Uh Oh, Internet: Basic Mobile Video Will be YouTube-Only With MetroPCS Plans | Hacker News Reader

Uh Oh, Internet: Basic Mobile Video Will be YouTube-Only With MetroPCS Plans

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121 pointsshawndumas83 comments

Blocking sites because they're "not on the service plan" is likely to be much more acceptable in western countries than explicit censorship, as in Iran or China. It's authoritarianism dressed up as commercialism. In the post-Wikileaks era my bet is that governments will either encourage, or at least not do anything to hinder, the erection of walled gardens which make it more difficult for the average internet user to get access to unauthorised sources of content. The next decade could see a return to the Compuserve-like internet services which existed in the 1990s.

Oh come on, do you really think that governments are so shook up over WikiLeaks that they might encourage ISPs to turn the internet into a series of walled gardens? For that matter, do you really think that they're that evil? Obviously they're not happy about WikiLeaks, and I'm not saying that governments or ISPs are perfect, but some perspective is badly needed here.

What you've written screams hyperbole and is veering dangerously into conspiracy theory territory. Net neutrality is a real issue, but it's got nothing to do with WikiLeaks. Governments aren't as dastardly or hell-bent on destroying your freedoms as you (and many others on HN) seem to think. It's actually quite disconcerting that so many on HN think this way -- hackers (in the good sense) could have a lot of influence on the future of democratic nations, but this kind of anti-government slant has the ability to really hurt our credibility and keep us on the sidelines.

Just as the majority of hackers are decent people, so are the majority of people in government. But just as there are black hats among hackers, there are black hats in government. Just as it would be imprudent to ignore the potential threat of black hats on computer security, it would be imprudent to ignore the potential threat of black hats on freedom.

I find it disconcerting that your appeal-to-emotion rebuttel addressing the walled garden premise has garnered so many up votes. The second paragraph is nothing more than an insult to the ideology opposite yours.

I've got nothing against people having an ideology opposite to mine, though we're not talking about polar opposites here -- we probably both agree about the importance of net neutrality.

What I do have a problem with is people holding beliefs based on little to no actual evidence. I understand the appeal of trying to slot this into your worldview, but it's totally unsubstantiated. All evidence suggests that neutrality is threatened by major corporations lobbying the government to allow them to make more money, not the government lobbying major corporations to turn the internet into a walled garden.

There's plenty of evidence that our government wants to restrict the flow of information. For example: When people in Iran were tweeting during demonstrations, it was hailed as the savior of democracy: people getting together and using tools to rally against their oppressors. When Twitter is used at protests here, at home, they get arrested, and called terrorists.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE5965KD20091007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jhsmCMuwdg

That has nothing to do with the assertion that governments are encouraging private companies to restrict internet freedom. No number of examples of police forces overstepping their bounds is proof of an authoritarian conspiracy to censor the internet in the federal government.

Despite your sneers, the governments of the World, and especially the U.S. government, have shown a strong bias towards information control, and walled gardens are controllable. The Internet as a whole is not. Wikileaks is merely a small example of governmental distaste for informational freedom/transparency.

If you seriously think the US government is doing than most "governments of the World" to control information, you need to be better informed.

Governance in the 21st century, whether it be at the level of governments or corporations or other large scale institutions, is about managing flows of information. Wikileaks merely provides an example of cases where such management failed catastrophically. I think it's not too much of a stretch into the murky world of conspiracies to suggest that governing organisations may wish to retain control of their information flows, and take steps in accordance with these concerns.

governing organisations may wish... to take steps... to retain control of their information flows

I think the point of the parent is that this attitude is defeatist and will therefore be somewhat self-fulfilling.

Instead, we hackers need to assert ourselves more fully in our own democracies to avoid the sort of thing your comment seems to assume is a fait accompli.

I'd be surprised if it came from a Wikileaks angle. Most (government) arguments I've seen against NN have been from the angle that it's corporations right to create plans like this and to block it infringes their freedoms.

There is more at stake. Imagine if shazaam radio got the contract and thus 40 bucks a month lets you listen to unlim shazaam (+ their 2 dollar fee). Whereas a competitor like pandora is not in any way blocked, you just have to pay 10 bucks a month to metropcs and then a whooping 1.3 bucks a month for pandora service. Guess who will win out in the war for the user. Shazaam can suck ass compared to pandora, but other than the fanbois, there will be mostly shazaam subscribers.

