

Implications: Verizon plans bandwidth-gobbling mobile video service - 1213
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/verizon_video_plan/

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1213
I'm not posting this as an expert, but am thinking about where it's all
headed.

If only 10% of mobile users watch video, and that video takes up 38% of the
network... And Verizon is not compressing video as much over LTE so they can
impress you with how much data you're using, and eventually show you why your
bill should at some point turn into $150/month instead of $80-100...

Sorry for the incomplete ideas. But is there a magic solution in there
somewhere? If the network doesn't care about finding the sweet spot between
quality and efficiency, and if the hardware and the OS also don't care, does
that open up a big opportunity for some fourth party?

It seems like pretty soon instead of keeping phones simple to use and getting
absolutely everyone on the mobile teat like they are in position to do, they
may overreach and end up making people really need to do all sorts of stuff
the guy won't tell you at Walmart, like pick and install the right bandwidth
optimizer if you don't want to blow through 2GB in a day. And possibly save
you an extra 20 minutes of battery until someone fills that other huge
opportunity of substantially better batteries for all this stuff. There are
still plenty of people who don't have a computer at home and won't, because of
stuff like that getting in the way of just picking it up and using it.

This could be an even worse example than signing people up to 2-year contracts
and offering phones that are sometimes in rough shape in half the time. I'm
not a conspiracy theorist, but they seem to have a pretty good thing going
here and potentially push it further than they should.

