Amazon Is in Talks to Offer Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Is in Talks to Offer Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members

bloomberg.com

79 pointsjbredeche103 comments

Oh boy. I can see it now:

By accepting this offer, you agree that Amazon has the right to collect anonymized web traffic data. This helps us improve your customer experience and offer you more relevant product suggestions when you search on Amazon.com and other Amazon affiliated properties.

Edit:

More interestingly perhaps, this allows Amazon to bypass the tracking restrictions at the platform level (say enforced by Apple, and has harmed Facebook).

Dropping to the network infrastructure level may make attribution and tracking on Amazon Advertising best in class across not just Amazon.com, but other properties? I don't know enough about the space so just musing, but I can't help feel this is a major development that's a bit more than Prime members now get more free stuff.

All existing providers are doing exactly this. AT&T even has a plan where you can pay extra (something like $30/mo) to opt out of tracking.

This has to be some of the expected value for Amazon, but I would still trust Amazon more than other carriers (Verizon, AT&T, etc.).

Lol, I read this comment and immediately went "No way".

Then thought about it for another second then agreed.

Then thought about it for longer and said "No way again".

Honestly, I'm stumped on this one haha, which is an interesting place to be, contemplating who's more evil.

Ex Amazon employee here, Amazon has some of the best internal controls over user data of any company I’ve ever worked far bar none.

These internal controls? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

Amazon acquired Ring in 2018, the fine is for bad internal controls before 2018.

I work at AWS so I'm not neutral here, but how would this even work? Now that web and app traffic is encrypted, mobile providers can "see" what websites and app you access via your DNS lookups and destination IPs, and only some of the time, but that's about it. It doesn't get to the level of specific product purchases or much that you could put into a recommendation engine.

dns over https (DoH) prevents the carrier from inspecting DNS lookup.

IPv6 could also prevent the carrier from easily reporting what the destination is. By service provider cycling through IPs. There’s also iCloud private relay that blocks this as well.

Only if every one implemented them !!

It's a fine level when it comes to mergers and aquisitions though. Look into what Facebook did with Onavo.

Seeing as how all ISPs and mobile service providers already do all that and more, It really doesn't mean much to me if its AT&T or Amazon doing the tracking

AT&T is selling your phone calls and text messages to marketers, how to opt out

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24756042

My home ISP can steal my data too - that's why I only use it with a VPN.

Man all that data is over rated and worthless. Monitoring ppl 24x7 is like keeping tabs on your cat 24x7. Nothing that interesting is going on. That doesn't mean the data isn't over priced and over sold to schmucks. But that game has been going on for so long everyone playing the games knows how useless the data is.

Keeping tabs on a cat 24/7 is what makes life worth living. I agree that people are overrated though

For advertisers it isn't. Signals for purchasing that could be had for cheap are extremely valuable. Especially if they're reliable. If Amazon could get me a qualified lead for the half the price of Google Ads, that would be a game changer.

I love it. Just keep jamming more random stuff in there and periodically saying, “you know, we give you so many amazing benefits that we just have no choice but to raise the membership fee again!”

Or split it off like they did with music storage (and deleting all but 250 of my stored songs), then peppering me with requests to upgrade to prime music 24/7.

I use prime because I have enough need for the shipping aspects of it that it works out favorably. Prime video is a very nice bonus.

Beyond that, there is a lot of hassle to being connected to Amazon. All their e-readers and audible can't help but advertise incessantly. These are apps where I want to open to the same place maybe a hundred times in a row as I read or listen to a long book. Yet, every time, it opens to the store page and I have drill down through my library to find my current book. If I'm on to my next book and search for it while in the library section of the app, it will pull up results from the store as well.

I feel similarly. Even pre-pandemic, the fact that I could often order something through Amazon and get it before I would have gotten around to driving 5 miles to the store is absolutely worth the membership and Prime Video is a nice enough bonus.

Ads are a pain on Kindle though I could admittedly spend the money to make them at least partly go away. Music I don't really care about as I get Apple on another bundle.

This is quite the timing after settling with the FTC for having no guard rails for employee access to Ring surveillance:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

How did I miss this?!

Amazon employees had unrestricted access to all stored and live Ring video? Just one employee they mention used it to watch 50,000 videos of women in their homes… And they paid just $5.8mm to settle.

It got posted a few time to HN but oddly none of the threads got any traction

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166452

If privacy of users isn‘t forced on these companies, there will be a future where watching nude photos and videos of their customers will be a corporate benefit for Amazon executives.

I actually cancelled prime because Amazon products these days suck, it’s become literally flea market shit

I probably would use Amazon cell phone service, but would be good if I could just buy that, not all of prime

If they can take over my monthly phone bill that’s a huge gap. Prime is what $150? What almost 10x cheaper than my phone bill. Of course, the odds that it will offer an equivalent feature set is probably minimal so there will be a switching cost.