Wikileaks is not even in the picture here. This is pure 1st amendment issue. A provider can provide a completely unfair advantage in the "open" market to another company over their competitors. Imagine if television networks could chose to only show republican campaign messages, and ignore all democrat ones. Its the same issue.

This is actually huge news as it marks the beginning of what many of us feared and destroys future entrpeneurship. I have no idea why the FCC decided mobile Internet should allow these practices.

There is competition in mobile internet, whereas for non-mobile many people only have one or two realistic choices. That could be why mobile gets less regulation.

Sprint usb type mobile broadband plan: $59.99/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract.

Verizon usb type mobile broadband plan: $50/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract

AT&T usb type mobile broadband plan: $60/mo for 5 gigs on 2 year contract

T-mobile usb type mobile broadband plan: $39.99 for 5 gigs no contract

So yeah, it seems rather unlikely that any cartel like cooperation on tiering would evolve in this market.

(EDIT: Updates, thanks for the pointers. I was cribbing from a dodgy web page it seems http://mobile-broadband-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ )

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from for t-mobile:

T-mobile usb type mobile broadband plan $39.99 5GB no contract (even more plus webConnect)

Hmm, you're right. I had gotten them from here: http://mobile-broadband-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ - I started getting them from sprint and verizon, but when I came across that and it fit what I had already found I went with it for the rest.

Thanks for the catch!

Quick check of the other 3 numbers shows that they're accurate according to the provider websites.

That's misleading in a couple ways.

First, you have omitted other providers whose prices are not similar to those above. Clear, for example.

Second, competition is about more than just price. It is also about features and restrictions. The provider that this thread is about is offering a lower priced plan WITHOUT a contract, but with restrictions on what you can do with it.

(EDIT: continuing, as I thought of another significant factor)

Another problem is that you are looking at mobile USB internet access plans, rather than mobile phone access plans. Most users don't have a strong opinion (or any opinion at all) on which particular dongle is hanging off their laptop. Hence, given several mobile USB internet providers offering similar level of service (e.g., 5 GB/month) and similar terms and conditions (2 year contract), the expected result in a competitive market is for them to all charge about the same price.

Of course, in a non-competitive market dominated by a cartel, the expected result is ALSO for them to all charge the same price.

Net (no pun intended) result: your examples provide no evidence one way or the other on the question of competitiveness in mobile internet.

I wasn't trying to provide a comprehensive mobile services price comparison, I simply chose a service I knew to have comparable terms across the 4 national carriers that own their own towers. MetroPCS and Clear both provide significantly different services being online only in certain metros.

I had skipped handset service because when fully loaded they have service tiers that make it difficult to do direct comparisons, probably intentionally. However:

AT&T unlimited voice: $69.99/mo

Verizon unlimited voice: $69.99/mo

T-mobile unlimited voice: $59.99/mo

Sprint 900 minutes (max): $59.99/mo

and:

AT&T ala carte SMS: $0.20 per

Verizon ala carte SMS: $0.20 per

T-mobile ala carte SMS: $0.20 per

Sprint ala carte SMS: $0.20 per

Considering the radically different cost basis of the two programs it's hard to believe there isn't some de-facto price coordination going on.

I don't really disagree with what you're saying but...

Verizon is $50/mo/5GB and that's LTE (4G) -- and if they don't subsidize the device, no contract.

MetroPCS is $60/mo (including taxes) for unlimited phone service including LTE. I don't like what they're doing here but if their service is any good (doubt it), that's a good deal.

Millions of dollars worth of lobbying & Astroturfing.

Check out CTIA's front group 'MyWireless.' They claim to be 'a nonpartisan non-profit advocacy organization, made up of wireless consumers, businesses and community leaders from around the country, supporting reasonable pro-consumer wireless policies.'

In fact they share an office with CTIA and have the same press contact as CTIA. Their net neutrality stance is what you would expect, though the writing is comical: These big online companies - and their blogosphere and celebrity supporters - want to stop wireless carriers from managing their wireless networks - especially wireless Internet...If the FCC and Congress let flashy online companies and their billionaire founders write regulations that favor their businesses, American wireless and Internet consumers will ultimately lose money, choices, security and quality.

Sad, shameless plug - I wrote about this last week. I really didn't expect this to happen so soon: http://blog.grouptexting.com/2010/12/22/lobbyists-astroturfe...

I really wouldn't mind this at all if it weren't being sold as Internet access.

Mobile YouTube? Fine. Mobile Facebook? Great. If it's a walled garden, call it that and discount it accordingly. But once you have "Internet" and "more Internet," something's gone terribly wrong.

