Cellular suckage

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Rant

In the early days of the US mobile phone industry, the carriers wanted to ensure that they could recover their investment in building out the cellular network as quickly as possible. Faced with a chicken/egg problem, they chose to build the network, make the handsets cheap through subsidies to drive customers to try the service, and take their profits later. It worked, except that now we expect handsets to be cheap even as we expect more features than ever  in our handsets.

I was fortunate enough to play with a Nexus One just after Christmas, and as I tweeted then, “#wantwantwant”.  But reading through the Google Terms of Sale and talking to the contracts department at TMO, I realize that this adventure is far more screwed up than the usual handset subsidy.

Many of us hoped that Google would start to disrupt the subsidy system by selling the phone unlocked and at cost, forcing the carriers to adapt through the pressure that their customers and potential customers could apply. Google didn’t do that, for whatever reason.

OK. I’ve been with T-Mobile for 10 years and have not upgraded my phones at every opportunity, so they’ll take care of me, right? Sorry, Google’s agreement with TMO and their Terms of Sale won’t allow that. T-Mobile has no flexibility to set rate plans or offer discounts because Google controls the phone (except for returns, which are handled by HTC for N * $45 where N is the number of things you screwed up according to the Terms of Sale).

So T-Mobile’s customers are screwed; pay anything less than full price and you must change your plan to an overpriced individual plan before you’re allowed to touch the Google phone. Otherwise, pay $530 or piss off.

I choose to piss off. Maybe I’ll get another Crackberry.

How does this ridiculously restrictive game benefit Google?  They’ve done nothing disruptive, they’ve made it painful to buy the phone, they’ve prevented their partner from doing anything to reduce the pain. And they promise to bill their customers $350 if they try to game the system to make the process end as it should have started (whether TMO pays the subsidy to Google or not).

OK, the evil carrier must have messed it up! Wait, how does it help retention to tell your customers that they can’t have the handset they want unless they throw away the plan they’re used to using and pay more money for less service?

I guess HTC will sell a lot of handsets. I don’t think they screwed up the buying experience though. They would sell even more if customers could buy what they want.

So who benefits from this?

Paris

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Travel

I really like Paris. I love some parts of Paris, and some things about Paris. In the last 4 years, I have spent a total of almost 3 months there with my family and I finally feel like I know my way around. I have an enormous list of places to go, but here are a few things to try when you’re there.

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Sagan

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Random

Anyone switching to IPv6? My colo and a few others are really hyping it, but while I know that this is real. it feels a little like the Y2K hype. The ‘IP Exhaustion Counter’ has been showing 810 days to exhaustion for almost a week now.

There seem to be a number of factors that are holdiing up mass adoption. There are no IPv6 devices or services that are really compelling (the carrots are moldy), and overhyping the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses isn’t helping (your noodle-like stick doesn’t scare me). Then there are the inconveniences; my broadband router can only be managed via IPv4, the docs for my firewall mention IPv6 but they’re pretty difficult to decipher, and my colo’s IPv6 implementation doesn’t use TSP and as such, it’s tricky (for someone who is just getting started with IPv6).

There are sure a lot of addresses in the IPv6 space, though. 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses per /64. I’ll take two, please.

Whack

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Change

Roger van Oech’s book did its job back in the early 80′s, when I first discovered it. It seems to take a lot more now to make me change direction. My 9-year-old asks great questions that often break my lookup habit and make me think; wisdom beats knowledge, especially when the ‘knowledge’ is really just a habituated response.

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