...but for the majority (not vast majority, but majority nonetheless) who will be using 3G connectivity as a backup for when WiFi isn't where they are (home has WiFi, work has WiFi, places they hang out probably have WiFi), the $50/year price is a big draw. Keeping in mind that a 300MB iPad plan on AT&T is $20 per month...and the 16GB iPad with AT&T LTE costs $629 (add another $100 to upgrade it to 32GB).
If people realize that their data bucket is very limited (I remember sipping through 100MB of free data on my Google Cr48), they will make sure not to watch videos of any kind on their Fire while using the mobile network. Nor will they be shuffling through long, drawn-out high-resolution photo slideshows. If they stay away from those two activities whole on the mobile network, they will be able to download e-books, surf the web, check e-mail, post tweets and status updates, and download the occasional song from AmazonMP3 wherever they happen to be, all while paying less for a year of service than they pay for a month of service on their cell phone.
Also, I'll bet you $20 that the $50-per-year data plan will just cut off after the 250MB monthly allotment is used. No overages, no muss, no fuss. It's not in Amazon's interest to have customers getting a worse mobile data experience than on the iPad, and both Verizon and AT&T's iPad data plans work this way (I know; I've used up 1GB in a day on my LTE iPad and had to purposely buy another data bucket because my service just stopped at the end of the gig).
Google still pays for some of their connectivity to the outside world. It's called transit. They don't peer with 100% of the ASes in the world, and they're not a Tier 1 network where all traffic is downstream.
Granted, Google peers with a crapload of providers, however Comcast (largest cable provider), Time Warner Cable (second largest cable provider) and Qwest aren't part of the mix. Today my Qwest-powered ISP is going to Google via AT&T (transit on Google's end) and YouTube videos are crappy. When the ISP was hooked up to AT&T things were great. Similarly, my 22 Mbps Comcast connection has difficulty pulling down a 2 Mbps YouTube HD stream...YT uses Level3 transit to get to Comcast. I know, I did the traceroutes. Comcast pays L3 for transit, as does Google...don't know why (except for spite) Comcast isn't peering with teh Goog but they aren't.
Google probably peers with some of the bigger networks out there, or at least pays for transit to them. They peer with Internet2 and probably Cogent. They get transit from Level3, AT&T, Sprint and Global Crossing, probably in that order in terms of how traffic gets passed. So they aren't using anyone's tubes for free unless those tubes have been opened via a settlement-free interconnection agreement (free peering) and their bandwidth bill (let alone their backbone infrastructure bill) definitely isn't zero.
WHen you're using a pre-WiMAX network with low capacity, you have to manage traffic. With an actual WiMAX network with TONS of spectrum, that's not the case.
I've used some sort of conference calling service on my MJ account before, but I guess it wasn't FreeConferenceCall (or rather high-termination-fee-conference-call). Just tried and while the listen-to-a-recording number works, the join-into-a-meeting number doesn't.
That said, what do you expect for less than $2 per month? If I REALLY need to do the whole conference call thing I'll use another SIP provider (1.25¢ per minute anyone? How about 1.05¢?) or I'll dial through Google Voice. Problem solved.
Or I could use MJ's own conference call number.
Yes, it's an inconvenience, but if MJ allowed calling to those services they'd lose money after maybe as little as a half-hour of calling. If they're losing money on you, they naturally dont want you as a customer. MJ's cost structure is ridiculously low (if I got service for $15/year elsewhere I'd barely have 100 minutes and an inbound number) so their business model can't stand several-cent-per-minute termination charges that are split between an entity like FreeConferenceCall and some small ILEC.
To my knowledge though calls to numbers in that small ILEC other then FreeConfCall aren't blocked, so if your grandma lives in PoDunk Telephone Cooperative land, you can still get a call through with a MagicJack.
MagicJack in effect can't afford to be a common carrier with its price structure. If you want something that is, pay 10x the price and there you have it. It's not like MagicJack is forcing you to use their phone service to the exclusion of all the (dozens and dozens) of VoIP providers out there, the dozen or so major cell providers and MVNOs, and the couple of landline options (telco and cableco) for VoIP. MJ does the best they can by providing a free conference calling number of their own, and quality on it is fine.
From a business perspective I'd personally play things a little differently, choosing instead to have an "international calling rate" to the conference call providers. A few cents per minute later, the problem is solved. The costs are passed on to the customer and everyone except TechDirt reporters are happy. But that's just me.
1. Broadband metering, even cable metering on a system identical to Comcast's, is easy to do and is done right now on many ISPs.
2. How can Comcast easily beter broadband? Push an update to all modems (simple) that enables SNMP and sends the data back to Comcast. Done.