Indeed, at some point filtering and traffic shaping crosses over into false advertising if the output doesn't go by some other name than "internet service". It would be like paring down a luxury car until it is little different from a golf cart, and trying to sell it as a Lexus.

I'm more stunned by the price: I pay 20€ for unlimited and unrestricted data access with a double SIM (one mobile broadband, other for phone). And they want to charge more for other video access?

Whoa. MetroPCS is considered cheap in the USA, as most plans are around 60 a month.

I was shocked too when I came to the US for a few months.

In Germany, I just pay 9 cents per SMS/Minute and 10 Euros for a Gigabyte of data (per month).

In the US, I had to pay about 50 USD per Month on T-Mobile. It would have been more if I actually told them I had a smartphone ("Nah, I've got an old Nokia, I just want to be able to get eMails").

I don't know what plan you have, but tmobile for me is 60 a month for unlimited internet, sms, 500 minutes, unlimited nights/weekends.

What plan is that? I'm on tmobile and just upgraded to a Nexus S and all the unlimited internet plans seem to hit 70/mo or above. $30 for unlimited internet, plus $39 minimum for the rest. Would love to grab your plan if possible.

I used the "T-Mobile Even More Plus™ 500 Talk with FlexPay®" and added the featurephone internet "service"... I could only get edge anyway because of t-mobile's weird UMTS frequencies in the USA. I just had to set the proper APN and it worked (only edge, but that's just because I had a European GSM phone)

p.s. I used google voice for texting, no need for stupid text message plans

I’m shocked by how expensive mobile internet is in the US. I’m with giffgaff here in the UK, and I pay £10/month for 250 calling minutes, unlimited SMS and unlimited internet (no fair use policy).

Yea I was shocked after i moved from germany to the US. Even worse is the coverage here

Population density of Germany is 229 persons per km/sq. In the US it's 32. It's a lot more expensive to run the infrastructure for a country 27 times the geographic area and 1/7th the density.

Then explain why there's no EU-comparable regional service in areas of the US with far greater density, like any of the top ten metro areas. Even the cell carriers have large roaming-only gaps and dead zones, not just in the unpopulated western US, but on major freeways in California.

Using national population density to explain the extraordinary relative suckage of US broadband is a straw man argument.

There are some regional carriers but they're not necessarily well known. Not to mention that at&t, among others, have spent crap-loads of money lobbying to make it more difficult for smaller companies to get spectrum.

>Then explain why there's no EU-comparable regional service in areas of the US with far greater density

Because nobody wants regional service? There used to be regional service that was cheaper--I remember my parents signed up for it when they first got cellphones, around 2003--but it lost out in the marketplace, because people would cross a state line and be shocked by the roaming fees.

There are a lot of regional carriers left. I believe MetroPCS, the carrier in the article, may be one of them, since I'd never heard of the firm.

Edit: http://www.metropcs.com/coverage/ Their coverage maps indicate real coverage of a few metro areas, and roaming onto national networks.

It's just that regional carriers aren't a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the big national guys. Who wants a 10% discount for 1/100th the coverage area ?

I agree that the empty space in the western US distorts the population density, so just claiming sparse densities doesn't answer the question well. But isn't it obvious that there is are far fewer regional services in the US because Americans travel within the US more the Europeans travel within Europe? Lots more of the smartphone-carrying population travels from New York to California than from Spain to Poland.

Honestly, do you have any ideas about what causes these high prices other than density? The competition among the providers is pretty healthy, as far as I can tell.

Finland has a population density of 17/km^2. From a campaign, I can right now get unrestricted data at 384kbps for 3€/month, or "as much as the connection can handle", up to 14,4Mbps, typically 4Mbps, for 14€/month.

Lower population density actually helps wireless internet -- the cost is mainly not about the transmission equipment, it's about the very limited amount of total over-air bandwidth.

Lower population density actually helps wireless internet

Not quite true. Wireless internet is most cost effective when population density is at an extreme on the scale. If the density is low then you can use fewer towers that have larger cells and if the density is high then you need more capital for the higher-capacity infrastructure, but your backhauls are shorter and you have a larger userbase to recoup the investment. I would bet that for wireless operators in Finland the Helsinki area, Turku, and low-population areas make money while Kuopio is probably a break-even region at best...

The population distribution in Finland is nearly all in the lower 1/3 of the country though. Population distribution in the US is (I'm guessing) more normalized. So really you're talking about the population density of the Helsinki metro area, which is likely pretty high.

