I understand it, phone calls are not even phone calls anymore.
Calling is packetized and sent over the internet like a normal VoIP provider like Skype or Vontage.

This is much cheaper for the phone companies because of not having to use a switching service to have a physical limit to how many conversations can be going on at once, VoIP solutions have only theoretical limits based on the bandwidth and ping any particular tower can get.

If I remember correctly, 3G phones packetize that for you. Meaning your 3G phone sends "data" to the phone network that contains your voice, and the tower sends back "data" your phone interoperates as the other persons voice.

Older phones send the tower some kind of analog "voice" that the servers at the tower turn into "data" and away it goes.

So that sound you here when you get an old phone (or iphone with 3G turned off) when it gets near speakers is the sound (TDMA interference) of you costing ATT more money per call.

Don't worry he is dead wrong.
 
is there any word on pricing for the other plans? I have the 450 and don't really need anymore than that. I'd love it if it went down.
 
Don't worry he is dead wrong.


Actually, you're dead wrong. In fact, you have absolutely no clue on what you're talking about.

When data is blocked (even via APN changing), you still get SMS. Why? Because it utilizes the same control channels that are used to make a phone call.


Next time, before posting do some research instead of spouting off things you read in the internet. You sound like an old granny reading tabloids.
 
At&t Sucks

I still don't understand how AT&T is considered a company. My life is Apple. I am on my Mac 24/7 and I have a YouTube Channel all about Apple products. I got the iPhone 3GS this Summer. AT&T decided to charge me $130 for the first week I got the iPhone and they told it was going to cost that much every month. Keep in mind, I had the cheapest plan that you can get with the iPhone. AT&T originally told me over the phone, whenever I was ordering the iPhone, that it was going to be around $60 a month. They more than doubled the monthly fee. On top of that they sent me a first monthly fee the first week I got the phone and called it the startup fee. When we called AT&T and asked about the charges, they told me a bunch of different fees which added up to $80, then they put me on hold and hung up. I got barely any service in my town that week that I did have the iPhone. My parents cancelled that first week because of the over charged bill. Apple going with AT&T is the biggest mistake Apple has ever made and hope they don't make the same mistake this June. I am a true Apple fan, I have had apple 3 models of the iPod Touch and I think they are great devices. AT&T is the main reason why everyone doesn't have the iPhone.
 
So, basically $80 more than Sprint

With Sprint I get an unlimited data and text plan with 1400 minutes, free nights and weekends starting at 7, and free calling to any other cell phone 24/7, which is virtually unlimited because only calls to land lines during peak hours actually deduct from my 1400 plan minutes.

For two phones, that's $129. For the two-line "unlimited" plan with text on AT&T, it's $209.
 
Actually, you're dead wrong. In fact, you have absolutely no clue on what you're talking about.

When data is blocked (even via APN changing), you still get SMS. Why? Because it utilizes the same control channels that are used to make a phone call.


Next time, before posting do some research instead of spouting off things you read in the internet. You sound like an old granny reading tabloids.

Oh my God, do you actually know how Text/SMS messages work? Do you? No, then sit down and quiet down. There is no point in embarrassing yourself.
 
Oh my God, do you actually know how Text/SMS messages work? Do you? No, then sit down and quiet down. There is no point in embarrassing yourself.

Yes, I do. Clearly you don't, considering you just wrote two ad-hominem posts without any rebuttals at all.
 
Yes, I do. Clearly you don't, considering you just wrote two ad-hominem posts without any rebuttals at all.

Ok, then clearly explain how you think they work. I for one already know. Oh you wish to know?


Well, Text messages piggyback on top of the same signal used to determine how many bars your mobile should display. That is why SMS/Texts are limited to 160 characters (well 128 when SMS was developed, but the scientist behind SMS thought 160 was perfect, in the end he got it). In other words, SMS/Texts piggy back on your phone power signal and end up costing the carrier next to nothing.

Hence you see all those posts saying texts are still 99.9% profit, because in reality they are.

Now does that help your small mind? Does it?
 