3. In reality, 250GB is just an arbitrary limit that Comcast equates to "a lot of data". From what I've heard/seen, they're only going to cut a customer off if they're downloading/uploading enough to congest the network for everyone else. So at that point Comcast has the choice to cut the person off, or upgrade their infrastructure, or make the customer move to a business plan whete a higher payment means Comcast can invest more into their infrastructure.
4. Want to measure your own usage? Grab a router compatible with DD-WRT or tomato, install it and there you go. Any Linksys WRT54-series router (G, G2, GS, GS2) can support the firmware, as can some of their higher-end routers (like my WRT310N) and routers of other manufacturers (for example the Dell TrueMobile 2300 if you can believe that). So you can go ahead and monitor your own usage.
I don't like caps and overages (or service cutoffs; we don't have after-overage throttling in the US for wireline carriers) more than the next guy, however people need to get their facts straight. Comcats's 250GB "soft cap" is to my knowledge the most liberal one in the residential ISP field for companies who do cap usage. If you don't like the cap, $60 per month will buy you a business-class connection at their lower tier (6/1 or 12/2 depending on the area) and you're good to go.
I have Comcast in Colorado and it works fine. I use TWC (no caps yet, thankfully) in Texas and it works fine. I use a wireless ISP in Texas, with a 25GB cap...I haven't hit that cap in a long time since the internet is pretty crappy to begin with. If I had a 250GB cap on the wireless connection, I'd be on a higher speed tier and download more, but they don't offer that. So I do all my downloading in town, where the tubes are clear...yay adaptation.
1. Verizon can charge a fee, not a fine. But if you agree to the TOS and it's held up in court, it can be chaarged, and you gotta pay or you're breaking your side of the contract.
2. IANAL
3. You CANNOT stop illegal file sharing without breaking your network. My school slows down torrent file downloads. Solution: download 'em over HTTPS or as text files. My school has everyone behind a firewall, but everyone has a static non-NATed IP address so I've gotten some crazy fast downloads on...wait for it...the 96 KHz versions of Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts album set. Yep, BitTorrent can be legal, folks.
4. Only dumb kids who should be buying music from iTunes get caught on the whole illegal file sharing thing anyway. Private torrent trackers are rather heavily vetted so you pretty much don't get any *AA moles in there.
5. Who downloads music anymore, if you indeed have a cushy campus connection to ride on? I only download MP3s (Napster subscription, with BitTorrent as my backup in case the one-time song download fails, which has happened several times over the past week) if I'm going to be out of internet range or if my internet connection is dog slow. At a university, neither is the case...
6. In terms of "education", universities should simply make students aware of the legal options available that are quite cheap, especially compared with dealing with the *AAs. Lala.com has streamable songs for ten cents apiece (less for albums) and Napster has unlimited streaming and five downloads for $5 per month. Granted, neither service gives you unlimited iPod-able music, but hopefully the new KaZaA service, at $20 per month, will do that.
7. Either the school newspaper or the IT department don't know what they're talking about. Could very well be either, but if it's the newspaper I'd like to take the reporter and slap them around because they're doing discredit to decent on-cmapus news sources. My school's paper being one of them (I write most of the tech stuff in it...I'll avoid the shameless plug and make you dig through a few layers of links to find out which paper this is because our website needs a little help).
Guess that's about it. Personally, IF I did do an illegal download and IF that download could've been gotten DRM-free online for a cheap amount, I'm perfectly fine with paying a $50 "You idiot" fee. But I'll bet the false positives in the system will ruin it, and the writers of the article had everything screwed up.
...companies like Grande Communications. Their double/triple play options are very clear: two services bundled gets 10% off your monthly bill, three bundled gets you a total of 20$ off. Not the rocket science that Comcast is trying to hawk. Heck, even TWC tells you exactly how much you save by doing a bundle, at least in my area.
Oh and by the way, I have never had pay TV. Too 'spensive. My parents somehow are eligible for LifeLine so our landline bill is less than $5 per month (it'd be less than $5 anyway if we had decent HSI...I'd just put MagicJack credentials into an ATA and have done with it).
But at any rate I think that companies like Grande, who can quickly and easily describe their product lines, pricing and discounts, will get people's business if there's a competitive market available. Grande competes with Time Warner Cable in most places, and TWC has 15/2 in all those areas.
Competition is good...too bad most places don't have it. Which means you end up with crap like Comcast is pulling with their more-expensive-than-single-play triple-play bundles.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Ian L.
Maybe useless for you...
