Would the data hogs on AT&T network be castigated with a variable pricing model? AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega was the first to hint at such a possibility. However, earlier this year, David Christopher, the CMO at AT&T dismissed these speculations claiming that his company was actually "OK" with users hogging the bandwidth.
But it now appears that the company still sees an eventual shift towards variable pricing model down the line. Speaking at an investors conference in San Francisco, Randall Stephenson, CEO at AT&T said that he expected the industry to move towards a variable pricing structure in order to accommodate the high bandwidth consuming customers. Stephenson however did not elaborate on whether his company was contemplating such a move in the near future.
Commenting on other issues, Stephenson said that the AT&T network was now carrying close to half of the nation's total data traffic. To cater to this increasing demand, he revealed that AT&T was working to increase the data capacity on its network and said he was pleased with the progress made so far in high iPhone density areas like San Francisco and New York. However, the AT&T CEO noted that voice quality was still an issue at some places and assured that they shall be fixed by the middle of this year. Speaking about the deployment of next generation technology, Stephenson said that his company was "not in a tremendous hurry" to deploy LTE infrastructure and said that he expected 4G to roll out by 2012.
Interestingly, despite the attractive data plan offered by Ma Bell for iPad customers, Stephenson does not see demand picking up for the 3G version of the device. He revealed that his company does not expect any significant increase in network usage and that the consumers would be opting to connect via Wi-Fi instead.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree with Stephenson that iPad customers would prefer to buy iPad with only Wi-Fi over iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G? Let us know what you think in the comments.
[via MacRumors]
As long as they DROP the current price for those of us who use less. They always want to raise it for high bandwidth users but never drop the price for the rest of us. Plus they sign a contract with Apple to provide unlimited data on the iPad for $20 a month. They need to stop sending mixed messages. $10.00 for the first 5 gigs and $5 for each 5 gigs after that would be a fair price (none of this per meg billing nonsense.) If the pricing was based on their actual cost it would be $10.00 unlimited (given that they make some outrageous amount like a $1,000 per meg on text messages!)
What's the point of uncapped data plans if everyone get's poor speeds, and even worse, poor call quality?
In Australia capped plans have always been the norm, and whilst the price sucks, the service is fast and reliable. There are some services which are unlimited, but they have a Fair Usage policy.
I can't believe that none of these ideas (as annoying as they can be) haven't even been considered by AT&T in America.
All cellphones, and almost every device in the world is moving towards some form or Internet connectivity and just like everything there are people that vary in the spectrum of intenet usage. There will be those who use as much as 10gbs or even more and others that will use a messily 10mbs. The technolgy market isn't waiting for cellphone companies to upgrade their networks and as technology mves forward people demand around the clock Internet access at all times. In order to keep costumers happy the cellphone companies will eventually have to be a step ahead of technology and allow a fluid and reliable around the clock network that allows for users to be on the Internet as long ad they please. Whichever company does this, will win the race.
This is obvious because if companies eventually put a cap on data usage, then competition will lead to one company allowing a bigger and bigger cap that will lead to unlimited use. Seem familiar? This is how we got to our plans today
Why would i pay more to use more data when they cant handle it as it is? And its not like they are low on resources or money, their busniss whent up 2000% since the start of the iPhone, a explotion that big means alot of money comming in with not enough time to spend it all, hence they still have enough money to upgrade their network, so no i will not pay more for my data usage when i wont be able to use what i pay for cuz their network cant handle it.
Now that verizon has the phone as well I bet there are a lot MORE hacks for it