Last week was a pretty hectic week and I didn't have time to make a blogpost, so this week I am going to make two to make up for it and hopefully they'll be even better than usual.
This week I am going to concentrate on mobile data usage, sparked mostly by this article "AT&T relents on 'unlimited data' plan limits" but also because of my own frustrations in mobile technology and their service providers.
The key value of the article is that AT&T, the prominent mobile service provider in the United States, are reversing their decision to throttle clients' usage of their mobile data plans if they have exceeded 3 gigabytes of data within a billing cycle despite the plan being labelled 'unlimited'. The idea of 'unlimited' data plans not being anywhere close to unlimited is not only quite common in the United States and Canada but around the world, service providers are reluctant to let their customers use the services to the extent that they have signed on for and create hidden disincentives to use after they have hit a certain limit, usually in the method of slowing down that user's maximum transfer speed so that they cannot use the plan to download more data than the provider wants. The real clincher in this subject as I see it is that using mobile devices to access the internet is becoming increasingly common and the usage will only increase, the mobile service providers in Canada (and the United States) are rushing out to cash in on this trend by promoting as many technologies to access the internet from a mobile device as they possibly can, you may have noticed all the marketing and push for services such as 3G, 4G, LTE and whatever else they can come up with. Meanwhile the service providers in question do not seek to actually provide the service they are advertising, instead opting to prop up a facade of the service then fail to come through on the promise, sometimes by not having decent coverage for their user base, sometimes through customer support foolery, and in this case by only letting the user truly use part of the service they have signed up for.
The scrupulous methods these companies are using are quite frankly dangerous, the providers already hold a tremendous amount of power (just look at Bell and Rogers' substantial lobbying to the regulatory commissions) and while there are alternatives, Wind Mobile for cellphones, only available in parts of the country and even then the service is less than satisfactory for many customers, Teksavvy for internet which is barely able to survive under the big two's attempts to destroy their business through lobbying the CRTC, they are simply not enough to allay the fears about the future of this sector. The use of information technology and the transfer of data is ever increasingly crucial to North American's daily lives and right now the service providers hold a substantial amount of power over the consumer, it is time for everyone to stand up and show that we cannot stand for this or it will only get worse.
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