Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

I think the phone company and our federal government's Do Not Call registry (https://donotcall.gov) are letting us down.

AT&T LTE Bandwidth

I've used AT&T Wireless service since the first iPhone was released, exactly ten years ago, yesterday. AT&T offered unlimited data and then, a couple years later, they instituted limited data plans. I stayed with AT&T since they grandfathered me in with their unlimited data plan. Even today, I still had an unlimited data plan with AT&T, but they'd throttle it at a certain point. The data would still come through, but at a much slower rate.

However, data was never a big selling point for me. The real issue for me was monthly cost. Phone companies utilize a price elasticity business model, which means they figure out how to charge the most they can to maximize their profits. If they charge too little, they leave money on the table. If they charge too much, then customers will switch to another company. 

Cricket LTE Bandwidth

Generally, cutting edge smart phones cost $500 – $1,000 or more. To defray these costs, the wireless carriers will subsidize the price of the phone by having their customers sign a two-year wireless service contract. This works well since many people do not frequently hop from wireless carrier to wireless carrier. But I like the idea of not being committed to a single carrier. So, I typically purchase an unlocked phone. Purchasing an unlocked phone means I had no service contract commitment, plus I can insert any companies' or countries' SIM card.

About two years ago, my AT&T bill was a very ridiculous $150/month. I never used up my minutes so I dropped my plan down to a moderately ridiculous $95/month which kept creeping up until it recently hit $111/month due to inflation. That's when a couple friends told me about Cricket Wireless which is now owned by AT&T. Cricket utilizes nearly all of AT&T's cell towers meaning that I'll have the same level of coverage. But they key selling point of Cricket is that it costs way less than AT&T.

Switching

So, today, I made the switch from AT&T to Cricket. It took less than an hour for me to go to the local Cricket store and return home with my phone number and service ported.

My monthly bill dropped from $111.42, with AT&T, to $35 with Cricket. But there are some slight differences.

Cricket Cons

1. AT&T LTE down stream bandwidth clocked in at 13.4 Mbps. Cricket advertises that their LTE tops out at 8 Mbps. In practice, I'm seeing about 7.8 Mbps download with Cricket which is very respectable.

2. No more unlimited data. I now pay Cricket a total of $35/month for 4 GB of data. I looked at my AT&T bills from the past year and I was topping out at less than 3 GB of data/month.

Cricket Pros

1. Unlimited voice minutes. (I was paying AT&T $40/month for 450 minutes, with unused minutes rolling over.) Most of my talking is over WiFi since I use either FaceTime or Facebook Messenger, so voice minutes was never a big selling point for me, but I do like that I now have unlimited talk minutes.

2. Unlimited texting. (I was paying AT&T $20/month for unlimited SMS/MMS text messaging; with Cricket, that's all rolled into the $35/month plan.)

3. Cricket utilizes nearly all of AT&T's cell towers, so I should see no connectivity differences.

Today, I ended up paying about $75 to Cricket, out the door, for the $35/month plan due to one-time activation charges. Let's see where it goes from here.

Hard copy print out of the Internet with yesterday's news.

As companies grow, seemingly small changes become difficult. Change is even more difficult when companies have been around for a long time. Most companies think in terms of what they do rather than focusing on the benefits they provide. It's hard for many companies to recognize they could be left behind when technology changes. The classic example is the ice trade of the 1800s. More recently, we saw it in the newspaper industry over the past decade.

One clear example of this is SMS. It is a shrinking technology. Since 2005, the cost of sending a single text message rose steadily from 5¢ to 25¢ over the next few years. This falls under category #3 of the The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models.
Rarely do people send SMS text messages through their computer. It would be a simple feature, but the carriers didn't implement it. Other companies have stepped in because the wireless carries didn't innovate SMS. It was Grand Central that brought texting via computer to the masses. Apple has taken this one step further with Messages. Messages strongly encrypts the content and deliveries it to multiple devices at the same time at no cost.

The markets are bigger than any one person or company. A company can fight change by controlling or cornering the market, but that won't last forever in high tech. The companies that tend to fight it and succeed for long stretches of time tend to be oligopolies (Think: Big, as in Big Media, etc). It lasts for a while, but what companies truly last for centuries?

Have you ever taken a look at all the personal wireless networks around your home? If you live in a house, you might notice a couple of your neighbors' networks. But, if you live in an apartment or condo, you could easily be within range of ten or more wireless networks.

Each wireless network can be given a specific name to identify it. For security reasons, wireless networks can also be configured to not broadcast their name, but people rarely do this on home networks.

Since your network is broadcasting its name, people can see it. If your network requires a password, then they can attempt to join it by repeatedly trying different passwords.

To avoid this, I've given my home wireless networks names to dissuade people from joining them by naming them with financial rates to look as if they're metered: $4.95/minute is the name of my Airport Express network, and my two home base station networks are named $9.95/minute and $12.95/minute.

Over the years I've had a number of guests over to my house who would try to join my neighbor's wireless networks before asking me the name of my network. They've always had a good laugh when I told them the name. They usually comment that they were trying to access all of the other networks and stayed away from the $12.95/minute network just in case it could some how run up a bill on their device.

In one word, "Yes!".

A 30% revenue sharing deal is great. Yesterday, Steve Ballmer implied that it was too much at Mix 2008 in Las Vegas.

Today, if you develop a mobile application which you want delivered over-the-air (OTA) to a mobile handset your only choice is premium SMS (PSMS). For example, if you buy a game or a ring tone the charge will show up on your cell phone bill.

Here's the part no one knows unless you've dealt with wireless carriers and PSMS: the wireless carrier and the SMS aggrogator, which is the middleman between you and the wireless carrier, will keep 50%-60% of the revenue collected.

Yes, that's right - the developer collects less than half of the revenue. Not to mention the fact that the company selling their apps and media must pay for the short code (five or six digit phone number) which typically runs about $15K-$30K/year ($500 or $1000/month to lease the short code, which is akin to buying a domain name, then another $1000/month to host the short code with an SMS aggregator plus the developer has to pay for each text message they send, too.).

The current OTA solutions are not cheap which makes Apple's 30% solution extremely appealing to mobile handset developers.

My mother finally got online and has her first e-mail address. Undoubtedly, she'll have technical problems - where to begin?
"Mom, this is your login and password for the computer..."
"Mom, this is your login and password for your e-mail..."
"Mom, this is your login and password for your ISP..."
"Mom, this is your password for the wireless base station..."

Next comes customer service...

Luckily, Apple has a great Mac cheat sheet - I wish I thought of this simple solution:

I've heard people voice concerns that cities could be liable for network traffic that passes over their municipal WiFi networks. This seems absurd – cities aren't liable for crimes related to road traffic. Could a kidnapping victim sue the city for allowing their kidnapper to escape over the city's public roads? Of course not.