Can some MBA explain this to me?

[Chakravartin]

Trouble wrote:
The water analogy doesn't really work because the customer pays for the water they bring into their dwelling. They aren't paying for water out of a single faucet and there is unlimited water to bill. Two completely different situations.

The analogy is dead-on.

AT&T's "connectivity" service is point-to-point and person-to-person, not device-to-device.

Otherwise, you'd be paying them double or triple for having a second phone or fax machine in your house.

Remind me: What's the surcharge for using a fax machine?

[Trouble]

Chakravartin wrote:
[quote=Trouble]
The water analogy doesn't really work because the customer pays for the water they bring into their dwelling. They aren't paying for water out of a single faucet and there is unlimited water to bill. Two completely different situations.

The analogy is dead-on.

AT&T's "connectivity" service is point-to-point and person-to-person, not device-to-device.

Otherwise, you'd be paying them double or triple for having a second phone or fax machine in your house.

Remind me: What's the surcharge for using a fax machine?
No it isn't. You are mixing two service contracts. Home internet service which allows the subscriber to add devices and cell phone service which allows for one device.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

silvarios wrote:
used T-Mobile mobile data (T1 connected WPA2 Enterprise hotspots supplementing the EDGE data speeds) as my primary ISP a few years ago. With tethering, it was not unheard of to hit at least 2GB/month -- on EDGE!!!

I used to hit 2 GB/month on dialup.

Data is data. Phone companies *were* putting in more towers to enable higher speeds so they could stuff more users in an area that made voice calls. Then smartphone users started using 20 times as much data and locked up connections at full speed and blocked other users from connecting because the phone companies had not realized people would actually do what they implied in their ads (like watching streaming movies on a phone). They were caught trying to service a town of 100,000 people via one gas station with eight hoses, then half the people bought SUV's that got 2 mpg and drove six hours a day.

[Seacrest]

Trouble wrote:
[quote=Chakravartin]
[quote=Trouble]
The water analogy doesn't really work because the customer pays for the water they bring into their dwelling. They aren't paying for water out of a single faucet and there is unlimited water to bill. Two completely different situations.

The analogy is dead-on.

AT&T's "connectivity" service is point-to-point and person-to-person, not device-to-device.

Otherwise, you'd be paying them double or triple for having a second phone or fax machine in your house.

Remind me: What's the surcharge for using a fax machine?
No it isn't. You are mixing two service contracts. Home internet service which allows the subscriber to add devices and cell phone service which allows for one device.
Regardless, it's still an "artificial" restriction, ie: one dreamed up by the carriers themselves.

There's no technical reason I can see that an end user should be restricted to how they use the bandwidth they pay for -- as long as they pay for it.

I think the econ term for it is something like "manufactured scarcity," which is why I was asking if any biz majors could explain it to me.

BTW, when I first got DSL, I vaguely remember the technician telling me they don't support connecting more than one computer. This was before garden variety routers and other networking equipment became really cheap, so I had an old beige linux box which I used to share inet through.

[pqrst]

Seacrest wrote:
I think it is analogous to a service station charging you one price per gallon for gasoline to fill up a sports car and a different price for a minivan.

If I can play devil's advocate here, I think it is more analogous to somebody paying the monthly toll pass for a car (with a certain expected amount of wear and on the road surface, space occupied, etc.), but using it for an 18-wheeler (or the equivalent number of vehicles to an 18-wheeler) instead. My 2 cents.

[silvarios]

pqrst wrote: If I can play devil's advocate here, I think it is more analogous to somebody paying the monthly toll pass for a car (with a certain expected amount of wear and on the road surface, space occupied, etc.), but using it for an 18-wheeler (or the equivalent number of vehicles to an 18-wheeler) instead. My 2 cents.

I would disagree. 2GB is 2GB, why does it matter how you use it? Remember, there are data caps in place. If you go over, you pay more money. There's no free ride here.

[silvarios]

Trouble wrote: But it isn't the same service. The customer is connecting two devices or more devices. The opposing argument is that "if the plan allows 2 GB of transfer then I should be allowed to serve that 2 GB to as many devices as I want." However AT&T isn't selling transferred data, they are selling connectivity.

Great argument, except many carriers used to allow tethering without a fee (some still do). Data is data. In fact, my carrier lets me share data among all lines.

[space-time]

you guys like to split the hairs. The simplest explanation is the one I gave already, just one word

[silvarios]

RgrF wrote: Can't get a chuckle at AS, so Nate practices for one here. :thumbsup:

There's not much humor to share on AppleSwitcher these days.