Tiered pricing for mobile data?

http://www.slate.com/id/2231646/

Does heavy 3G data use account for dropped calls or poor reception?

What is AT&T going to spend $17 billion on? More 850Mhz towers?
Upgrading existing tower/base station sites? More backhaul bandwidth?

And $17 billion to upgrade existing 3G (HSDPA?) infrastructure? Weren't
they going to deploy LTE soon?

So if iPhone users on average use 5 times more data than other
smartphone users, would making iPhone available on other carriers
alleviate that? Well it might lead to price competition and a tiered
pricing scheme which might result in lower monthly costs could make one
carrier more attractive than another.

Article is right though that adding more capacity just encourages more
use -- induced traffic -- so the congestion problem returns.

poldy wrote:
> http://www.slate.com/id/2231646/
>
> Does heavy 3G data use account for dropped calls or poor reception?
>
> What is AT&T going to spend $17 billion on? More 850Mhz towers?
> Upgrading existing tower/base station sites? More backhaul bandwidth?
>
> And $17 billion to upgrade existing 3G (HSDPA?) infrastructure? Weren't
> they going to deploy LTE soon?
>
> So if iPhone users on average use 5 times more data than other
> smartphone users, would making iPhone available on other carriers
> alleviate that? Well it might lead to price competition and a tiered
> pricing scheme which might result in lower monthly costs could make one
> carrier more attractive than another.
>
> Article is right though that adding more capacity just encourages more
> use -- induced traffic -- so the congestion problem returns.

What's more likely to happen is that other smart phones, Android and
Windows Mobile based, will be offered by other carriers and will begin
to equalize the 3G usage among all four carriers, rather than the way it
is now with one carrier, with one extremely popular device, being bogged
down. The new HTC Touch Pro 2 is a great product (works on Verizon's far
better 3G network with much greater coverage as well as European and
Asian GSM and W-CDMA networks), but HTC doesn't have a clue as to how to
market it so it will likely fail like other HTC products.

Android has the most potential, especially in terms of creating a base
of new applications that can compete against the Apple Apps store. The
Apps store was a brilliant marketing move that Android will have to
duplicate, and Google has the resources to do something similar. With
WinMo and Palm there were thousands of applications, but finding them
and buying them was a pain in the butt, and the developers were pricing
them based on the expectation of low volume sales.

The Gartner analyst recently evaluated the smart phone market three
years from now. Symbian will be #1, Android #2, iPhone #3, Windows
Mobile #4, and Blackberry #5.

Apple has probably locked up most of the iPhone users for life; they
aren't going to switch to a different platform unless there's a very
good reason to do so, so they'll struggle along on AT&T's network until
the iPhone LTE that works on multiple networks is introduced.