...but for the majority (not vast majority, but majority nonetheless) who will be using 3G connectivity as a backup for when WiFi isn't where they are (home has WiFi, work has WiFi, places they hang out probably have WiFi), the $50/year price is a big draw. Keeping in mind that a 300MB iPad plan on AT&T is $20 per month...and the 16GB iPad with AT&T LTE costs $629 (add another $100 to upgrade it to 32GB).
If people realize that their data bucket is very limited (I remember sipping through 100MB of free data on my Google Cr48), they will make sure not to watch videos of any kind on their Fire while using the mobile network. Nor will they be shuffling through long, drawn-out high-resolution photo slideshows. If they stay away from those two activities whole on the mobile network, they will be able to download e-books, surf the web, check e-mail, post tweets and status updates, and download the occasional song from AmazonMP3 wherever they happen to be, all while paying less for a year of service than they pay for a month of service on their cell phone.
Also, I'll bet you $20 that the $50-per-year data plan will just cut off after the 250MB monthly allotment is used. No overages, no muss, no fuss. It's not in Amazon's interest to have customers getting a worse mobile data experience than on the iPad, and both Verizon and AT&T's iPad data plans work this way (I know; I've used up 1GB in a day on my LTE iPad and had to purposely buy another data bucket because my service just stopped at the end of the gig).
Muddying The Waters
Google still pays for some of their connectivity to the outside world. It's called transit. They don't peer with 100% of the ASes in the world, and they're not a Tier 1 network where all traffic is downstream.
Granted, Google peers with a crapload of providers, however Comcast (largest cable provider), Time Warner Cable (second largest cable provider) and Qwest aren't part of the mix. Today my Qwest-powered ISP is going to Google via AT&T (transit on Google's end) and YouTube videos are crappy. When the ISP was hooked up to AT&T things were great. Similarly, my 22 Mbps Comcast connection has difficulty pulling down a 2 Mbps YouTube HD stream...YT uses Level3 transit to get to Comcast. I know, I did the traceroutes. Comcast pays L3 for transit, as does Google...don't know why (except for spite) Comcast isn't peering with teh Goog but they aren't.
Google probably peers with some of the bigger networks out there, or at least pays for transit to them. They peer with Internet2 and probably Cogent. They get transit from Level3, AT&T, Sprint and Global Crossing, probably in that order in terms of how traffic gets passed. So they aren't using anyone's tubes for free unless those tubes have been opened via a settlement-free interconnection agreement (free peering) and their bandwidth bill (let alone their backbone infrastructure bill) definitely isn't zero.
A Tale of Two Networks
WHen you're using a pre-WiMAX network with low capacity, you have to manage traffic. With an actual WiMAX network with TONS of spectrum, that's not the case.
Just found out it doesn't work for me
I've used some sort of conference calling service on my MJ account before, but I guess it wasn't FreeConferenceCall (or rather high-termination-fee-conference-call). Just tried and while the listen-to-a-recording number works, the join-into-a-meeting number doesn't.
That said, what do you expect for less than $2 per month? If I REALLY need to do the whole conference call thing I'll use another SIP provider (1.25¢ per minute anyone? How about 1.05¢?) or I'll dial through Google Voice. Problem solved.
Or I could use MJ's own conference call number.
Yes, it's an inconvenience, but if MJ allowed calling to those services they'd lose money after maybe as little as a half-hour of calling. If they're losing money on you, they naturally dont want you as a customer. MJ's cost structure is ridiculously low (if I got service for $15/year elsewhere I'd barely have 100 minutes and an inbound number) so their business model can't stand several-cent-per-minute termination charges that are split between an entity like FreeConferenceCall and some small ILEC.
To my knowledge though calls to numbers in that small ILEC other then FreeConfCall aren't blocked, so if your grandma lives in PoDunk Telephone Cooperative land, you can still get a call through with a MagicJack.
MagicJack in effect can't afford to be a common carrier with its price structure. If you want something that is, pay 10x the price and there you have it. It's not like MagicJack is forcing you to use their phone service to the exclusion of all the (dozens and dozens) of VoIP providers out there, the dozen or so major cell providers and MVNOs, and the couple of landline options (telco and cableco) for VoIP. MJ does the best they can by providing a free conference calling number of their own, and quality on it is fine.
From a business perspective I'd personally play things a little differently, choosing instead to have an "international calling rate" to the conference call providers. A few cents per minute later, the problem is solved. The costs are passed on to the customer and everyone except TechDirt reporters are happy. But that's just me.
A few corrections
1. Broadband metering, even cable metering on a system identical to Comcast's, is easy to do and is done right now on many ISPs.