Your phone bill is approaching $1500 annually? What are your parameters? Unless that’s unlimited data lines for a family with lots of added devices, that’s a ton of money.

$1.5k is pretty much the going rate for two phones with unlimited and non-terrible tethering.

It’s really not that huge a jump. For a single phone line with tethering, ATT will run you $1200 annually. My budget provider with deprioritized service but on a similar plan is $540. A Prime membership covers a household, but anyway you measure it, $150 is close enough to “one order of magnitude less” to be useful as an approximation.

$240 Annum for 15GB mint mobile.

Plus another $24 or so in fees.

I seem to remember there not being any fees the first time I signed up, which was over two years ago but they were there 18 months ago. I’m assuming they didn’t charge them at the start to make the price more attractive.

AT&T 4 lines (2 adults 2 kids) x $40 each + taxes = ~$200 per month, $2400 per year. This is unlimited data, text, minutes - we used to have a data cap, but the worry about the kids exceeding it when out and about was not worth the savings. We could probably ditch the unlimited minutes for at least the kids lines. We also sometimes have an upgraded phone on the bill at 0% interest over 24 months - there is generally a pretty significant discount compared to the device vendor, with the downside that AT&T does lock the device to its network for those 24 months (unless you pay off the discount you got).

How is your phone bill $125 - month? I have usage based billing and it's between $25 and $80 depending on my usage.

Prime is $150/yr

$100+ monthly phone bills often include the cost of the device, not just the service.

Yea but in this case it's not a good comparison since Prime Mobile is presumably not including a phone too. But maybe it will.

My AT&T bill is over $100/month. My dad's on the plan too but it's a good $100/month just for the service in any case.

I buy the most expensive retail ATT plan and it is $50 per line and it goes lower per line as you add lines. See “unlimited premium”:

https://www.att.com/plans/wireless/

With signature program and multi line discount, I pay $40 per line excluding all taxes, and $45 per line including taxes for 4 lines. When I had 5 lines, it was $5 cheaper.

My experience with AT&T is that even though the cost may be listed as $45 per line for multi-line (and notably $75 for Signature single line), that after taxes and fees it comes out to $90 for a single line on signature. Came out to an additional $15 per line back when I was paying for multi line, too.

These days I go with post-tax/fee calculated provider costs (in my case, Visible (Verizon) at $45 for deprioritized service). So I guess some qualifying customers like yourself can manage that…

Maybe price discrimination, but only applies after fees?

I was mistaken about the price for ATT. Looks like the pre tax prices are drastically higher for fewer lines than mine.

1 line is $85 per line

2 lines is $75 per line

3 lines is $60 per line

4 lines is $50 per line

5 lines is $45 per line

and after that, you have to open a new ATT account and start at 1 line.

So I can see paying near $100 for an individual ATT line. It actually looks like Verizon is cheaper now? You can get 1 line for $65 per month plus tax for 3 years if you switch to Verizon (I cannot tell what the price is if you are already on Verizon).

Mine is $280/mo, but has 6 phones and 4 other devices. So ~$30/device is good? No phone cost in there, just service.

https://www.cnbc.com/select/how-to-cut-your-cell-phone-bill-...

> In fact, JD Power told CNBC that the average cell phone bill is now $144.

If you are on a typical american post-paid plan I guess that is what you get.

that bill is probably for multiple phone lines in a household, and include extra for paying off device loans.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here rolling my eyes at the description of "free or $10/month" as my mobile bill is already less than $10/mo. I'm sure adding cell plans to Sunk Cost Fallacy would be a great business move for Amazon though. The more things they can tie to it, the harder it is to cancel.

What good quality products aren’t you able to get on Amazon anymore that you used to?

The best example is my iPhone charging cords. It was $5, and didn’t work. It was so cheap that rather than the dog and pony show of doin g a return, I ordered another one from another vendor that also didn’t work

I then ordered official apple one that worked

And the HDMI splitter I bought sings to me

And the baby toys, it’s almost comically bad grammar on the box, and the kids songs are Chinese accents

My $100 battery charger, takes half a day to charge

> it’s become literally flea market shit

the funny thing is that one of the reasons I keep my prime is because it's a flea market where I can find stuff that I have an extremely hard time finding locally or need to pay exorbitant shipping, for 5-7 days delivery, from others.

What do you mean by "literally flea market shit"?

The last 3 items I ordered were obviously dirty used items missing parts, thrown loose in boxes without the factory packaging, and no padding. Like you said, it seems they are selling things that were found in the garbage, or at thrift stores/garage sales as new items.

