Your experience of the Internet at home, at your business or on the go is set to get continually better and better despite what the monopolists want.
Many years ago back in the 1990s, I had a meeting with a local monopoly phone company. Their people were incensed about on-air comments I made about they had a “how to allocate shortage” mentality instead of looking at ways to increase capacity and provide more to people using technology to do it.
Fast forward 15 years later and AT&T has announced new data plans for smart phone users. Under the new plans, you take whatever you pay for calling and then for texting and then on top of that you’ll pay between $30 to $50 for tightly rationed data. It’s the whole “Woe is me, AT&T can’t figure out how to serve customers after it promoted all these smart phones” mentality.
Then you take Virgin Mobile. They have offered a great deal with plans starting at $35 for unlimited data and text, with rationed talk time calling minutes. But now, Virgin Mobile is going to throttle you on data starting soon. The plan is to deliver a high-speed connection for users up to 2.5GB. After that, they will slooowwww your connection down to a crawl.
So while AT&T is using price to get you to stop surfing on your smartphone, Virgin Mobile is using behavior modification!
But new international standards are set for data and the best guesstimates are that the speed of you accessing the web on your phone could increase by 500 times over during the next two years.
That would mean you would go to a website on your phone and the page would load before eyes could register that it was even there. This isn’t pie in the sky stuff. This is poised to happen in the next two years.
So often in business, people go through a mental thing of rationing capacity instead of looking forward and thinking how to serve customer in a way he or she wants. All this whining about capacity is garbage. As always, people in a company get tunnel vision and miss the big picture of what’s coming.
