Ya know, the whole 1 year, 2 year, etc contract thing is BS in my opinion. It's just a cheesy way to ensure customer loyalty by making it bloody impossible to cancel if the company does something stupid, and punishes *YOU* for voting with your dollars. Now how much of a racket is that!?

I agree, if one of the major players in the US, lets just say at+t as an example offered a flat rate of $50 a month for absolutely unlimited everything, regardless of what device you have, no caps of any kind on data and no contracts or credit checks....youd be hard pressed to tell me that EVERYONE wouldnt flock to at+t if they did that.

and the at&t capacity would be in ruins in about a day...

munky261: Yes, they would flock there in droves for certain. That's the funny part though. The CEO's who run these companies have totally lost touch with reality, and with the common customer. They're more interested in the $50 glass of lemonade and totally miss the fact that it's not how much you can charge them and get away with it, but rather just the sheer number of customers that'll make you rich and successful.

The rule of business I was taught early on in life is, you take care of the customer, and your employees, and the rest takes care of itself. I have yet to see that rule fail once. Also, if you take your focus off everything else and only put it on the bottom line, you might have success for a while, but you will eventually fail. That much is guaranteed. It may take a while for that failure to complete, but it will happen.

tso: Actually, no. Given that all the other carriers would have customers locked into contracts, they'd only be able to migrate over as their contracts ended. So the influx of users would be manageable, and as capacity was reached in each area, additions could be made to the system to easily keep up with demand. On top of that, most cellular locations have more than sufficient bandwidth. The idea being that they've got room for lots of growth should it occur.

MetroPCS offers that, but only in their direct markets (they don't do roaming agreements). I was fine with them until I started having to travel to places they don't cover. Plus, they're CDMA and I didn't really like their handset selection. I want an Android phone :-} (maybe when LTE comes, which they've said will be their chosen direction, I'll think about going back).

Boost offers it, on a more nation-wide basis than MetroPCS ... but they've got an even WORSE selection of handsets, and they're mixed CDMA and IDEN. And... I think their unlimited service is on the IDEN network.

T-Mobile has unlimited voice for $50/mo ... if you've been with them for at least 2 years. That makes $85/mo total for unlimited voice, messaging, and data. But, again, you have to be on their loyalty program (unfortunately, I've been with them for less than a year).

Personally, as MetroPCS and Boost gain more momentum, I expect to see T-Mobile react in their pricing (since they're the smallest of the big 4). I think that, for nation wide coverage, $70-$80/mo is a reasonable price for unlimited everything. (and, note, Sprint is at $100/mo for that; and I pay $100/mo for it on T-Mobile, only because I'm on a family plan ... otherwise it'd be $125/mo)

Give it a year or three... I bet we'll see the little unlimited carriers (MetroPCS and Boost), and the big 4, meet somewhere in the middle. Which, again, I think is going to be around $75/mo.

and what would the next tiers say?

thats the "unknown" in all this, the peering agreements and tiers of networking.

thats why all kinds of companies wants to keep the traffic, be it wired or wireless, on their own network. if they are lucky, they have a balanced peering agreement where its agreed that each side will accept equal amounts of traffic from the other side. if they are unlucky they have to pay for traffic crossing the border in some direction.

in either case, if there is a spike of traffic on their end, thanks to flat rate customers wanting to max their use of what they pay for, it can play havoc with the peering agreement...

as for leftover capacity, no way, no how. all companies in this kind of game guesstimate that no customer will make use of their max capacity 24/7. basically the companies will oversell their capacity as much as they can get away with.

Well of course they oversell...its like meeting a woman that has a nice rack but come to find out she stuffs her bra and is only a b cup. LOL The point is if a business model like this was introduced AFTER major upgrades and expansion, from there on it would be of total benefit to us users as they would have to develop newer technologies more aggressively to keep up.

johnkzin: Well, if MetroPCS can get T-mobile scared enough to move, they should in turn get the big three to blink as well, hopefully making our cellular system better, with zero contracts, no limits, and a set price.

TSO: Peering wouldn't be an issue. Most of that's already worked out well in advance, way back when they sign the initial contract for high speed service to the towers. The only way this would affect what's already in place is if they had to upgrade capacity, and that's already usually covered in the initial peering agreements. I know this because I used to work for a Tier 1 ISP and dealt with broadband setups and contracts every day.

murky261: Yes, overselling is the big thing these days. The typical rule is to sell 50% more service and/or bandwidth than you have actual capacity for. Why? Because, 10% of users account for 90% of bandwidth, and the remaining 90% account for the other 10% of usage. We used to do that all the time. And in well over 98% of cases, the 90/10 rule holes up pretty well.

In fact, I remember several cases during my tenure at the ISP where we were actually able to oversell our pops by as much as 300%, mostly because the people connecting were only interested in email and weren't online more than 20-30 minutes a day tops. However, we got bit a couple times on that. One case I remember specifically involved our DSL service in Wisconsin I believe it was. Our pop where the Redback was located was oversold by 50%, which was pretty typical at the time for most of our pops. That came back to haunt us about 3 months after that DSL pop opened.

We had no way of anticipating that the majority of customers on that pop were all power users. I think when the dust settled, we were at a 1:1 capacity level, and while there was a little breathing room on the connection, it wasn't much. Again, that was the extreme exception, given typical usage rates, but it just goes to show that it can happen. However, with only a 2% chance that it will, most ISP's use the 50% rule to setup their core bandwidth requirements and then only build up from there if capacity remains continuously above 85% capacity for more than 3 days.

Eventually, even though we me be old and gray by the time it happens, these companies will give up these archaic business models and learn that if they actually give the customer what they want and how they want it, it will be more profitable for them in the long run.

Well, companies used to be very customer focused years ago, but when they took their eyes off the customer and focused only on the bottom line, all this crazy anti-consumer insanity started happening. Personally, it drives me nuts. I remember having the importance of customer service not only beaten into me, but those teachings continually reinforced and proven over and over again every single day. It made such an impression on me that I doubt I could ever go and be a profit focused individual ever again. Besides, if you take care of the customer and your employees, the profits will take care of themselves and you shouldn't need to ever even think about them or even take a glance in their general direction, save for when you have to balance the books. If you're doing what you should be, they have a very interesting habit of taking care of themselves with no intervention on your part. I just wish that companies would rediscover that fact.