via collegehumor.com
Brilliantly observed.
Monthly Archives: December 2012
T-Mobile CEO confirms the iPhone and the death of phone subsidies
T-Mobile is eliminating all device subsidies in 2013, requiring new customers to pay full price for their phones up front, buy it on installment or bring their own unlocked devices, Legere said speaking at corporate parent Deutsche Telekom’s Capital Markets Day in Bonn.
T-Mobile will shift entirely to its unsubsidized Value Plans, which offer customers far cheaper rates for voice and particular data. Traditionally carriers factor subsidies into their normal contracts rates – basically you’re paying a mortgage on your phone. With the Value program, T-Mobile is keeping the contract, but passing what it saves on subsidies back to consumer.
via gigaom.com
Sky has never bought you a TV set. The subsidy has always been a burden, justifying lock-in contract periods. The era of opportunistic cellco choice on the fly for best bargain data bundles gets closer.
???Call of Duty??? Reaches $1 Billion Faster Than ???Avatar???
???Call of Duty: Black Ops II,??? thelatest installment in Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI)???s best-sellingvideo-game franchise, topped $1 billion in retail sales withinits first 15 days of release.
The sales figure, which relies on Chart-Track retail data,means ???Call of Duty??? reached $1 billion faster than the movie???Avatar,??? the record holder for feature films, Activision saidtoday in a statement. The previous installment in the seriesaccomplished that same feat last year. It took 16 days to reachthe $1 billion milestone, compared with 17 for ???Avatar,??? whichcame out in 2009
via bloomberg.com
Top 10 Overused Professional Buzzwords 2012
Telecom in the new era
“Telcos are mostly going to sell gigabytes in the future. The revenue that funds all our massive infrastructure, whether it be fixed or mobile, is going to come from selling gigabytes as opposed to minutes and messages.”
Excellent. Recognition that the need for consumers to pay the operator to manufacture voice calling services is over, trumped by the handset’s edge to edge audio capability.
“Data is the saleable item and will be bought in parcels and volumes, and it’s good for the market to have alternatives that are cheap and low volume and medium and high. Some fast, some slow. Unless you create a diverse range of offers that meet every market, you end up with an unhealthy market.”
Half right, nothing is “saleable” when it exists in abundance, which data does in the wired envrionment. Having recently moved to 0.5TB quota at a residential price, there may be caps, but who’ll know. The saleable item is subscription to the connection, the end.
Moutter says there is no point in uncapped plans. “That would be like selling electricity with unlimited electricity for $50 a month; how the hell would that be efficient? That would be insane.”
Wholly wrong. What is insane is comparing an energy transmission network delivering a costly limited commodity to consumers with a datacommunications network that exchanges a functionally infinite commodity provided by subscribers.
Hamish MacEwan 