8 replies to this topic

[Conuck]

by  Marguerite Reardon

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Correction made December 9 at 7:51 p.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that AT&T had announced a tiered pricing plan. The company is considering incentives to curb heavy wireless data usage.

AT&T wants its iPhone users to use less wireless data, and it may consider new pricing models to curb users' data usage as it tries to keep up with growing demand.

At an investor conference in New York on Wednesday, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T's head of wireless, said the wireless operator is considering incentives to get consumers to reduce their data usage.

De la Vega said 3 percent of smartphone users are consuming 40 percent of the network capacity.

"We're going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don't crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites," said de la Vega according to a transcript of the conference. "And you'll see us address that more in detail."

He went on to say that most consumers aren't aware which applications use a lot of bandwidth and which do not. For example, email does not consume a lot of bandwidth, whereas streaming video and audio do consume a great deal of bandwidth.

"What's driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock," he said, according to the transcript provided by AT&T. "And so we've got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage."

The rest of the story here:
http://news.cnet.com....html?tag=mncol
 

[AlucardHS]

if they drop that i-phone there network will go back to normal !

[dlewis23]

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if they drop that i-phone there network will go back to normal !

There so called 'Network Problems" Don't happen everywhere. If you come to South Florida, we don't have any of the problems that people complain about in the rest of the country. Download speeds are always between 1.5 - 2.2 Mbps. We have 5 bars all the time, we don't have dropped calls.


South Florida is the model for what the rest of the country should look like, and lots of people have iPhone's here.


Just because people actually use the iPhone the way it was intended to be used, doesn't mean AT&T should drop it. This would happen to any carrier you put the iPhone on. It will always use a ton of data, and its a fact now that this is were all phones are going. It's already getting harder to find a "dumb" phone. In another year or two, most phones sold will be "feature" phones.


It's not just AT&T, all carriers need to get there ass in line, and beef up there networks. They need to stop bitching about the amount of bandwidth that is used, especially when they don't pay for 1/2 of it and increase the number of back links to each tower.

[justinlay]

Hopefully Verizon dont do the same anytime soon. Sence i got my droid im using like 5x more bandwidth than I ever used to on my windows mobile phones

[dlewis23]

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Hopefully Verizon dont do the same anytime soon. Sence i got my droid im using like 5x more bandwidth than I ever used to on my windows mobile phones

Do you know what your actual usage is? For the last month I used a little over 1.2 GB of 3G data on my iPhone. And that was a light month  . Normal for me is about 2.5 GB.

[justinlay]

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Do you know what your actual usage is? For the last month I used a little over 1.2 GB of 3G data on my iPhone. And that was a light month  . Normal for me is about 2.5 GB.

When i had my htc touch i was using on average of 500mb a month. This month ive used 1.2 GB so far i still have till the 4th of next month

[dlewis23]

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When i had my htc touch i was using on average of 500mb a month. This month ive used 1.2 GB so far i still have till the 4th of next month

LOL, I bet Verizon is hating you. But just think for that $30 a month you spend on data, in the real world you could buy 300 GB of bandwdith across 15 + different carriers.


In Verizon's world your lucky if you can use 5 GB before they are bitching at you.

[justinlay]

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LOL, I bet Verizon is hating you. But just think for that $30 a month you spend on data, in the real world you could buy 300 GB of bandwdith across 15 + different carriers.


In Verizon's world your lucky if you can use 5 GB before they are bitching at you.

Well i get a 22% discount a month for service which makes them smile even more 

[tommie gorman]

All they have to do is set a really high reasonable limit then. Hit 90% with a warning its about to run out, and 100% bam. And only target after the 4% level. Not that hard. And make sure you send out notices in the billing statement. 

But of course our courts would probably find that practice illegal somehow.