How much data cost to AT&T and Verizon and how much do they make from it?

[BiggAW]

Whomever told you GCI uses PCS doesn't know what they're talking about. PCS is a CDMA technology that Sprint used to use (hence their old name of Sprint PCS). GCI's network is a GSM network (one that originally shared AT&T's towers in Alaska). Even the old Alaska Digitel network (which is a CDMA network GCI now operates) has nothing to do with PCS. Also, it was GCI that built cell towers all along the Parks Highway from Wasilla to Fairbanks, not ATT.

The microwave system in SW Alaska is part of TERRA SW, and GCI is looking to build another system called TERRA NW that would cover Barrow and other areas. GCI actually has run fiber from Anchorage to Bethel as a hard link for TERRA. The plan is to have multiple redundant rings (so a break somewhere does not disrupt) traffic throughout the Alaska interior, just as they have done with their fiber running to Seattle (multiple routes through Prince William Sound).

One other thing: Verizon is coming to Alaska in the next year or two. They bought a bunch of spectrum from a local company that was just sitting on it, and are currently building their Alaska data center right across the street from ACS headquarters. ACS has seen a massive drop in wireless customers in the last couple of years, so I'm not sure they even have the financial means to try to expand their services beyond the larger urban areas.

No. Just no. You are horribly misinformed. PCS is the 1900mhz band. Currently in the US, it has GSM, HSPA+, CDMA, EVDO, and LTE deployed on various parts of it in various markets. Sprint still uses the the 1900mhz band exclusively for their CDMA network. They used to call it PCS because the CLR spectrum was deployed on analog while PCS was digital, but now that it's all digital, PCS is a disadvantage, since its propagation is poor compared to CLR. T-Mobile is GSM and uses PCS, AT&T relies on PCS heavily to boost capacity, as does Verizon, and in some markets, Verizon or AT&T don't own cellular (850mhz) spectrum, so they use PCS exclusively.

The CLR blocks in Alaska are AT&T (ex CellularONE), and ACS. GCI does not own one, so they must be using PCS. Not sure if ACS or AT&T also own PCS blocks or not. There are something like 6 PCS blocks in every market, but only two CLR blocks.

That's fine if GCI built the towers up the highway, but AT&T has EDGE sites on them, GCI has GSM only. AT&T must be leasing from GCI, that's a pretty common phenomenon, as weird as it seems. Around here, T-Mobile has some towers that they lease decks to the other carriers.

ACS has great coverage, it's just a matter of subs and sustainability. My guess is Verizon will buy them out. Verizon also has the 700mhz upper-C license up there.

Terra SW was what I was referring to, their fiber ends in Lovelock, and then switches to microwave to get farther north. It then will eventually go back to fiber in Shaktoolik, where it continues to Nome, and then goes back to microwave to serve some of the local communities. Sounds like a great newtork overall, even if it has a zillion hops in it. Hopefully they can keep the latency reasonable in going from fiber to microwave to fiber to microwave on some of the extreme ends of the newtork.

Terra NW is the fiber portion up to Nome and the surrounding villages, it has nothing to do with Barrow. AFAIK, there is no plan to get internet access to barrow. There would have to be several extremely remote microwave repeater sites, if not an underwater fiber cable, either of which would be big $$$. Unfortunately, that's how AT&T thinks, not in what can be done like they used to (national microwave relay and AT&T Long Lines).

There is a huge loop in the middle of it, but the link to the outside world, and Terra NW to Nome are not redundant, at least not site wise. Maybe they have two different systems with independent power systems running in parallel on the same towers for some level of redundancy.

I'm wondering if GCI will put HSPA+ up in the villages that have Terra, and if they will let AT&T roam at 21mbps....

 

[kdarling]

No more resource intensive than sending a few bytes of data.

Sending an SMS is not the same as mobile Internet Access.

An SMS is much more resource intensive, for reasons I gave above.

For minor example, there's no need for store and forward with Internet data. Either you're able to connect between say, your phone and a website, or not. OTOH, an SMS must be stored and repeated efforts made to deliver it.

Another example is that when you surf the web on a phone, the packets are shunted into the Internet as soon as possible and no longer use carrier resources after that. An SMS travels entirely through internal carrier networks, even worldwide.

As it is, everything that's transmitted and received on our phones nowadays is digital information, so whether it's a voice call, an SMS message, or a TCP/IP packet, it all boils down to 0's and 1's.

It also boils down to 0's and 1's when talking about RAM, ROM, Flash Memory and Hard Disks... yet it would be just as technically ignorant to claim they should all cost the same per byte.

Again, sending an SMS is not the same as doing mobile Internet Access. Not even close.

 

[ninaco]

I just wish they could offer at least a limited form of rollover. Save unused data for the month you may really need it, with an incentive to not use data unnecessarily on the other months.

That is what I would like!

Or, let customers purchase a large amount of data and give them a deadline for using it. (The larger the data purchase, the more time allotted for usage.) I rarely use a cell phone, so I go prepaid & that's how it works.

 

[BiggAW]

Sending an SMS is not the same as mobile Internet Access.

An SMS is much more resource intensive, for reasons I gave above.

How? It know it's on the control channel, but it is a TINY amount of network usage, and somehow, these networks can support massive numbers of texts moving around, and they offer them at an unlimited price.

That is what I would like!

