Many of you are surfing IntoMobile, downloading illegal torrents, and watching a YouTube video of a cat playing the keyboard, all at the same time thanks to broadband. I personally don’t know anyone who uses dialup, and I doubt you do as well. Have you ever stopped and thought to yourself why the business model for broadband delivery to your home isn’t the same as wireless data on your mobile device? All home broadband connections are offered with unlimited consumption, you simply pay for speed.
Take a look at AT&T’s plans for DSL:
And Comcasts’s plans for cable:
See how pricing plans are structured? You want more bits per second, you give us more dollars per month. Now why is it that mobile data is so analog in the USA and many other countries around the world? Usually there is only 1 package. You either have mobile internet on your device, or you don’t.
Check out how my Finnish operator, Saunalahti, charges for their mobile internet:
Notice how you pay more for speed, just like you do in America for broadband at home. What plan do you think I use? You’d be surprised to know I have the cheapest (slowest) package that only offers 384 KB/s. I use the living hell out of it thanks to Opera Mini, but at the same time I’m not hogging up all the bandwidth available at a cell tower. Why do you think AT&T’s network has been a steaming pile of shit after they launched the iPhone? There is no throttling, everyone gets the same big fat pipe.
If mobile data was priced in tiers based on speed, how many more people do you think would sign up? Some of us just do a lot of Twitter and email on the go, we don’t need 3G, and we don’t want to pay $30 a month just to tell our Facebook friends how we feel about a movie we just saw. Some of us like to surf full websites all day on our iPhone, and we want the snappiest experience possible, and we’re totally willing to pay for that.
More user choice (more packages) is all I’m asking for from operators. It helps move more people on to the internet, and it gives speed to the people who really want it, the people who want to pay, because all the cheapskates like me don’t use up all the bandwidth.
Discuss.