[potatolicious]

I too dislike how AT&T foisted these prices on us - but I disagree with the author here.

He seems to be advocating that there's something wrong with not consuming 1.5-2GB a month. He's a heavy user - cool, but I see no reason for the majority of the world to be just like him.

> "Why are so many people using so little bandwidth? Or, put another way, you should be ashamed of yourself if you sell a device like the iPhone and then encourage people use it so lightly that they only consume a couple hundred megs of data a month."

Honestly, I don't think anyone has been encouraging people to use less bandwidth. For most users a few hundred megs a month is plenty, and there's nothing wrong with that. Unlike us geeks they're not constantly chained to their gizmotrons, and do not live like cybernetic organisms. That's perfect okay, and in fact I'm jealous of that lifestyle sometimes.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's very short-sighted to cap bandwidth - we may very well be killing the next world-changing app in the crib. The world will find use for all of this bandwidth if we let them, but at this point in time I don't think one can look at the bandwidth usage numbers and proclaim that people aren't using their phones enough.

At what point does the phone stop working for us, and instead we for them?

[awa]

I think he wants to say AT&T should get the users hooked to using lot of data, so they as a subscription company can keep making money from users for a longer time.

[Legion]

Exactly.

If you're AT&T, when households are looking at their bills for stuff to cut, you don't want them looking at their data plan and saying, "well, I guess I don't use it very much..."

You want the gym membership to get the axe.

[sethg]

But most AT&T customers are locked into long-term contracts, so they can’t just up and decide “I’ll cut the data plan”.

My startup was recently bought by Nokia, and unsurprisingly, one of the fringe benefits of working for Nokia is getting a free smartphone (GSM 3G) with an unlimited data plan (T-Mobile, thank God). My wife and I looked into cancelling our Verizon family plan and moving to just one line for her, but the early-termination fee is so high that it’s cheaper for me to just keep the Verizon phone. And since our Verizon plan has free in-network calls, it’s also cheaper for me to carry the Verizon phone, so that she can call me on it.

The flip side of this is that people who abandon their carrier because of network issues will be more like a slow leak than a stampede, so AT&T executives with an eye on quarterly profit results would rather do anything but invest heavily in building out their infrastructure.

[Legion]

That doesn't significantly change the issue.

Whether one can cut the bill immediately or in X months time, the point is that the last thing AT&T should want is people saying, "why am I paying $X when I hardly use it?"

They should want to have mobile data usage so ingrained in their customers' lives that people wouldn't dream of cutting it when their contracts run up.

AT&T has sold a lot of data plans by making them required for iPhone purchases, and plenty of people wanted the fancy new toy. What happens when smartphones aren't the fancy new toy? How many AT&T iPhone customers, if they had to drop their iPhone and get another phone, would still buy a data plan if it was simply an option rather than a requirement?

[loewenskind]

Actually I'd rather they eat less fast food. If they stop going to the gym they will get less healthy and die sooner. I'd like them to be using my product for as long as possible.

[loewenskind]

Wow, 3 down votes for pointing out that fast food isn't healthy and is bad for my business (if I'm not selling fast food).

[Legion]

3 down votes for off-topic blather. Nice try, though.

[akeefer]

But if the heavy users of their services are costing them more than they're making, and generally degrading the quality of the service, that argument doesn't really hold up. I'm going to assume that, like most similar business models (including gym memberships and all-you-can eat buffets), AT&T relies on light data users paying for more than they use in order to subsidize heavier data users that use more than they pay for. Encouraging people to become heavy users that are an overall cost to the business so that they stick around longer would seem like the classic "we lose money on each one, but we make it up in volume" sort of mistake.

It would be like encouraging people to eat more when they go to an all-you-can-eat buffet by giving them doggy bags to take home as much as they want, on the theory that then they're more likely to come back. If you're losing money on those people you don't really want them to come back.

It's obviously an open question as to exactly what their costs per user are for light versus heavy users of data, but I'm going to infer from their recent actions that they've decided that at the moment supporting heavy users of data isn't such a great business to be in.

[lutorm]

Your argument makes no sense to me. Why would the length of my subscription with AT&T have anything to do with how much data I use? If I only use 100MB a month and am happy with that, how would paying less for it make me leave AT&T faster?

[jokermatt999]

> Honestly, I don't think anyone has been encouraging people to use less bandwidth. For most users a few hundred megs a month is plenty, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't think they're outright trying to discourage usage, but any cap whatsoever will make people paranoid about using it up, and have the effect of making them use it less. If there's no limit, you never have to worry about it, and will feel free to use it all the time. But if you know that you could hit that cap at some point, you'll think twice before starting up Pandora or YouTube, even if there's no reasonable way you could hit your cap.