Or, let customers purchase a large amount of data and give them a deadline for using it. (The larger the data purchase, the more time allotted for usage.) I rarely use a cell phone, so I go prepaid & that's how it works.

It would definitely be nice, the problem is extreme data usage. Say, they applied the same rule as for minutes. So now, a customer who need 500MB/mo would be on the 3GB plan. That would be rolling over 2500MB/mo. They would have about 30GB of Rollover at any given point. Now they go to the lake or the seashore or wherever with their rooted Android phone. The towers there are already crowded with summer traffic. They decide to start streaming HD Netflix over HSPA+, and burn 17GB over the course of a week.

See the problem? That's extreme, sure, but I think that's what they're worried about. Or just maximizing profits from overages.

 

[IllIllIll]

Sending an SMS is not the same as mobile Internet Access.

An SMS is much more resource intensive, for reasons I gave above.

It also boils down to 0's and 1's when talking about RAM, ROM, Flash Memory and Hard Disks... yet it would be just as technically ignorant to claim they should all cost the same per byte.

Again, sending an SMS is not the same as doing mobile Internet Access. Not even close.

You may be correct on the technicalities but in the end it still doesn't justify the massive cost that people pay for given the tiny amount of data each SMS message consists of. I simply don't believe that all of the resources and operating costs required to handle SMS messaging justifies charging a customer almost $1500 per megabyte of data transmitted/received.

Ultimately it boils down to what the market will bear, and obviously a balance has been struck between what the carriers can charge and what customers will pay. But to attribute the high relative prices completely to technical considerations and infrastructure is ignorant on your part, and you certainly haven't shown that this cost justifies the price paid by the end user. Granted, it's part of the overhead for the carriers but not in any way a major part of it. Additionally, as the technology matures and more infrastructure is put into place, the cost to the carrier should decrease, and should be reflected in the price that consumers pay. It hasn't.

Here's a summary from someone who has apparently done his research, from http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536&cid=22219254 :

I made a paper for the univeristy some years ago. The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.

They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0

Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.

So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You won't change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0).

 

[holyindian]

Simple logic, they've realized during the times when they used to have unlimited data, people used more free voip service rather than phone talk time.
Thus its a huge loss for them. Cutting the data plan down, will cut people using voip more and using more phones talk time plans.

 

[barkomatic]

Why can't they offer unlimited again? Because you have stupid people who were tethering excessive amounts of data to their computers or streaming NetFlix and Pandora all day simply "because they can." This slowly began to kill the networks (especially AT&T's as they had the most abusers).

Unlimited data is long gone, and you really can't count Sprint because theirs is way too slow. Most ISP's have some sort of cap. Comcast is 250GB I believe.

Thank all the people who abused it and ruined it for people who only intend to use the phone as a phone.

Sorry, but AT&T offered -- actually forced -- unlimited data on early iPhone adopters. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake for the company but that's not the customers fault. People who use their unlimited plans are not abusers and haven't ruined anything for you. They are simply using the service that was offered to them.

 

[MiamiC70]

Simple answer is TOO MUCH!
AT&T and the rest are scumbags that do nothing but figure out how to best fleece their customers at every turn and stifle innovation as much as possible so that the fleecing never ends.
But I blame our US Government 100% for letting Telco and Cable companies get away with it.

 

[BiggAW]

Simple logic, they've realized during the times when they used to have unlimited data, people used more free voip service rather than phone talk time.
Thus its a huge loss for them. Cutting the data plan down, will cut people using voip more and using more phones talk time plans.

Just no. Most people don't use voip to kludgily route around their carrier. Most people don't need to in the first place, as they don't use that many minutes anyways.

 

[MassTownie]

Cost is a rather complicated calculation for the carriers. Especially only for data. Here are some of the costs they have:

Government bandwidth allotment
Local taxes on towers
federal taxes on towers
bribes to government for tower placements
lawyers for bandwidth allotment and tower placements
pipeline for data and voice comms


The list goes on for quite a bit. If you can calculate all of those costs on a running basis every single month, you have the cost of running a wireless telecom.

LMAO...nice!

 

[mantan]

Sorry, but AT&T offered -- actually forced -- unlimited data on early iPhone adopters. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake for the company but that's not the customers fault. People who use their unlimited plans are not abusers and haven't ruined anything for you. They are simply using the service that was offered to them.

Apple actually did the forcing as they required AT&T to have unlimited data as a stipulation of being the exclusive carrier. They didn't want users to be impeded by data limits with the iPhone.

Obviously the world has changed a lot since the original $600 iPhone with an EDGE connection. The number of iPhones (and smart phones in general) has exploded and tellco's are in an arms race to build networks.

In the meantime the market dynamics shifted. Since its inception cell companies made money on voice. Just when high quality coverage had pretty much gotten universal (remember when you had home calling areas), the market became data driven. People want faster and more reliable access to the internet. And unlike talk minutes, they don't want to pay for it. They expect that same $30 to give them lifetime access to an evolving cutting edge network.

Meanwhile the ' minutes' market has dried up. (most people have more rollover minutes than they'll use), alternatives to text like Google Voice and iMessage have hurt the text market. Selling tiered data and charging access fees are the only revenue streams left.

 

[seanpercival01]

Thanks for share a valuable information. I have an iPhone 4S verizon bought @ $99.