Technology and traffic shaping have moved on a lot since the millennium, as have customer expectations. You want a prediction? Unlimited data tarriffs will become the norm, probably late in 2010. One network is going to open the floodgates and just go for it as a marketing campaign, and the others will have to follow. The question is which companies are going to stare down each other to be the first to see what happens to their network when they do throw the switch.
Ewan Spence has a great feature/rant/article/post about the concept of "unlimited" data (and, to a lesser extent, phone calls and text messages) in this day and age on the mobile networks.
Now, I have a rant of my own on this, but first, I really think you should click above and read the entirety of Ewan's post. It's so good, it was actually hard for me to decide which part to quote.
Right.
First off, they're lying. Most of them, at least.
Those operators who impose a transfer limit, after which they charge you extra, are just outright lying by using the word "unlimited". Fortunately, it seems there are fewer and fewer of those. We're now slowly moving to a model of "really unlimited, but after X amount of traffic, the speed goes down to something ridiculous, just so you can't say we're lying anymore".
It's more or less the same thing. But you can't say they're lying in this case.
Moving on.
See, the thing I like telling my American friends who complain about dropped calls on AT&T is: they're just cheap.
And mostly, that's it. They don't want to invest.
Sure, there is a point (of people in the same cell connecting at the same time) where it could get messy (and after a certain point condensing a cell doesn't work anymore), but NOT as messy as we are led to believe.
t's quite clear that if, say, all UK operators would just offer unlimited data, and for a reasonable price, their networks would collapse under the load. At least in London. And it's probably the same story everywhere.
But.
I mean their current networks. Their current infrastructure.
I've seen people that I normally consider smart defend the operators on this. "But if everyone would suddenly start streaming stuff or torrenting or whatnot, the network would collapse".
Mmm...yeah. Maybe. But then, 'filtering' or 'throttling' or whatever you want to call it makes sense ONLY in this case, of mobile connections. Yet companies are applying that more and more to fixed connections. And that's insane. And not necessary. So if you as an operator would prioritize 'normal' internet traffic, and set very low priorities to uncommon and bandwidth-intensive protocols, you'd solve two problems. First, the network would not collapse, and second, you'd encourage (coerce, ok) your customers not to try doing those things in the future.
People might hate me for saying this, but I believe it's a simple solution. Again, in the case of mobile networks ONLY.
However, none of this will help if you're not willing to fork out some cash and upgrade your network, work on the cell density and so on.
People in Romania defend the networks' lack of investments for this, but are they not aware that these are the companies (at least in this country), that, for their size, have by far the biggest profit shares compared to their earnings?
What if some of that money went not to the shareholders, but into investments?
I think they hope no one will notice any of this.
Well I do.
Like I noticed when I was in England that in half of Oxford I could not get a decent 3G signal from Vodafone, the UK's most praised network especially for coverage.
It's 2009. That's unacceptable.
Get the money out and do what has to be done. If you do, in a few years (perhaps even months or weeks) data will outsell calls and texts. By far.
And I shall repeat. Network unreliability is NOT a matter of physics. It's, in 99% of the cases today, just your operator being cheap. I'm sorry.
I'm skeptical. I don't think we'll see truly unlimited anything in the mobile world for quite a while.
Because the operators are scared (as Ewan put it), clueless (that they WILL in the end become 'dumb pipes' no matter how hard they fight it) and constantly feel profit pressure from their shareholders.
Which is why the little that they spend of those profits today mostly goes to rather dishonest advertising of this or that new animal-plan.
See, some are still trapped in the Jungle Book.
While we live in 2009.
So let's just patiently form a queue and wait for them to catch up, shall we?
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