MacDailyNews Take: It isn’t. It’s a scam. Just like charging separately for SMS text messages which are also just data. As long as consumers act like suckers, they will be treated like suckers.
Luoma continues, “Since AT&T has started metering data usage for the iPhone 4 and iPad, it seems only logical to ask (and I know I’m not the first): Why isn’t AT&T rolling over data too?”
MacDailyNews Take: Because they don’t want to be the dumb pipe that they are and they want to continue to fleece their sheep as often as possible.
Luoma continues, “The almost-too-painfully-obvious-to-even-say-aloud answer is that AT&T will make more money by not offering rollover data, so they aren’t.”
MacDailyNews Take: BINGO.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If your elected representatives (in the U.S., at least) really wanted to do something constructive for a chnage, they would look into these telecoms and their repricing of the exact same data based on what you’re doing with it (SMS, for one glaring example) and immediately legislate the practice out of existence.* Of course, that would necessitate not taking campaign contributions from AT&T, Verizon, etc. or actually doing the right thing regardless of whether they got a campaign contribution from a telecom or not. Good luck with that happening.
We haven’t touched or paid for SMS for years, purely out of principle. There are plenty of other ways to “text” that work just fine, thanks. In fact, threaded push email is close enough to “texting” for us. Others to check out are: Yahoo! Messenger and the like. Please add other “texting” options below.
*Data is data. We have no problem with the telecoms charging what the market will bear for it. We just do not think it is right for them to charge different, separate rates for what amounts to the same old data. And, yeah, rollover data would be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe when multiple U.S. carriers have iPhones and have to compete against each other, competition will deliver something like that to us.