I don’t get it. I have service with Virgin Mobile. I don’t talk much so I went for the $25 plan. Unlimited text, mms, web, email, you name it, and 300 minutes. Perfect for me. But I’ve always wondered about the logic to this. It would seem to me that regardless of whether I’m talking or streaming a radio station, I’m using some amount of capacity. Actually, I’d guess the streaming uses more since it’s constant, instead of a voice call that has periods of dead time.
I use Net Counter just cuz I like numbers, and I clock in at 12-15 GB a month data usage. (Does that include texts? If not add a ton of those.) That’s gotta be more than what I’d use talking for 10 minutes a day. I admit my knowledge of wireless systems is very limited, but I think I have a working knowledge of general connectivity. It just doesn’t make sense that voice calls would command such a premium, unless people are just so conditioned to talk on a phone that most pay the higher rate for extra minutes.
And VM charges something like ten cents for text, fifteen for mms IIRC, if you go with a plan that doesn’t include a messaging pack. In fact, my second VM phone is on the $20 plan for 400 minutes, period. So between the two, I’m paying $5 more and giving up 100 minutes in exchange for an absurd amount of data and convenience. (Don’t most “unlimited” plans cap you at 5GB?)
So what gives? Why is there such a difference between voice and data?
I have a hard time believing you are actually passing that much data on your phone. Virgin caps at either 2.5 or 5 gigs of data, if you are streaming radio you’d notice it.
Most plans contain what the end user would regard as strange features. The key is to understand that plans are not designed to provide users with a perfect match to their usage patterns, despite that being how they are marketed. They are designed to maximise revenue from a user. Moreover, they are designed to attract a known revenue stream. Subscriptions are vastly preferred over pay for use models. So what you get are a slew of subscription plans that are designed to attract users to pay the most that the carrier feels the user will pay for a set of features. Breakpoints in plans are often set by looking at user usage patterns and setting the breaks at just the right place to get people to pay just a little more for the next plan up.
The costs to the carrier are often unobvious. SMS and MMS are essentially free to the carriers, although when the data crosses to another carrier they may charge one another - but the charges tend to even out each way. Data costs are solely within the carrier’s own infrastructure, they don’t involve talking to other carrier’s networks, so apart from the marginal cost of bandwidth congestion within a cell, there isn’t any significant cost to the carrier. Voice calls may involve charges to connect to other carriers, and maybe to landlines, and involve connections via the more traditional charging mechanisms.
Most of the costs are based upon the cost of the infrastructure, not the marginal cost of the service instance. What one does see is that carriers have finally realised that the users are not bottomless money pits that can be gouged for every additional service, but rather that users are people with fix budgets, and the goal of the carrier is to get a consistent slice of that budget each month. So plans are reverse engineered back from a set of user demographics, not set on the basis of costs to the carrier for providing a service.
Just a little more to add to Francis’s great answer: From a bandwidth standpoint:
Voice data typically compresses better than most other data, including music. The frequency range of typical human conversation is less than that of high-quality music and thus quality losses due to compression are harder to notice for voice data.
Your usage patterns seem pretty atypical and it’s likely that you’re being subsidized by other users who pay just as much but use less. High-bandwidth users are part of the reason many carriers now cap their “unlimited” data plans.
People are definitely conditioned to pay more for voice. They’re conditioned to pay more for other bullshit things like tethering, too. As Francis implied, they price based on what they think the market will bear, not what’s best for you.
I dunno, i used to really test the unlimited data on my phone plan until vzw informed me that the unlimited data portion of my plan would not be renewed with my contract. 12-15GB a month is not that difficult a stretch of the imagination by any means (yeah i used to be one of those bandwith hogs the carriers blame the price gouging on) and thats not even using a “smart” phone
Well, I’m 17 days into the cycle and I’m at 4.2GB right now. When I pass 5 I’ll run a couple speed tests and pay closer attention to quality of streaming, but I don’t recall any problems other than normal hiccups. Thanks for all the other info.
Wonder if it’s just a matter of time before they notice and start to throttle it.