Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering where telcos and ISPs stand in this context. I mean, given almost everybody owns a mobile, and telcos already have your details and payment data anyway, it's surprising that no telco-backed payment solution has emerged (except for maybe mpesa in Africa), when telcos are already part of a highly regulated market (in EU at least) and could be further regulated to provide payments in a non-discriminatory way to the benefit of both the telco and the user. In the 1990s, downloadable ringtones with anonymous payments via special phone numbers were widely used, making use of MMS which has an option to request paid content where the UI asks you if you want to accept the paid content. What's the reason for this not taking off? Is it that previous efforts were failures, or that Telcos were too greedy or what? Or was it ruined by Google and Apple who'd rather want you to consume their ads or paid media offerings?

View on HN

I would absolutely say that telcos were too greedy, and that the history of the Internet is exploiting the fact that the Internet doesn't have a billing system to undercut telcos at every opportunity.

The Internet has undercut voice, text, ""online services"" (Compuserve and AOL etc), news, and most recently cable TV. The only way those prices can be lifted off the zero floor again is by a monopoly somehow squeezing out the free alternatives.

The psychological overhead of billing should not be underestimated as a reason against micropayments. Not having to think about your usage is liberating. This is why bundling (e.g. Netflix, Prime) is not going away.

Content creators do sometimes need to be paid somehow to produce content (although lots will do it for free!), and people seem to be slowly converging on Patreon/Kickstarter for this.

Since the early 90's I've argued that banks should join forces and make a phone or at least a chip for a phone. I talk with a few banking people not to low on their food chain but they didn't understand it at all:

Phone companies are doing transactions per second which requires them to replicate a bank. It might be that you can only buy one thing today (calls) prepaid phones are ordinary bank accounts and phone contracts are credit cards. Where do you, as a banker, think this is going to go eventually? To add to this insanity [I added], you have a 0.50 cent per minute help line. You are already using their bank to sell support to your customers. Hundreds of guilders are transferred per person from your accounts to your competitor every month! Compare the service level: If I don't use the phone often enough they steal my money and close my account!

Over the many years that followed I got properly robbed by phone companies multiple times and hear at least 30 crazy stories from people I know. Schemes not even the greediest banker could dream up. They would go to prison fast.

This is effectively M-PESA.

As usual, the incumbents don't care and have ossified structures and a poor understanding of technology. Banks, in particular, care least about the bank accounts - they're almost a loss leader to get people in for the real business, which is loans, especially mortgages.

Right, but we take a mortgage with them because we already use their other services. 10 cent funeral insurance is a gold mine. I suppose they will stay ignorant until some random tech giant lets you buy the house from the street and unlock the door while drones fly in your belongings.

There's a "Use <MY_MOBILE_NETWORK> billing" option in the Google Play App's Payment Method settings on my Android phone. I'm in the UK. (I haven't used it so I don't know how it works)

In the US, it puts the charge on your phone bill and makes it near impossible to contest or get a refund when things go wrong, because dealing with phone companies is usually way more painful than dealing with a credit card company or even a bank.

In the US, you shouldn't ever use this - you should just use a credit card instead.

In the UK everyone uses debit cards, so I'm not sure if this recommendation is still valid. In the US, using a debit card is possibly the only thing you could do that's worse than "bill my mobile carrier."

Hm that's an interesting US perspective that was new to me. I still maintain that establishing a non-monopolistic payment system is vital (similar to having a currency in the first place) and that, for us in the EU at least, telcos are reasonably competitive and on the regulatory hook anyway and thus best equipped to become payment providers.

Because telcos and ISPs have a reputation for comically bad UX?

I buy 1 GB data a month ago for my prepaid phone for 10 euro. I thought 1 GB isn't much so I buy another one. Turns out you can only top it off to 1 GB. I thought meh.. then I got an SMS message announcing it would expire after 30 days. I dunno, you could put that kind of stuff above the form?

1GB for 10EUR on a prepaid in EU is way too much. In Germany, the price is about one tenth that (7-8GB for 9EUR) and that's supposedly already a high-price region when it comes to phone rates as they say. I believe in other parts of Europe (Lithuania, Estonia?) you can get up to 40GB LTE for 10EUR.

I've worked for telcos, and postpaid is indeed very much about "buying customers" via deals/sales prediction models and customer retention; they kindof have to do this, else they simply wouldn't exist in the marketplace. But for prepaid, OTOH, I can't see anything wrong with the prices (ok you don't get a sponsored spyware device every other year).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com