verizon doesnt offer unlimited anymore. some ballshet.. companies tryin to hustle all day.
Of course. Cap data usage to a miserable amount, subsidize phone price, jack up monthly premium, lease tons of retail stores, hires tons of sales personnel, sign up as many people as they can, and spend as little as they can for radio deployment.
Let the profit roll in, especially those data overage charges. $15 for every 1GB. Customers don't care, as long as they have a pretty iPhone with a cute case. Ca Ching! :thumbsup:
As it was explained to me, if you have 2GB for say, $20 and you go over 2GB, you're charged ANOTHER $20 for a new set of 2GB...
What SHOULD be done here is pay for 2GB, if you use it at all up, fine. If not, the cap rolls over and continues to roll. You should be paying for a batch of bytes, not the right to use those bytes.
A couple of years ago I would agree with that, but not now. I see a lot of people using things like Netflix, Google Music, etc. when they are out and about. In times past, those services were pretty much unusable on public wifi which almost always sucks. Now we have nice and fast LTE networks and those services are really usable on the go. Just looking at my usage as an example. I do a fair amount of running throughout the week. I have gone from downloading music onto my phone to simply streaming GMusic. I have to keep a very close eye on my usage to make sure I don't bump over the 2Gb limit. My wife likes to watch TV shows via Netflix or HuLu over 4G as well (although she is so afraid of the data cap she often doesn't do it) and she fits the "average user" almost perfectly.
I always find the posts that say "just upgrade the infrastructure" humorous. The notion that it's just the flick of the switch to light up new spectrum is far from the truth. On top of the eNodeB manufacturers supporting the newer spectrum, you also have to get that other part of the RF equation: antennas.
You see anytime a company wants to hang a new antenna, the landlord generally tries to escalate the rent from anywhere between 50% to 300%. On top of that, if the structure (monopole, lattice, guylined tower) cannot handle the increased load with the antennas you are going to hang, the carrier proposing the lease amendment gets to pay all the structural costs so the tower /edifice can meet specs.
Now, the larger two carriers have ~40,000 to 50,000k cellsites. Imagine the rent escalation alone (recurring monthly cost) over a span of 10 years. Mind you, this even before the costs of adding any actual call processing equipment in the shelter itself. In some cases, there just isn't enough room inside the shelter, and it has to be augmented, further increasing your construction costs. Even the microcell solutions have their space/leasing costs, and Ethernet backhaul considerations.
You also just can't land sites wily-nily and expect them to work. SNR is critical for good throughput performance. One mention above was system of small cells along a highway. That will never be a reality due to the small RF footprint given by small cells. You'd spend more time handing over between small cells at any decent amount of speed that you'd be consuming data.
In building systems generally aren't worth the cost expense to do on a large scale, as it's such a small amount of users. To design a decent in building system (SISO only) for a 9 story building you will probably look in the ballpark of 1 million. Easily double that if you want a MIMO system.
Look up "600mhz auction". It's huge, and it's next year.The FCC may open up some of the UHF spectrum now being used for TV and if that happens it should help, but how will that spectrum be divvied up between the carriers -- not going to happen for quite some time and even if it did the total increase in bandwidth will be modest.
Look up "600mhz auction". It's huge, and it's next year.
Ok, so I am very confused. I am grandfathered in to the unlimited data plan. My contract is up in like 2 months. I bought a new phone a few months ago after dropping mine into the Nile river. They tried to get me on some new plan with 6gb of data, but I told them no I wanted to buy a phone out right to keep my data.
Am I going to lose it? I use over 6gb every month. Mostly on The Chive and Pandora... I don't want to lose it.
As it was explained to me, if you have 2GB for say, $20 and you go over 2GB, you're charged ANOTHER $20 for a new set of 2GB...
What SHOULD be done here is pay for 2GB, if you use it at all up, fine. If not, the cap rolls over and continues to roll. You should be paying for a batch of bytes, not the right to use those bytes.
My brother has a grandfathered unlimited data on his phone but his phone is so old it barely works without crashing half the time. When he upgrades phones they will force him off the unlimited data.
Now's a good time to get a MDK S4 from Swappa.Tell him to buy a used phone off of Swappa or Craigslist. Cheaper, and he keeps his unlimited data.