[rylz]

I would argue that it was the existence of unlimited data by default that "pushed the phone industry into a data-driven model," which Stephenson acknowledges to be a good thing. Without unlimted data, especially in the early days, you would have had customers fretting over every MB rather than engaging with the full app ecosystem and freely exploring the capabilities of the new technology.

[saurik]

Buy that same logic we should sell people unlimited electricity plans, and see what that does to electric companies when people stop fretting about each and every milliwatt of power they are using.

The problem is that when customers stop caring about how many watts of power they are using and start purchasing products made by manufacturers that no longer are serving a market that has any notion of efficient power consumption you will get the exact same situation that is happening with mobile data.

Specifically, products that use an immense amount of power for a killer feature (such as electric cars; analog being gigabytes/day data usage for things like Netflix) will start proliferating, increasing the average power usage of each person above the floor used to calculate the cost of the unlimited plan.

In that situation, it is fairly obvious that the power company is then going to have to change their rate scheme, as otherwise they are just subsidizing electric cars: neither the users nor the electric car companies (again, Netflix) are otherwise paying for the increased societal power usage.

The temporary initial reaction will then simply be to ban electric cars from the power grid (as happened with Netflix: did not work over 3G due to the bandwidth cost) while the rates are restructured, a return-to-sanity would occur where unlimited plans are dropped, which then will allow those high-power-using products to actually be distributed to users.

The whole while, of course, people will be whining on forums about how power companies have already laid out the cable, and how the marginal cost of power is effectively zero at some points during the day, and how unfair it was for the power companies to take away the unlimited plans; and, when a representative from the power company points out that it was a mistake, he will be lambasted.

[rylz]

I don't argue that AT&T's more recent decisions to stop offering unlimited plans were not both reasonable and rational. I'm just saying that, in light of Stephenson's comment that AT&T is happy with the iPhone deal for turning its business into a data-driven one, the unlimited plans may have accelerated that change. So if that was a serious goal for AT&T, maybe they shouldn't regret their initial offering of unlimited data, even if it makes much more sense now not to offer.

[cageface]

Thanks for making this point.

I'm no fan of AT&T, but the childish, whiny sense of entitlement that's increasingly prevalent online is really disgusting.