Let my Wi-Fi go: FCC rules Verizon can't charge for Wi-Fi tethering

I have a hard time deciding if I want unlimited or not. I certainly don't need unlimited. I know there are people who use 50-100+ GB a month but I don't come anywhere near that and don't want to subsidize those people. I'm perfectly fine with a per GB charge or a decent sized base plan and a reasonable per GB overage. OTOH those caps need to grow every year because in a few years 100 GB a month will probably be today's 200 MB plan. So in that case "unlimited" has some futureproofing to it.

Your suggestion doesn't go far enough. If I were Verizon playing with these rules, I'd still try to collect fees. If were caught, I'd refund those fees and go about my business. No harm, no foul.

My point is that it's not really a penalty to just refund the money you took illegally. There must be punitive damages to make the risk of breaking the law more than just a profit or break even proposition. It should be a profit or lose more money than the risk is worth proposition for companies.

With a CATV subscription, you can hook up an essentially unlimited number of TVs. You could in theory watch every channel 24/7 for the same basic rate. The basic costs associated with cable are related to the infrastructure to bring the signal to your house, plus whatever licensing fees for content that are essentially passed through.

With Internet plans, we are charged repetitively for multiple devices, and in essence you are basically discouraged (throttling, excess usage fees) from actually using the service to 100% of the contracted rates over the billing period.

For example, I have on my account 2 iPhones with data plans (mine, wife's), 1 with tethering (mine), and 1 4G USB dongle. I went over the 5G limit on the dongle, but both of the basic data plans on the iPhones were under budget for the month, and I hardly used the tethering. Do you think I'll get a break from Verizon, or any kind of 'net usage' billing for the overage on the 4G dongle?

As others have pointed out in other threads, the mobile Internet space is ripe for disruption. It's not going to come from 2 college drop-outs on a $15,000 Y Combinator budget, but it's going to happen as soon as the economy lights up a little bit and we get some real infrastructure investment rolling.

If you are using an iOS device to download a 100MB game app over WiFi via AT&T DSL --that you pay for-- while, at the same time paying for a cellular data plan, AT&T is making making more money on you because their cellular data bandwidth is not being utilized by they still charge you.

I would venture to say that most iOS devices spend the bulk of their time within WiFi zones (AT&T or not). This means that a portion of what AT&T charges for cellular data is never actually used and that is pure profit for them.

As I said in my post: I don't know what the right solution is, but the current setup is starting to smell pretty bad.

If the above example doesn't do it for you, think about this. Twenty people working at a company. The company pays (maybe through AT&T) for Internet access and provides WiFi to all employees. Every single one of them has a personal iPhone. Every single one of them pays for a cellular data plan. And, while at work, every single one of them is using the WiFi access point for the bulk of the data traffic on their devices. AT&T is making a nice profit on data bandwidth they never have to deliver over the cellular network.

Later on, those same people go home and are likely to transfer data over their own (paid) DSL connection rather than use cellular data. Again, double charging by the telcos, if you will.

Once you do the math past a single iPhone the effect starts to become obvious very quickly.

Maybe what I am saying is that if I am paying AT&T for cellular data as well as DSL I should receive a credit on my cellular data plan for the data moved over DSL as opposed to the cell network. Again, I don't know the first thing about their business equation, so I'll be the first one to admit that this proposal could be beyond ridiculous for a hundred and one reasons.

I would love clarification.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iMbsPSv2vatAVvbz_8n0xU3M...

> Depending on your device, as we've seen, that could take years.

The FCC should decide on a reasonable timeframe, and fine them for every day over that that they still charge for it. Verizon can argue that the updates come from the handset manufacturers, but the restriction was put there at Verizon's behest, so they can really only blame themselves.

So any criticism of differentiated pricing based solely on the idea that "a packet is a packet and it costs the same to route" may be astute in the static, technical dimension -- but naive in the ultimately more-important dynamic economic and business dimensions.

Potentially, but I think it's a fair bet that a lot of people with data plans don't use nearly 4GB. Will that set overlap significantly with the set of customers who tether? Hard to say.

Further, there are some of the 90% of customers who valued tethering, but wouldn't pay $20 for it. They might tolerate a $5-$10 rise in base rates without switching. Then, there are others of the 90% who could also tolerate a $5-10 increase in base rates, and still others who would be lost at each level of increase.

The exact net effect will change based on how many customers fall into which ranges of price-tolerance behavior, but the fact that the base rates now provide an extra value, that some were willing to pay $20 for, strongly suggests some increase in base rates, greater than $0 and less than $20, would be the new profit-maximizing rate for Verizon. And thus everyone who doesn't want tethering at any price loses out.

Regulations which prevent differentiated pricing can often help the high-end customers -- in this case richer people with multiple devices -- by preventing their willingness-to-pay-more from subsidizing the overall service. They may not help the price-sensitive and more likely to be poor customers. Thus the cheering of this regulatory action on some boards (including here) should not be taken as a proof of net consumer benefit. Just that it benefits rich heavy-tethering users.

I would argue that the benefits of low bandwidth prices for the rest of the economy outweighs the benefits from the current telecom profits.

Is subsidizing phones actually a good idea?

To me, it is one features of the US mobile phone market that looks particularly unhealthy. For instance, the subsidy is biggest reason cellular networks can start messing around with what you can and can't run on your phone in the first place. Otherwise, if you didn't like how your carrier crippled your phone, you'd wouldn't buy your phone from them (at least for AT&T and T-Mobile, though I suspect competitive pressure would drag Verizon, Sprint and the rest along, for the most part).

GSM was developed and initially deployed mainly by the old european government telecoms before privatization took hold in Europe.

My concern is that the fees being imposed on consumers are instituted just because they can be and because competition is artificially limited, not to generate revenue so they can provide better service to consumers/attract new customers.

Like I said, it's already a non-free market in the telecom sector; just a matter of how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go in terms of regulation and dictation.

I don't pretend to know what the best course of action is... just spitballing.