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It's 2017... how are they still coming up with new schemes for data plans?

This shouldn't be that difficult. Bits are bits. Let me use them.

Imagine if voice plans in the old days were done like this:

"You have 600 minutes a month... but only a portion of them can be used during mornings... and another portion can only be used for calls longer than 5 minutes... and another portion can only be used for ordering take-out food..."

Dang... now that I think about it... remember the "free calls after 9pm" nonsense?

I guess everything comes back around.

:D

We had something like this...
a bulk of minutes and then free nights and weekends (minutes), and for extra free the free nights started at 5PM or so and not 7 or something like that.

I'm not sure what other stuff the marketing team will come up with next. Maybe it will be only certain % of your data can be used to stream audio?
 
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AT&T and verizon is one of the most expensive places that you can own a phone with
 
As for texts, as far as storage and all that, there's probably something to some additional infrastructure there. But as far as sending and receiving them, they were basically part of the same packets that were already being sent to and from phones, so not much in the way of additional bandwidth was really being involved.

Yes, the characters are indeed eventually embedded inside a cell-to-phone packet that exists during a call or call setup. However, that oft-repeated explanation is far too simplistic, as that is the very smallest part of its journey. It's like thinking that the only cost to sending a letter cross country is the carriage from your postman's mail truck up your walkway to your mailbox.

First off, a text message must use carrier resources to find and be sent to a particular phone somewhere in the entire world. It can easily trigger cross carrier fees.

The text arrives as a call page (aka a ring for voice calls or a pager message). This has used up extra resources already, as a page is always sent to multiple towers in the last radio cell network you connected with.

When the target phone receives the page, the message is still not there yet. The phone must first authenticate itself to the network and get its own control channel. Then it can finally receive the control packet with the SMS stuck in it. All of this is 90% of a full voice call, which is why texts cost similar to a one minute voice call.

But wait. Not done yet. Then the phone has to acknowledge receiving the text before giving up the channel. If the sender has requested a receipt, this whole process had to now be duplicated in reverse back to the sender.

If the recipient is offline, the text must be stored and tried later. If the recipient is an email address, the text must be resent over the internet, and vice versa. If it's an MMS message, there's even more overhead. This all requires carrier resources and computing centers.

And this is all repeated for each text!

In fact, texts use up enough resources that, before safeguards were put in place, you could cause a call denial of service attack in an area simply by sending a bunch of texts to phones targeted in that area.

During busy hours, people on one US carrier can be sending more than a million texts a _minute_, with the target phones having to be found all across the country or further. Because they have to use carrier control channels to locate the recipients, that's the control load equivalent of initiating 2+ billion phone calls a day, with all the associated extra control server costs.

Said text servers have to be distributed safely in multiple locations around the country, with associated building, physical and logical maintenance, electricity, cooling, security and backup power costs. In short, texts aren't a free ride at all.

Whew, that was hard to do on an iPad! :)
 
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[QUOTE="sw1tcher, post: 25277662[/quote]Verizon can afford to include this 4K unlimited streaming feature for free with both of their current unlimited plans and still make a crap ton of money.[/QUOTE]

What does that have to do with anything? I could afford to buy a brand new car...does that mean I owe my cleaning lady more money than the market dictates?

Man alive, some of you guys sound really entitled. Verizon doesn't owe you anything. It's not compulsory to sign up for their service.
 
While that's mostly the case, some part of it does have to do with the resources that are available and basically supply and demand. If more and more people use data and more and more of them use more data and "heavier" data then more of the bandwidth gets used up at any given time, which wasn't the case before. That's not to say that companies aren't to make money off of anything and everything and often enough for no real reason, but in a lot of cases there's at least something to it to one degree or another.

I just feel like since the economic crisis, 9/11 and for Apple, nearly becoming history in the 1990s, many companies have become too proficient in the "art" of "creative gouging", perhaps even to the long-term detriment of the company when it comes to customer good will. Maybe the fear of a rainy day exerts pressure on companies to pad their coffers with as much money as they can possibly squeeze out of their customers or in Apple's case, sitting on the Mt. Everest of reserves while implementing questionable pricing tactics from time to time. Sometimes (like with the airlines and all of their fees), it goes a little too far.
 