2. How can Comcast easily beter broadband? Push an update to all modems (simple) that enables SNMP and sends the data back to Comcast. Done.
3. In reality, 250GB is just an arbitrary limit that Comcast equates to "a lot of data". From what I've heard/seen, they're only going to cut a customer off if they're downloading/uploading enough to congest the network for everyone else. So at that point Comcast has the choice to cut the person off, or upgrade their infrastructure, or make the customer move to a business plan whete a higher payment means Comcast can invest more into their infrastructure.
4. Want to measure your own usage? Grab a router compatible with DD-WRT or tomato, install it and there you go. Any Linksys WRT54-series router (G, G2, GS, GS2) can support the firmware, as can some of their higher-end routers (like my WRT310N) and routers of other manufacturers (for example the Dell TrueMobile 2300 if you can believe that). So you can go ahead and monitor your own usage.
I don't like caps and overages (or service cutoffs; we don't have after-overage throttling in the US for wireline carriers) more than the next guy, however people need to get their facts straight. Comcats's 250GB "soft cap" is to my knowledge the most liberal one in the residential ISP field for companies who do cap usage. If you don't like the cap, $60 per month will buy you a business-class connection at their lower tier (6/1 or 12/2 depending on the area) and you're good to go.
I have Comcast in Colorado and it works fine. I use TWC (no caps yet, thankfully) in Texas and it works fine. I use a wireless ISP in Texas, with a 25GB cap...I haven't hit that cap in a long time since the internet is pretty crappy to begin with. If I had a 250GB cap on the wireless connection, I'd be on a higher speed tier and download more, but they don't offer that. So I do all my downloading in town, where the tubes are clear...yay adaptation.
A few comments
1. Verizon can charge a fee, not a fine. But if you agree to the TOS and it's held up in court, it can be chaarged, and you gotta pay or you're breaking your side of the contract.
2. IANAL
3. You CANNOT stop illegal file sharing without breaking your network. My school slows down torrent file downloads. Solution: download 'em over HTTPS or as text files. My school has everyone behind a firewall, but everyone has a static non-NATed IP address so I've gotten some crazy fast downloads on...wait for it...the 96 KHz versions of Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts album set. Yep, BitTorrent can be legal, folks.
4. Only dumb kids who should be buying music from iTunes get caught on the whole illegal file sharing thing anyway. Private torrent trackers are rather heavily vetted so you pretty much don't get any *AA moles in there.
5. Who downloads music anymore, if you indeed have a cushy campus connection to ride on? I only download MP3s (Napster subscription, with BitTorrent as my backup in case the one-time song download fails, which has happened several times over the past week) if I'm going to be out of internet range or if my internet connection is dog slow. At a university, neither is the case...
6. In terms of "education", universities should simply make students aware of the legal options available that are quite cheap, especially compared with dealing with the *AAs. Lala.com has streamable songs for ten cents apiece (less for albums) and Napster has unlimited streaming and five downloads for $5 per month. Granted, neither service gives you unlimited iPod-able music, but hopefully the new KaZaA service, at $20 per month, will do that.
7. Either the school newspaper or the IT department don't know what they're talking about. Could very well be either, but if it's the newspaper I'd like to take the reporter and slap them around because they're doing discredit to decent on-cmapus news sources. My school's paper being one of them (I write most of the tech stuff in it...I'll avoid the shameless plug and make you dig through a few layers of links to find out which paper this is because our website needs a little help).
Guess that's about it. Personally, IF I did do an illegal download and IF that download could've been gotten DRM-free online for a cheap amount, I'm perfectly fine with paying a $50 "You idiot" fee. But I'll bet the false positives in the system will ruin it, and the writers of the article had everything screwed up.
That's what I like about...
...companies like Grande Communications. Their double/triple play options are very clear: two services bundled gets 10% off your monthly bill, three bundled gets you a total of 20$ off. Not the rocket science that Comcast is trying to hawk. Heck, even TWC tells you exactly how much you save by doing a bundle, at least in my area.
Oh and by the way, I have never had pay TV. Too 'spensive. My parents somehow are eligible for LifeLine so our landline bill is less than $5 per month (it'd be less than $5 anyway if we had decent HSI...I'd just put MagicJack credentials into an ATA and have done with it).
But at any rate I think that companies like Grande, who can quickly and easily describe their product lines, pricing and discounts, will get people's business if there's a competitive market available. Grande competes with Time Warner Cable in most places, and TWC has 15/2 in all those areas.
Competition is good...too bad most places don't have it. Which means you end up with crap like Comcast is pulling with their more-expensive-than-single-play triple-play bundles.