Tiered Pricing A Cloudy Solution For Wireless Carriers

[Guest]

There is tremendous pressure growing on the shoulders of wireless carriers as cloud services emerge and increase in popularity.

Tiered Pricing A Cloudy Solution For Wireless Carriers : Read more

 

[mrmoo500]

Tiered data plans are a blatant rip-off of the consumer by the telecom companies. They run a nice oligopoly and know that we will be forced to pay them whatever they demand. Do you really think it costs them more than $30 a month to provide internet service to each smartphone? There is a reason that the telecoms and oil companies have the biggest profits out off all the companies in the world.

 

[Guest]

It'd go over a lot smoother to flip-flop it and offer discounts to those who use less and a slight bump in cost for power users.

 

[Guest]

Tiered rates = No Clouds.

 

[hellwig]

Companies like AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, and the others like to tout that 90-some percent of their customers pay less on tiered plans. What they don't tell you is that the extra money they get from the remaining 10% far-exceeds what they "lost" by offering cheaper plans to the masses. Of course, what they're betting on is that the people who aren't affected or get cheaper plans have no problem selling-out their neighbor for $5. Those of us complaining that it's not fair get drowned-out by people saying "It doesn't affect me, so I don't care". Of course, when it does affect them, those who've been paying more all long also no longer care, and at that point, there's nothing anyone could really do anyway.

 

[palladin9479]

And the next question is, when will this mentality spread into the home / desktop world. Its coming, especially with IPV6 on the horizon. You wouldn't be able to hide how many network enabled devices you have, and thus per-device service level pricing.

 

[gorehound]

tiered pricing and capping accounts stifles innovation.
but the execs do not care as they want their dinosaur system to milk their customers.

 

[reggieray]

Another reason to cloud to jump off a cliff. I will keep my HD and a backup HD on hand.

 

[mchuf]

[citation][nom]ReggieRay[/nom]Another reason to cloud to jump off a cliff. I will keep my HD and a backup HD on hand.[/citation]

For me "The Cloud" is an answer to a question that was never asked. But hey, let's give away privacy and content ownership for convinence. And with how blatent hackers have been lately, should we really trust this?

 

[gm0n3y]

From the telecom standpoint of course tiered pricing makes the most sense and I don't blame them for switching to it. We already have tiered pricing for talk time, why should data be any different. The main problem I have is the rates they are charging. There is a reason why the richest man in the world owns a telecom.

 

[dalethepcman]

Telecoms are trying to become the gas/electric company's of the future. For the privilege of using gas/electric you don't have to pay $30/month + your usage, you only pay for what you use, and you can use as much as you want, as fast as you can. Until the carriers have the infrastructure to support 10+% of their devices running at 100% network capacity, they need to stick with a flat plan. After they have the infrastructure in place they need to switch to a metered billing platform.

Right now the carriers are getting the best of both world's by using a metered billing system on top of a flat rate system and hauling in tremendous profits because average Joe user doesn't realize hes buying services from a Monopoly.

"The greatest trick the devil has ever pulled, was to convince man that he doesn't exist"

 

[dark_lord69]

Tiered Rates = When you get your bill you will be in tears.

 

[WyomingKnott]

What a ridiculous concept: pay more if you use more. How un-American.

 

[fir_ser]

I don’t think tiered pricing is in the best interest of customers.