You can pay for a smaller battery. Tesla may or may not deliver you a car with a smaller battery - depends what they have available. If they only have larger batteries available, they'll give you the larger battery, but software limit it to the size you paid for, and give you the option of paying to use it all later. Paying to get the larger battery after the fact is a one time fee.

I don't know why it would irritate you. You paid for something and you received it. It may have cost Tesla more than otherwise (because their supply of smaller batteries was depleted, so they had to give you a larger battery), but they hope to recoup that loss by having you pay to upgrade later. Alternatively, maybe you'll sell the car to someone else, and that next owner will pay Tesla for the full battery (because remember: you never paid for that battery. It doesn't belong to you - it belongs to Tesla and is Tesla's to sell). Or maybe you'll sell the car back to Tesla, and they'll resell it as a car with a larger battery.
Hmm. Seems to me what they’d software limit would be the maximum charge, which would actually extend the life of the battery.
 
To all the UDP haters on Macrumors who have claimed in years gone by that high usage subscribers caused network congestion well, apparently you were mistaken. At the end of the day, all you had to do was pay up. The bandwidth was there all the time - Verizon just wanted more money in order to use it. It was always about the money - not about congested towers, etc.
 
No.
Free Market will correct itself.

Please enlighten us how the neutral internet has stifled these poor companies and hurt us consumers???

Oh and, when exactly is the free market going to correct the fact that Comcast has a monopoly on broadband in my market? Seems no one gives a damn, and removing net neutrality will only drive the price gouging even higher.
 
You’re confused. TM will buy sprint (thanks to trump) and create a bigger network.

Um, if by 'create a bigger network,' you mean 'corner the market and price gouge, you and I are in agreement. The 'merger' with Sprint isn't the first time. T-mobile also tried to get AT&T to buy them before Obama blocked that too. They don't care about how big their network is, they care about how small your options are. Companies are not your friend, make the executives of Verizon and T-Mobile switch places and they'd do the exact same evil things.
 
Gotta pay for all those deceiving commercials as well as paying all those fat cat executives. $85-95 a line lol. What a ripoff the only people who still have this ripoff are clueless people.
 
To all the UDP haters on Macrumors who have claimed in years gone by that high usage subscribers caused network congestion well, apparently you were mistaken. At the end of the day, all you had to do was pay up. The bandwidth was there all the time - Verizon just wanted more money in order to use it. It was always about the money - not about congested towers, etc.

Don't hold your breathe for anyone who actually believed that nonsense about 'network congestion' to suddenly grow a brain now, or any time soon. You either recognize/admit the cell providers and ISPs are a monopoly, or you don't--that simple.

The one business model of a monopolistic entity is to constantly find reasons to justify price hikes that will prevent government intervention. The moment people stop believing one excuse, like 'network congestion,' Verizon will come up with another excuse half the country will readily believe. They spend millions researching what excuse might be believable enough.
 
They always need some way to charge for different "levels" of service. First it was call minutes, then later when people started texting more, it was bundles of SMS messages... and now that we're all communicating via iMessage / Messenger / FaceTime / whatever else, it's data volume -- and now they're starting to play with bandwidth as well.
[doublepost=1508989251][/doublepost]
big wow....... nothing much for something..... yawn question for anyone.... why MUST i have a data plan if i don't want one? there are so many access points out there personally i do fine.
Sounds like you want... an iPod Touch?

Not entirely joking, I used to carry one around and just use it on wifi before I got an iPhone.
 
sw1tcher said:
Verizon can afford to include this 4K unlimited streaming feature for free with both of their current unlimited plans and still make a crap ton of money.

What does that have to do with anything? I could afford to buy a brand new car...does that mean I owe my cleaning lady more money than the market dictates?

Man alive, some of you guys sound really entitled. Verizon doesn't owe you anything. It's not compulsory to sign up for their service.

