Return to the archive index

RE: Sprint PCS Rolls Out 3G

From: Christopher Allen <>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 15:11:04 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Tony Havelka wrote:
> Pay per MB plans are just bad news.

It depends how much your time is worth, and this is by far the cheapest
per MB plan ever offered. Voicestream was recently charging $4/MB for
GPRS. These plans are only $1/MB for 120MB/month which provides 4MB per
day, or 5MB for 5-day-a-week access (more likely than 7-day-a-week).

(1) Most people are not going to use this as their main internet
access. There are far faster and zero cost 802.11b portals all over.
Most college students won't have a problem finding 802.11b portals around
campus. So this is just for emergencies.

(2) When its an emergency, the data is worth more. If you're doing field
consulting (something likely at least 90% of the people on this list are
competent enough to do and could easily find employment in) and your
client is paying you $50/hour, you can afford to spend a buck or two on
wireless internet access while on the clock. It's a cost of doing
business, the customer benefits, and it's sensible from both your and his
points of view to pass the cost on to him. $1/MB high-speed mobile data
allows you to provide greater value. It helps you. It helps the economy.
Everyone benefits when you make sensible business expenditures. Everyone
loses when you act the radical spendthrift.

> The all you can eat plans make more sense from a user and supplier
> point of view.

(1) Spending your own and your client's time to save a few pennies never
makes sense. It's penny wise and pound foolish. You'll lose clients, and
deservedly so.

(2) It would take an hour to transfer 5MB (your aforementioned daily
ration before you start paying by the MB with the pay-per plans) with
all-you-can-eat CDPD. This transfer would have to be continuous to fit it
in only an hour. Has anyone, anywhere ever transferred 5MB _in a whole
day_ with CDPD?

> In practice, nobody wants to pay for all the spam they have to d/l in
> their email or for that large attachment that was sent to you by
> mistake.
You get 5MB of spam every single day? Perhaps your ISP should consider
adopting spamassassin:
http://spamassassin.taint.org/

-Chris

--
Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to 
Wear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain

+Previous Message in Thread | Next Message in Thread

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

Archive created with babymail