NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: AT&T Cracking Down on Unofficial iPhone Tethering & MyWi Users
Funny how important players of an industry fights its likely best customers. Vodafone in Italy has introduced a data offer which they might replicate worldwide A) You have some monthly GB allowance. If you use it all, you can decide to either - anticipately re-start your month or - wait until the beginning of next month in the latter case, you don't incur in bill shocks, because there are no high fees for excessive traffic; instead you get slowed down to a certain throughput (enough for mail, I'd say) and all the traffic at this slow speed is not billed. (I call it the "always-on speed") let's say you had a long period on the road and you eat up your monthly allowance after two weeks, you can decide to restart your monthly allowance. suppose you eat up you allowance 2 days before the end of the month, you can wait two days with basic throughput and no extra cost. so now they don't care for tethering. if you are a heavy user, you will simply buy anticipated data packages or upgrade to a plan with a larger bulk of data. B) furthermore, re. customer segmentation, they use two other parameters 1) the first one is the connection speed (1.8, 7.2 and 28.8 Mbps). This is like the port speed in the modems age. 2) the second one is the overbooking. based on sequences of hsdpa frames, they defined three level of overbookings (low, medium, high), similar to what happened in the modem age where different ISP phone numbers had different overbooking levels they have thus 4 parameters on which they can design and segmentate offers - volume - port speed - overbooking - always-on speed they can build tiered access having different level of "quality of experience" based on technical parameters without discriminating between sources, destination or type of traffic, without price discrimination (they used to bill based on time-sessions of a couple of minutes so sending an IM was effectively outrageously expensive) not all is positive though. they still have lower priced plans for traffic excluding VoIP (which means you have to pay an extra fee if you want to use VoIP (any VoIP)). On 18/03/11 17.43, Lauren Weinstein wrote: > > AT&T Cracking Down on Unofficial iPhone Tethering & MyWi Users > > http://j.mp/fwuloi (osXdaily) > > --Lauren-- > NNSquad Moderator