That still does not explain why I'm losing signal in the middle of Queens, for example. You can be damn sure, that nothing similar happened in the middle of Munich.

Mobile data seems very expensive in the US compared to Europe, but the States seem to be cheaper in most other areas: e.g. Petrol/Gasoline - $3 per gallon in the States, over $8 per gallon in the UK now.

Most of Europe taxes gasoline very heavily to encourage alternatives and discourage use.

Here in Finland, roughly 75% of the price of gas at the pump is tax. Or in other words, we have a 300% gas tax.

Mobile data seems very expensive in the US compared to Europe

Just don't get on a train for a couple hours and stop in another country. Roaming data rates will kill you in Europe!

We're going to be the crotchety old men and women calling carrier tech support in just a few decades:

"Back in my day, you didn't need some big corporation's permission to look at pictures of naked folks on the internet…"

And so it begins. The only way this won't run rampant is an immediate consumer backlash.

They already solved that problem. Backlash-ing costs you $250.

Is that the cost of an early termination fee?

No. It’s $350 for an “advanced device”. So, backlash costs a great deal more than you think.

Unless I read things incorrectly, current contracts are grandfathered in. Just don't renew.

Remember the leaked slides for differently priced mobile services that leaked out a few weeks ago? http://blog.grouptexting.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dip....

That seemed like a worst case scenario that we might expect down the road...not within days of the FCC giving mobile broadband a pass on net neutrality. Hopefully this move backfires and forces the FCC to revisit their ruling (http://gigaom.com/2010/12/28/who-wins-and-loses-under-the-fc...)

Mobile broadband is becoming mainstream. Congress & FCC really screwed this up at the worst possible time for consumers.

Well that really sucks.

I wonder how they'll be implementing it, and how plausible it will be for other video sites to make themselves unblockable.

> I wonder how they'll be implementing it, and how plausible it will be for other video sites to make themselves unblockable.

Yes, I'd like some information on this as well. Will it be possible to circumvent their block using encryption? The article says only the videos themselves will be blocked, not the websites.

It will almost certainly be possible for technical folks like us to bypass their filters but that will still exclude about 99% of their customers. That 99% will probably grudgingly pay the few dollars more and complain about phone companies screwing them again.

If they complain loud enough, it might be possible to get them to reverse their stance. From my POV, the problem is that only technical people are complaining, and no one else cares.

I'm guessing that people will respond the same way most people in China do to censorship - with relative apathy. They have better things to do than worry about whether the internet is censored or not.

Behind the scenes I bet it will be the same censorship technology as used in countries like China. The only difference is the way that the censorship is marketed, in the form of service plans.

This needs to be stopped. Wireless will increasingly become consumers primary Internet connection. If this becomes standard practice for wireless providers, freedom to access what content the user chooses will be effectively destroyed.

Has anyone actually located where MetroPCS makes sets these rules? I have not been able to find them in the TOS

here: http://www.metropcs.com/presscenter/newsreleasedetails.aspx?... "The $40 service plan offers unlimited talk, text, 4G Web browsing with unlimited YouTube access."

How does that limit video to Youtube only? You sure this isn't just a marketing phrase? Is there concrete proof that other video players will not work?

It seems to me that lowering phone prices[0] -- making subsidies, and thus long-term contracts, uninteresting to consumers -- and LTE compatibility across networks will create a more competitive market, lowering prices and forcing these tactics out the door.

Obviously, the carriers will do everything in their power to prevent the commoditization of their networks but am I crazy in thinking that's at least a path we are inevitably moving on?

[0] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/12/the-smartphone-explosion.htm...

lowering phone prices making subsidies uninteresting to consumers

I doubt it; irrational consumers will still choose "free with contract" instead of $100.

LTE compatibility across networks

I doubt this too due to frequency incompatibility.

>I doubt [LTE compatibility] too due to frequency incompatibility.

Are you sure? AT&T and Verizon both have frequencies in the 700 MHz range; I'm sure they don't have the exact same frequencies, but I'd bet that the same hardware can support them. At least, it's more likely than having one phone that can support, say, 1700 and 1900 MHz.

Last I heard, the lurking problem with LTE compatibility was that nobody had agreed on how to do voice over LTE. We might wind up with a situation where you can roam from AT&T to Verizon (it's all IP), but you can't take an AT&T phone and activate it for Verizon.

Anyone more knowledgeable on this issue care to talk about LTE network compatibility? I don't see why we wouldn't have chips that work on multiple frequencies like today but maybe it's not that simple. Like metageek said, there might be an issue with LTE voice.