I'm just struck by how expensive $1200 a year is for the service. I like having email on my phone as long as it's a corporate IT benefit, but I couldn't see paying that much for personal use.
 
-----
You get what you pay for. I've had a Nexus One for 5 days now, with that same plan, and its going back. THe 3G, and EVEN the edge service is very spotty. This in the baltimore area, even up and down 95. I dont think so.

You better be sitting down when you get the news of what it's going to cost you to get out of the plan and return your Nexus One. It's about $550, I hear.
 
Ok, then clearly explain how you think they work. I for one already know. Oh you wish to know?


Well, Text messages piggyback on top of the same signal used to determine how many bars your mobile should display. That is why SMS/Texts are limited to 160 characters (well 128 when SMS was developed, but the scientist behind SMS thought 160 was perfect, in the end he got it). In other words, SMS/Texts piggy back on your phone power signal and end up costing the carrier next to nothing.

Hence you see all those posts saying texts are still 99.9% profit, because in reality they are.

Now does that help your small mind? Does it?

LOL, I died laughing at this post. You just proved me and Kdarling are right by your definition. See your bold and compare it to my post:

When data is blocked (even via APN changing), you still get SMS. Why? Because it utilizes the same control channels that are used to make a phone call.

Except I don't use words like 'piggybacking' because I don't have to copy/paste from websites like howstuffworks or ehow, like your entire post was. Bahhaahha, plagiarism fail. As for the 99.9% profit, see my first post.

Now that I have completely torn your argument to shreds, I suggest you leave this thread before you dig yourself even further into the ground.
 
LOL, I died laughing at this post. You just proved me and Kdarling are right by your definition. See your bold and compare it to my post:



Except I don't use words like 'piggybacking' because I don't have to copy/paste from websites like howstuffworks or ehow, like your entire post was. Bahhaahha, plagiarism fail. As for the 99.9% profit, see my first post.

Now that I have completely torn your argument to shreds, I suggest you leave this thread before you dig yourself even further into the ground.

I don't copy/paste plagiarize... I know it because I study it. Electric Engineering with concentration in communications at University of New Orleans... so, I don't need to plagiarize, I already know.

Also, Kdarling said texts are a call, which they are NOT.

Just proved you wrong.
 
Text messaging limits need to die. AT&T needs to join this decade.

There's no reason to limit text messages anymore. They use barely a pinprick of network capacity.
 
Why don't you just switch to a voip service? I have and it only cost me 20$ a month for both local/long distance plus 60 min international free.

But then why bother with that? Why not simply use Google Voice and Gizmo and get all that for 0$ a year and that includes free texting
 
To those expecting to see just the ads they like, I don't think it will happen. That is largely the point of advertising, to contact new customers. If I'm paying for ads I need to keep my name in front of existing customers somewhat to keep them interested. I also need to put my name in front of new customers to grow my business and to replace customers who stop using my product.

Less intrusive ads sound good but people only pay for ads if you look at them.

Apple is extremely unlikely to retroactively start running ads in things like OS X or the iPhone. There is the distinct possibility that there could be ad supported versions of this in the future. Hardware prices are dropping radically. Hand held calculators used to cost over $500. Now you get them for free with an ad printed on them. This is the future of the computer. Not that there won't be higher performance computers you'd pay for, but that you could get a low end machine with a short lifetime that would run ads along with internet searches or email clients.

How about a tablet sized device that only runs a browser? Each time you turn it on it goes to the ad page of Coca Cola or Pepsi or shows a preview of the latest movie from Disney or Orion. Maybe every 30 minutes a small popup shows the logo of the advertiser. Over the course of 6 months I'd see the ad perhaps 1,000 times. After 6 months it stops working and you toss it. If the price of the gadget is around ten or twenty dollars that is around the price of a short run brochure and this is something you'd look at many more times.

Finally, Apple is unlikely to personally target ads at individuals without their consent. What they could do is datamine the information they have looking for patterns. They want to look for correlations between product, gender, and age so that in the future they'll know what else to pitch to you or just to tell the manufacturer who is buying their product.
 
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