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rebus9
join:2002-03-26
Tampa Bay Reviews:
 ·Verizon FiOS
 ·Bright House
| reply to Crookshanks
Re: hell ye said by Crookshanks:Setting aside the fact that it's not nearly as simple to split a cell as you think, studies have shown that less than 5% of mobile users consume >2GB/mo. If you were the carrier, why would you spend billions of dollars to upgrade your network, just to meet the needs of such a small portion of your user base? Two considerations to take away from this....
1) If only a tiny minority of users are bandwidth busters, then you don't need caps. Make it a soft threshold, and throttle-back those who exceed it. A few abusive users, throttled back, do not strain a properly engineered network.
2) You don't think that it's a coincidence they put a 2 GB cap, do you? It's the magic line in the sand that "most" users "usually" don't go over. But... they WANT the cap to be near your typical usage, because it's easy for a user to occasionally slip above that limit once in a while. And when that happens, their overage rates are extremely profitable per-byte.
They WANT you to exceed your cap occasionally. But just occasionally. Regular financial penalties woud have users screaming for higher caps. It has to be "incidental" overages. Basically, they've trained users to constrain themselves and to expect the occasional ding on the monthly bill. Remember, you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin him once. | |
Reviews:
 ·Frontier Communi..
| said by rebus9:1) If only a tiny minority of users are bandwidth busters, then you don't need caps. Make it a soft threshold, and throttle-back those who exceed it. A few abusive users, throttled back, do not strain a properly engineered network.
I already said that I like what Verizon did with their 3G network, which is effectively what you're advocating for. Did you not read my post in its entirety?
said by rebus9:2) You don't think that it's a coincidence they put a 2 GB cap, do you? It's the magic line in the sand that "most" users "usually" don't go over. But... they WANT the cap to be near your typical usage, because it's easy for a user to occasionally slip above that limit once in a while. And when that happens, their overage rates are extremely profitable per-byte. I don't think you understand the difference between averages and medians. The last study that I saw had the average data usage somewhere around 700MB, with the median around 400MB. It's only the 95% percentile of users that exceed 2GB, most never even come close. I manage more than 30 smartphone lines at work, and while that's not a large enough sample to be scientific, I can tell you that only ONE of my users regularly exceeds 1GB.
There's no conspiracy here with the 2GB cap. They picked it so it would only impact an extremely small minority of users. Even with the cap, Verizon at least still allows you to backdate plan changes. You'll never pay the $15/GB overage fee unless you fail to monitor your usage. | |
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