This would finally bring a market more like Europe and other places around the world -- including their much more reasonable pricing.

If Google would like to make a big stance for Net Neutrality, they could block connections from them. But I think that would be a big issue by itself.

They have Android smartphones... I'm very much wondering how this service will ever be able to work between the plentiful applications, including third-browsers (plus Flash support on 2.2). I imagine that the power user, at least, will have no trouble getting around it; the block won't be total either way.

OS has nothing to do with what ISP can block. The only thing someone maybe able to do is run all their connections through a proxy or private vpn.

It said the site would load but the video would not in the original article, which was part of where I was coming from. Plus, features like Opera Turbo inside of Opera Mobile, for instance, would make such proxies transparent to the user.

How is this scary new development? The budget option of proprietary bundled services has always existed, with the upsell being the unfettered internet. Youtube and facebook are not "the internet", but proprietary services that have been developed upon it. Surprise surprise, network providers used to bundling services look for a lowest common denominator for their base product line. That these services happen to deliver over IP is of little consequence.

However, don't think that I'm advocating for walled gardens - the important part is to keep innovating and creating a wide demand for The Internet at large so that carriers are unable to presume that most customers only want bundled discrete services in the first place (thereby pushing competition on generic bandwidth. bittorrent+RC4 has done wonders for wired net neutrality).

hmm, I'd better find those America Online CDs....

Facebook Fee: $.95

Youtube Surcharge: $1.53

blogging package: $.25

Roaming charge (non approved sites): $5.21

Wikileaks download penalty: $10.00

Destroying net neutrality, killing what made the Internet great in the first place: priceless.

Right. You can effectively censor sites simply by putting subscription charges on them. It's a westernised version of China's Great Firewall.

Potential cost to the establishment of forcing all the hackers onto darknets: who knows?

The ssh and vpn charges will predictably be outrageous and seriously curtail the popularity of darknets. Similarly with any alternatives that are centralized by service or protocol. It'd be an awfully tall technological order to create a distributed Tor-style traffic relay to the darknets.

Or are you suggesting pirate wireless carriers?

That said, if such a too-difficult-to-effectively-filter Tor-style relay came into being, that certainly would be a Big Deal.

http://www.i2p2.de/

If they start banning the protocol from routers, we can tunnel it through other protocols. You can push anything you want through an HTTPS link. Good luck banning that protocol.

Or we can do the wireless-mesh thing. There are a lot of people working on mesh-based peer to peer routing layers and DNS. Wish I could remember what the projects were called...

they can just ban all hTTPS and whitelist banks, paypal, facebook etc

I've always liked the idea of wireless mesh networks. [1] But it would limit exposure to ideas, code and data by physical distances. Even expanding out Bacon-style along the social graph as people move about, it would be a huge step back for unfiltered communication. [2]

[1] It's a rather romanticized attachment, that originally hinged on people one-day realizing that having all your data primarily on other people's computers probably isn't a great idea.

[2] Though that, too, triggers appealingly romanticized notions of 'place', 'dialect' and 'local culture'. Which is to say: it would all make for great cyberpunk fiction atmosphere; I'm just pretty sure it'd still suck compared to the current state of affairs.

>physical distances

I imagine we can just bounce VHF off the sky or something. People solve harder problems every day.

Also, never underestimate the bandwidth of a hard disk in the mail :)

From the point of view of the establishment what happens to hackers is of little importance. Hackers or other tech-savvy users will always find ways over, under or around whatever walls exist. This happens today in countries like China. All the establishment is really very concerned about is the majority of average internet users (who may or may not also vote).

I can't wait for the censorship-resistant, anonymous, redundant worldwide network that would be created. The internet is terrible on many levels, it works though, so the incentive for change is just not there.

Here's the competing bill:

Not getting nickel-and-dimed for Facebook: $0

Not getting nickel-and-dimed for YouTube: $0

Not getting nickel-and-dimed for Blogging: $0

Not getting nickel-and-dimed for Unapproved Sites: $0

Not getting nickel-and-dimed for Wikiwhatever: $0

Going and doing whatever you want to online: $10/GB.

Not burning emotional energy in constantly wishing death by fire and locust upon your carrier: priceless.

I suspect this is going to go over about as well as Rupert Murdoch's (disastrous) paywall strategies. So seriously, give it 3-4 ugly quarterly earnings reports before freaking out.

On the other hand, if this proves profitable, be very concerned.

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