Folk Demon

After reviewing leaked copies of Verizon’s new tiered data plan, and already being grandfathered into AT&T’s unlimited data from my 2 years of service since getting my 3GS, I decided to do a little research to test their claims that 90% of most data users do not use data at all, and the tiered plans are meant to hit power users only.

Now, in the context of the iPhone, AT&T and Verizon have complained about “power users” being those who impermissibly tether their devices, essentially “watch tv” on their phones (whether it be by slingbox, Netflix, or maybe another streaming App), or people who use their smartphone in ways for which the technology was developed – media on the go. They argue that after paying them, you should do what you can to not use their services and find wifi whenever possible. In other words, pay us for a service that we really don’t want you to use.

I already (over)pay for voice services as a condition on my data plan. According to my usage stats, I have used a total of 3 days, 23 hours, or 5,700 minutes, over the LIFETIME of my phone (2 years). That is approximately .043% of the total minutes I could have used under my contract (5000 nights and weekends, 450 anytime mins/month x 24 months; feel free to check my math). Roll over minutes mean nothing to me. Given the growth of services like Skype and GoogleVoice, its no wonder they rope me in to a voice plan, because honestly if I didn’t have to get it, I wouldn’t. So, as far as using what I pay for, I’m far from a power user.

This brings me to my data. I use wifi at home, but most of the time I’m at work without wifi access or on a lovely adventure in the great outdoors. Plus, even if my work had wifi I wouldn’t use it due to privacy concerns. Work has the right to monitor the traffic and most companies don’t want me clogging the pipes with Internet radio. More importantly, I can use Facebook and email without opening that info up to the IT department.

The bulk of my data usage comes from 3 activities: sharing pictures on Instagram/Flickr/Facebook/Tumblr, the Geocaching App, and SomaFm (the best Internet radio station on the web). Of those 3, two most often happen in the middle of the forest. Raccoons haven’t gotten wifi yet and I hear the bees absolutely hate it. Of the three I listed, only Somafm uses significant data. I use it mainly while driving as it was the reason I cancelled my Sirius subscription (relax, nannies, I start the radio before the car is in gear).

To prove my point at how just using a little bit of internet radio makes you a “power user”, I ran Somafm’s “Spacestation Soma” for exactly one hour this morning. I reset my usage in the settings App at 9:55 and streamed until 10:55. As the attached image shows, that one hour cost me 15.8 MB. At the lowest tier of data, that allows me 1 hour of Internet radio per day per work week for 3 weeks (1024 MB = 1 GB, x2 = 2048 MB. 2048/15.8 MB/hour = 129.62 hours of streaming. 129.62/40 hour work week = 3.24 work weeks). So if AT&T’s contention that anyone who uses more than this basic allotment (3% of users) is a power user, I’m starting to feel like I’m the only jerk streaming Internet radio. Even if I only bump myself up to the second tier, this usage rebuts the assertion that most people simply don’t use much data.

However, static measures today mean nothing tomorrow. When the new iPhone drops in Sept with an 8 megapixel camera, it means pictures that right now are around 1 MB on my 3GS might be 2 or 3 times as big (I have no idea as far as the ratio of MP to MB, this is just a guess). So that’s more data, even if only a little bit. But it can add up, and it also puts a cramp on new business models reluctant to eat up too much of subscriber data. The incentive to create new and innovative mobile applications is diminished when the developers are worried that their product might use too much of a user’s monthly limit and put the brakes on early adopters. Plus, the capacity of today’s iPhone today is light years from what I had just 5 years ago in college, back when games were measured in KBs and consisted of a ball bouncing through a maze. Even if 2GB were ample today, how will that allow growth for 2 or 4 years from now when processor speed and memory capacity has doubled or quadrupled?

One thing is clear: before consumers catch on, there will be a lot of overages being paid out. Then the question becomes less “What do I want to use my mobile broadband for?” and more “Why pay for 3G/4G if I have to ration it for emergency use only?”. The current boom in mobile gaming (a threat looming so large it has big-budget video game developers worried) might not be much of an issue anymore if user expectations of how their phones are used change.

Additionally, as OS’s increasingly integrate advertising into the platform, I’d like to have some assurances that my data is not being eaten by the provider. I’d also like some cybersecurity guarantees that the network is secure and my device is neither being cloned/spoofed nor has a backdoor or zombie app installed that is silently draining my data. Am I going to pay for the data dumps that Google an Apple rely on when they collect it in real time? At the very least, providers owe us detailed breakdowns of how data is being drained from our devices.