Don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say Verizon owes us anything. I was just pointing out to member coolfactor how much money Verizon makes.... more than enough "to pay for the increased demands on the networks."

This $10 feature (on top of the revisions to their $80 unlimited data plan) just makes Verizon look greedy.

Verizon had refused to offer unlimited data for years. When they saw that their subscriber growth numbers slowed and were losing customers to T-Mobile and Sprint (they both started offering unlimited data plans in the summer of 2016), Verizon was practically forced to offer it in February 2017 to stop the churn.

But then in August 2017, they revised their $80 unlimited data plan (unlimited talk/text/data; no throttling until 22GB; HD video streaming; 10GB hotspot) and split it into 2 different types: the $75 Go Unlimited with reduced features (throttling at any time, 480p video streaming, 600 kbps hotspot) and the $85 Beyond Unlimited (which is basically what the prior unlimited plan offered plus an extra 5GB of hotspot).

Little by little, they're going to start charging for features a la carte just like the airlines do now (checked bag fee, carry-on bag fee, early check-in fee, preferred seat fee, etc.)

And yes, I'm aware that people can switch to another carrier or not pay for this $10 HD video feature if they don't like it.
 
I'm game. It's an extra $20 for us. Fantastic deal.

Going off my router, my phone alone streams about 2-3 GB of data a day while at home over the home network. Same or about the same outside of a network and relying on cell network.
 
So much for the grandfathered plans...

I honestly wonder how many of them are left at this point?

Those were for the holdouts on the data plans from the old Blackberry days and early iPhone days, right?

Back when it was just a flat-fee for "always-on" data... in addition to your minutes and texts plans.

Ah the good ol' days. :)
 
I honestly wonder how many of them are left at this point?

Those were for the holdouts on the data plans from the old Blackberry days and early iPhone days, right?

Back when it was just a flat-fee for "always-on" data... in addition to your minutes and texts plans.

Ah the good ol' days. :)

Count one for me. I still have it and use it out the ying yang. I don't have another option at my home. When I lived in the city a couple of decades ago, I remember that "high speed internet always on" lingo. Your post brought back memories of when there was only one speed - super fast. All you can eat. That was with Time Warner Cable. It was the middle to late 90's. Thanks for the travel down memory lane!
 
Count one for me. I still have it and use it out the ying yang. I don't have another option at my home. When I lived in the city a couple of decades ago, I remember that "high speed internet always on" lingo. Your post brought back memories of when there was only one speed - super fast. All you can eat. That was with Time Warner Cable. It was the middle to late 90's. Thanks for the travel down memory lane!

Yep!

I remember when data plans became a thing for Blackberries and such. It meant you didn't have to manually connect each time you wanted to check your email. They just came to your pocket! :)

And yes... cable modems were amazing in the early days too. Always-on and fast!
 
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Don't hold your breathe for anyone who actually believed that nonsense about 'network congestion' to suddenly grow a brain now, or any time soon. You either recognize/admit the cell providers and ISPs are a monopoly, or you don't--that simple.

The one business model of a monopolistic entity is to constantly find reasons to justify price hikes that will prevent government intervention. The moment people stop believing one excuse, like 'network congestion,' Verizon will come up with another excuse half the country will readily believe. They spend millions researching what excuse might be believable enough.

So true and well said. Speaking of monopolies, I wonder who got paid off to allow Sirius radio to buy XM? I remember a decade or so ago it was blocked because they said it would create a monopoly. Well Hell. They got one now. Go figure.
 
I don't get how mobile plans work in USA, really... Here in eastern EU, I pay $10 a month (T-Mobile) for 20GB (3G, LTE) + unlimited calls, SMS, MMS. It's not throttled and I can stream whatever I want, can create a hotspot of full speed for my PC how often I want... And here you pay $40 for 600kbps?? WTH?

Just checked unlimited plan in my country's T-Mobile (really unlimited, without 600kbps limit, or 480p limit...). It's $14/month.
 
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