At this point I am willing to pay 2x for an item I can trust from anyone but Amazon.

The problem with bundling is it becomes harder to justify the more stuff you do not use. Prime Video already caused this for those who just wanted shipping.

I expect you are in the minority in terms of rationale. For most people, the more you get in the bundle, the greater the incentive, the faster the flywheel spins for Amazon. This is why bundling is both so powerful as a strategy and is also often the target of anti-competitive complaints.

That opinion becomes the majority when they increase the cost as well. Similar services have emailed me over the years, saying that, since they're continuing to grow and provide more benefits, they have to raise the price as well.

It's one thing when it goes from the $7/month I paid for Prime way-back-when to the $15/month I pay now. But the average phone plans are more expensive than that, on their own. So, if Prime offers this for all members, and a large percent end up using it, they'll have to raise prices in order to remain profitable.

If this were truly the "Free Mobile Service" offered in the title, that'd be one thing. But that's not how business works.

Exactly - we saw the same exact thing with cable, where they kept bundling more and more channels until the basic cable subscription is $80 and people started saying "why am I paying this?"

Amazon's appeal is that any one of its services would be a decent price for what you get for the whole bundle. I pay $10 for my Prime membership when to get the same 4k video streaming on Netflix it is $20. With that $10 I also get free shipping and all these other features that I don't care if I use or not because just the video and shipping is a deal. If the prime price was $30 it'd be totally different math, but it's not, it's a deal any way I cut it.

Yeah at this point I view Amazon Prime as a streaming service with an extremely odd set of perks.

It's also interesting the various bundles- I found out about the Grubhub+ one, which is normally $9.99 a month and is free with Prime. If you use one or two of the services bundles it ends up being an obvious money saver.

Don’t forget WholeFoods perks.

For me, Prime is the shipping. I don't know how much I'd pay for video streaming. Probably not much. And I've never used any of the random add-ons. (But then I don't use grocery/food delivery at all.)

I should setup a program that can digest the amazon export of all orders and tell you how much it actually saved you (especially if you're in an area that is no longer getting 2nd day, or you use the "amazon day" thing).

Because you get free shipping anyway with an order of $35 or more. I can't actually see how much shipping is below that without creating a new account, but I doubt it's entirely excessive.

Walmart of all places is starting to eat into my Prime usage, and I'm going to cancel after this year runs out and see how it goes.

As long as they don't go too crazy, it can be nice - until they bundle too many things and it's more expensive than getting what you want elsewhere.

I have little use for Prime Video so I'm not "saving $20 a month" compared to Netflix, I'm paying $10 a month for (whatever it has become, certainly not 2nd day) prime shipping.

They also do a horrible job letting you know what you get, because I didn't even know about the Grubhub+ thing until I read it here.

The flip side is that this makes Prime much more sticky - if you want to cancel Prime you need to find a new mobile provider and port your number over.

There's no way they keep Prime at the same price while also adding mobile service, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. Or maybe they do and start raising Prime prices in a year or two, knowing that said sticky-ness will keep people on Prime even if it starts costing close to the amount you'd pay for individual mobile service anyway.

Amazon spokesperson was just quoted denying this. "We're always exploring adding more benefits for prime members but we do not have plans to add wireless at this time."

Reported by CNBC at 9:40ET

This is interesting. I hope it grows in scope cuz AT&T needs to go die already.

I dont know how big Telcos havent been gobbled up by larger groups yet. They are such a slow moving gigantic revenue generating juicy targets. Big tech (advertising/media/cloud) is not big enough to do the gobbling. But big retail Walmart/Amazon are most def large enough to take out AT&T. And hope they do so cause I prefer dealing with them than the telcos.

ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile are dumb pipes subject to lots of regulation. The only one with decent profit margin is Verizon, and they are already the most expensive.

ATT is loaded up with debt from stupid attempts to not just be a dumb pipe, and I do not see much upside from buying any of them. Any future cash flows are surely already priced in since they are all basically utilities, and I do not see where the efficiency/synergy gains would be for another business to merge with them.

Telcos gobbled media.

Only Comcast did successfully, but it remains to be seen how successfully.

ATT and Verizon both failed, with ATT failing big (tens of billions wasted).

I think you have your numbers wrong. Big tech is in some cases 10-20 times bigger than AT&T (market valuation). Big retail is just around double if you look at Walmart and everyone else much smaller (if you remove Amazon which I count as big tech).

I'm not quite sure it would be a benefit for the end users to have big tech also own the wireless networks.

I don't think so. Revenue wise they are much larger than tech. Big tech is mostly advertising.

Verizon/ATT/T-Mobile are in the ~$130B or less revenue arena.

Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/Alphabet earn much more revenue, multiples more on some cases. Even Meta earns nearly as much as Verizon/ATT.

lol... as if Amazon is better than ATT.

Telecom industry isn’t that attractive a target because they have high capital costs, actual competition, minimal moats, and are stuck on an endless upgrade treadmill 4g, 5g, …

AT&T is specifically a poor option because they are loaded up with so much debt.

Amazon is not going to go out and build towers. They are going to license capacity from one of the three remaining infrastructure-providing carriers left (probably AT&T).

AT&T will never go away.

Additionally, any mobile network service that Amazon sells will have lower priority than mobile network service bought directly from the cell tower owners:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

Big tech would much rather commoditize the telcos and treat them as dumb pipes. You don't have to eat everyone upstream of you, as long as you capture most of the value and leave some bits to the commodity suppliers it's fine.

On the internet, most of the value (ads, shopping, socia etc.) is captured by tech cos. The pipes (despite the net neutrality reversal) continue to stay dumb pipes.

https://archive.is/ih4FP

Something is off:

- unlimited service

- for free, maybe $10/month

- vague "increase loyalty/stickiness" claims

- Amazon fired 30K people in last 6 months due to "economic conditions"

Is it 2008 or 2018?

Alternatively, when are we unionizing?

I would just be happy if there was a way I could simply buy and download audiobooks

instead it’s some kafkaesque kabuki dance/rube Goldberg machine required to listen to an audiobook without getting into a long-term monopolistic audible subscription

You can buy and download audiobooks on audible. Stripping the drm (for personal archival purposes) is so easy I can only imagine it was made intentionally weak to capture a certain segment of the market.

Throw the word "byzantine" in there too.

Libro.fm is a good alternative. No DRM.

You can buy and download individual audiobooks on Downpour.com, which come free of any DRM.

You can find a long list of DRM-free audiobook sources here: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks

This would almost surely cannibalize big parts of existing business for whatever carrier signs on and just transfer the margins to Amazon. I'm pretty curious if Amazon really has the leverage to make that happen.

While Amazon has more leverage than most, it's the same with any MVNO.

Well, I mean leverage to push $0-10/month unlimited. That's unusual.

A bit close to the Kingsman (2014) plot…

Pretty sure Bezos doesn't want to be a saviour of anybody or thing. On the other hand if Musk introduced a phone.

the kingsmen movies are... such an uncommon niche. It's got aggressively american populist plots, but its written in a classic hollywood style that glosses over in a way that people don't seem to notice that it's so unusual. People remember the action scenes. They don't remember the main plot points about the elites and the government actively conspiring to kill off the poor as a popular class-wide mentality.

the advertisements do this too. They're very much just showing the cool action scenes. very strange.

I canceled Prime a while back, and I couldn't believe how full of dark patterns Amazon is when you're not a Prime member.

"Free" shipping can easily turn into $6-$12 if you're not careful at checkout.

This would be perfect for my work phone (i.e. a semi-disposable line), especially since my phone is connected to my home network through Tailscale (i.e. WireGuard) pretty much 24x7

For a while, and maybe still now, you could buy Motorola phones on Amazon for a lower price, but with the lock-screen ads that the Kindle Fire range uses. No thank you!

I buy pretty much everything off Amazon, and even I would not pass all my cellphone data through them. That sounds like sheer stupidity.

> Free Mobile Service to US Prime Members

How exactly is mobile service "free" if Prime is a product you have to pay for?

I remember the last time Amazon offered free mobile service. It was quietly discontinued after a couple years.

Are you thinking of Kindle Whispernet?

I do miss being able to use my early Kindle 2 with the 'experimental web browser' and go beyond the walled garden, but the later 3G Kindles that were still walled off to Amazon and at least Wikipedia were still really nice for quick mobile referencing.

I guess we have to ask ourselves: how much do we trust Amazon and what would goods and services would be being willing to purchase from them?

houses?

trains?

ships?

elevators?

airplanes?

pacemakers?

Is it byod or do you need to use an amazon Fire phone and everything that would entail?

The Amazon Fire Phone has been discontinued 7 years ago.

I meant a special amazon phone generically.

Will they include ads on my phone lock screen?

I want an experience like I have with my Kindle.

There is warehouse in Seattle with Amazon Fire Phones :).

So, following Google's example, a la Google Fi?

this would put Amazon as the provider for most people’s only 2FA. Bleh.

In exchange for...

...your data of course. Which is, I'm confident, what you're saying.

It will be interesting what the privacy policy & controls will look like on something like this, particularly given the COPPA issues Amazon is recently dealing with.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-re...

Your private conversations, text messages from various services, and people etc etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com