Ultimately, while I may be consuming larger than “normal” amounts of data, it is not some network-clogging amount. I have worked at small law firms that can handle numerous people using Pandora, last.fm, and Sirius streaming, as well as streaming oral arguments from the Supreme Court. To say that a casual Internet Radio user such as myself is consuming too much data is saying the world’s largest telecommunications provider has less network capacity than a 24 person law office. What’s truly concerning me is if the carriers move to tiered content. They are already pushing the burden on others to carry the data they refuse to handle, arguing that users should just make someone else carry that burden. At the same time, many data providers complain about companies like Google getting a free ride by not paying for the bandwidth their services consume, or in other words, they make someone else shoulder that burden while reaping the profit. It seems to me that as time goes on, we’ll see the telecoms have their cake by shoving traffic on someone else’s network, then eat it too when they get to have tiered content that pays for the privilege to be accessed on the proprietary networks. If you want free access to non-approved content, then use another network, because it’s not like you’re paying AT&T to deliver broadband or anything. Just hope the wifi provider doesn’t also own preferred content as well…oh, wait, sorry – that’s a Comcastic pipe dream.

UPDATE 1 (6/24/11): I decided to test out data usage with a more popular application (that I personally hate) – Pandora. I did two 15

minute test runs with My Morning Jacket radio, first at low bandwidth, then high. The results were 5.1 MB and 6.7 MB per 15 min block. Recall yesterday my total usage for one hour of streaming somafm was 15.8 MB. so even taking the low bandwidth version of Pandora has me using 25% more data, and this is arguably the most popular streaming App across all devices.

It is absurd to think that the majority of people will not use more than 2 GB per month, unless I’m really missing a key ingredient here (that isn’t wifi).

 

UPDATE 2 (6/25/11): My wife upgraded to an iPhone 4 this past memorial day, making her stats fairly fresh and just under one month old. She discovered Pandora about 10 days after getting her phone (I tried to hide it from her because I hate Pandora and I’ve always been loyal to Last.fm until they changed their subscription terms, and now will push Somafm on anyone who will tolerate me). Anyway, she uses her 3G at work because her work can be anal about many things, one of them being their network usage. Plus we don’t need to have her get in trouble for using Internet radio. She doesn’t use it for much else besides losing to me at Words With Friends and Instagram.

I took a screen grab of her usage, and  as a casual user – and at the risk of getting in major trouble for saying this – an iPhone n00b, she is already up against what would be her 2GB limit. (I also point out that after having her iPhone for 1 month, she has already used 3.6% of her minutes when compared to mine).

So What’s Your Point?

My point is saying all this is not necessarily a rant against tiered data packages. Don’t get me wrong, I’m against them because I think that all-you-can-eat style data packaging is what has driven the mobile market up until this point. If we didn’t have unlimited data, I don’t think that mobile Internet radio would have survived this far, and I don’t know how much longer it will last if my findings here hold true. It also has been great for companies like Google and Facebook by allowing people to upload media on the go, wherever they are.

My point is that if these companies are going to move towards this model for good, they need to do a few things:

• Make the bandwidth flexible as technology grows. AT&T blamed their iPhone customers for making their network slow, even though they demanded that all iPhone users use their network for half a decade. Now that they’re putting the choke on it, they need to re-evaluate their bandwidth caps every few years or so to make sure that the cap permits a reasonable amount of data consumption at a low price.
• Building on the last point, they need to improve their freaking networks. My suspicion since reading all this was that they’d claim that their networks can’t handle all the data usage, so they need to charge data hogs more to help improve the networks for everyone. Of course, now that they’ve bottlenecked their traffic by intent, it removes a lot of the incentive to improve the network in any substantial way by artificially slowing down consumption.
• AT&T already provides applications that allow you to monitor your general usage, and breaks down voice consumption by “anytime” and “nights and weekends”. Data needs an analogue that shows what is consumed through wi-fi, 3G/4G/LTE/Wi-max/whatever the “billable” network is vs non-billable. I also think that bills should reflect what applications are using the most data so consumers can know just what is costing them overages (and if any applications are causing “leaks”, because that might signal something more sinister).
• Bundle SMS/MMS with the data plans. They’ll be obsolete as Apple rolls out their equivalent to BBM anyway.
• Stop charging for Tethering. If I’m paying for 2GB then it’s of no business to you as to whether or not I unlock a feature on my phone that lets me consume that data. If I tether via wifi, then stay out of my business. If I tether on your network, then I will do so at my own risk of going over.
• Stop lying to the public and claiming that only 3% of the people use a lot of data. Clearly, that’s not the case
• Finally, and most importantly, if you want to avoid Common Carrier status, then don’t tier the content. I find that based on my research here that Common Carrier status, even though it brings more oversight to the networks by the government (always a measure of last resort) is inevitable. If you want to meter usage like water, fine, but then don’t tell me I have to drink only certain kinds of water.