ato-1141 wrote:
Zeeb wrote:There is no income growth potential in unlimited plans. It's not about unlimited voice minutes or texts anymore--it's all about data.
read the fine print of current carriers offering "unlimited" data plans. You'll find that in practice, there are soft caps on all of them.
This is actually not true. Its more productive for a company to have unlimited data plans, or massive data plans. Think of the Google investment principle. Google not only makes its money by ads, but most of its income comes from how much there system is used. The more that users use google applications the more that there is a need for investment. Their network becomes more important and more wroth. AT&T is not going to give you unlimited data without charging you more. As there network grows the more expensive it is to maintain all the cell towers and not to mention how expensive it is to send zeros and ones through the wireless technology.
Know what I would propose is to have unlimited 3g or 2g instead of unlimited everything. This would cap you down to the current 3g technology or slower 2g (Edge). Even though they are slower, it less expensive to maintain a unlimited data network on those type of technology. And everything above 3g would cost you.
One problem with your solution - 2G aka "edge' transciever space is being phased out in areas to open space for LTE transcievers, there are numerous locationsin the US right now that no longer have any form of 2G transcievers. Tower space is limited, fairly expensive and a zoning nightmare to put up new towers so the reuse of out dated and limited transciever technology has little ROI.
Unlimited data was reasonable back in the day when smartphones where primarily a technology used in the business world, now when the technology is more widely accepted the stress on the infrastructure is not justifiable