The metaphor doesn't make much sense because the suggestion it was responding to didn't make much sense.

If there's a carrier making lots of money very very easily due to a lack of competition, and that carrier is going out of its way to stifle competition at every opportunity, and making it as difficult as possible for their customers to change to another carrier...

...under those circumstances how can customers even consider giving those same carriers compensation for lost profits? Why would we owe them a single penny?

If they can't make a good profit in a free market then they don't deserve any profit at all. We owe them absolutely nothing, they treat us like cattle. They're providing a commodity, so we're the ones who should be milking them, not the other way round.

The farmer's organic food metaphor doesn't apply because organic food isn't quite the same thing as non-organic food. They're two different products produced by two different methods so they have two different prices.

With carriers though they're all providing exactly the same product: calls, texts, data. There is absolutely nothing better about expensive data compared to cheap data, it's all just a single commodity. The ONLY reason calls cost more in America is because the carriers have stifled competition, and for that they deserve massive fines, not massive rewards.

this whole thread reminds me of the story when some people tried to explain packet switching to the "whitebeards" of ma bell...

I'm guessing that a big part of the reason of the carrier's pricing & locking system is their financial calculation.

They've made their calculations before investing in all the infrastructure with certain assumptions, and those assumptions include components such as:
- number of customers per base station
- customer growth\cycles
- expected income from each customer

You can see how an open system that brings free\low cost alternative solutions to what they're selling (voip, messaging system, etc) may mess up with with their calculation and they're fighting it off to delay the inevitable.

You can be sure that such calculations made nowadays already take into account disruptive devices such as the N900 (for any new infrastructure investments), but we just can't expect things to change overnight.

Sounds like the carriers need to start developing better plan offerings dependent on device type. If someone has a n900 type device they will just start charging them at a rate equivalent to unlimited voice text data. (which at tmo US is still only costing me 85$ vs the 150 i would pay with at&t.)

I'm pretty sure that carriers can tell what devices are accessing their network and they will just block you unless you are properly registered and paying into the appropriate scheme. Low for dumb phones, Medium for phones like the 5800xm, high for the n900.

(at the same time I think they should give you a credit for signing a contract without one of their subsidized phones... it is nice to dream)

I love this thread. I am happy to see people voicing the same thoughts I have with regards to the Carriers and their meddling in our phones, software, and wallets.

Unfortunately, it is. Whenever governments have offered bounties on pests (rats, foxes, whatever) some enterprising farmers always start breeding the pests to cash in on the bounty money.

I think Maemo has a built-in threat to carriers, and it's all about that word they're allergic to: open.

I think that's Nokia's biggest challenge here with this product. Of course, T-Mobile tends to be more flexible than other major carriers...

Quick question based on a comment under "Networks may reject..." Has anyone ever received a discounted rate plan for NOT buying a subsidized phone?

I haven't been able to find a link, but I remember seeing a link to a graph published by Verizon a few months ago which outlined that they expected that with the advent of LTE and it's gradual upgrades that there would be a shift toward data only packages by sometime around 2014. It mentioned the adoption of VOIP/SIP for the majority of voice and video communications, and chat like programs/email replacing SMS.
This led me to believe that these big companies are expecting devices like this to be the future, but they don't believe that their networks are presently able to hold the network load, thus they are currently restricting VOIP, etc.

If anyone knows where I can find this graph, I'd love to link to it...surely I'm not the only one who saw it.

Your best bet is probably to "buy" a phone using your discount and then resell it on ebay, which would theoretically recover more money than you paid for it after the subsidy.

I was not able to find the article I was looking for, but I did find this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/05/n...partnership-i/

It's interesting, because the hinted LTE (Verizon/Nokia) device would describe a yet to be announced Maemo device far better than any Symbian one. Maybe this is the N920...here's to hoping! Think about it, it would be a test OS platform on a test network platform.

Notice that the third Green box says: "LTE VoIP emerging"