(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

"Signal uses your phone's data connection so you can avoid SMS and MMS fees."

In what fucking *universe* is mobile data cheaper than SMS?

I am aware of four basic categories of mobile-phone plan: "SMS is expensive; mobile data is even more expensive", "the marginal SMS is free; mobile data is moderately expensive", "the marginal SMS and the marginal megabyte are both free, but the *base* monthly price is incredibly high", and the Chatr $35/month plan (which is still a lot compared to the ~$12/month† of a basic Public Mobile plan).

Look, I'm all in favour of encryption, but encouraging people to treat SMS and data-based texting as interchangeable and to default to using data sounds frankly *dangerous*. I have had a vision of the future in which I join Signal, and it's me desperately trying to get it through people's heads under which circumstances they need to use insecure mode when contacting me, *failing* to get it through their heads, and missing time-sensitive messages because people tried to send them to me over a nonexistent Internet connection.

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†depending on how many discounts you qualify for; maximum cost is $15

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(edit: part 2)

Comments

[wingedcatgirl]

That plan would be ideal for us. Why does the US not have plans of this nature?

[yvannairie]

Mmm to be fair, North America has absolute garbo mobile infrastructure overall, so it might be that... the companies literally can't afford uncapped internet for everyone, because their whole network would come down. Considering how often people are like "yeah, we couldn't reach anyone b/c all the lines were busy" basically never happens here, and in Finland we actually have nationally mandated network redundancy and internet is considered a utility like water or electricity.

But the likelier answer is just North American Gold Rush Capitalism, because IIRC, speedcapped internet is also the norm in pretty much every other continent. Once the infrastructure is built, it is more profitable to have as many people on it at cheap prices to keep the money for upkeep rolling in. It's the difference between making all of the money, right away, or making some money, a little bit at a time, growing slowly over time.

[thedarlingone]

"it might be that... the companies literally can't afford uncapped internet for everyone, because their whole network would come down."

Context: I take calls for one of the US's four large cellular providers, specifically the one whose biggest selling point is "We have coverage where nobody else does", so our userbase skews to people who either are willing to pay higher prices for the extra coverage or are too rural to get service through anyone else. So my perspective is pretty limited to "here's how this one US company does things", and I have pretty much no knowledge of how other countries handle cellular. With all that said -- I'm not sure I'm exactly following what y'all are meaning by "uncapped" data, but this comment made me think of a conversation I occasionally have with customers, so I thought I'd toss it in.

More context: we offer an assortment of what are officially called "share plans" and what I usually call "data-capped plans" in conversation, where the customer pays for a set X number of gigabytes per month (plus unlimited talk and text), to be shared between all the cellular devices on the same bill, and if they use more than that, they are charged $15 per gigabyte of overage, unless they have opted into the setting where they are throttled after the X gigabytes instead. (The opt-in nature of the throttling has definitely got an element of "let's get more money out of this", but given how... common it is for my customers to be Very Alarmed when any throttling does occur, I also think "okay let's not throttle this subset of people unless they know it's going to happen" was probably a smart call.)

We also offer an assortment of what are officially called "unlimited" plans, where you can opt for a choice between "throttling whenever the cell tower has more than a threshold amount of traffic" or "throttling only after X gigabytes, and then only when the cell tower has more than the threshold amount of traffic". We *used*, and this is where your comment reminded me of things, years ago we *used* to offer a completely different structure of data plans, where each cellular line had its own allotted amount of data, and if you were willing to pay for "unlimited", it was true high-speed never-throttled unlimited data that would always have first priority to the cell tower. (A very, very, very few of our customers still have this plan. When a call comes through where I have to change something like the number of texts or voice minutes, which were *not* unlimited on this plan, I always feel like I'm juggling glass figurines, because it's so old I've never actually been trained on it but it's obviously imperative that I don't accidentally lose that plan for the customer.)

Anyways. So now we get to this conversation I occasionally have with customers, which is what I thought of when I read your comment. The customer asks something like "but why do you call it unlimited if it's not unlimited", which is fair but obviously I don't admit that because customer service. XP So what I say is usually, "It's unlimited insofar as you never pay an overage cost. We used to offer true high-speed forever unlimited internet, but there were a few people who were using so much that nobody else could get through. The story goes, and I don't know how true this is, but the story goes that there was a guy in New York who was running a sports bar off some of our mobile hotspot boxes, so we had to do *something*. So we put in place this system we have now, where you have unlimited, but if you've used more than ~50GB in a month, you can get put in kind of this 'slow lane' to the cell tower where if there's a bunch of other traffic on the network you may experience a slowdown." (Another quirk of my customer service terminology is that I never admit in that specific term that we're throttling you. For some reason that term really puts people's backs up.)

Anyway, that was rambly, but that's where my brain went, is this maybe-apocryphal story of the time part of a USian cellular network did fall over due to somebody using fully uncapped data too extensively.

[brin_bellway]

What are you talking about? The United States has *tons* of speedcapped plans! A couple years ago I did some research for [a then-homeless American friend who was reliant on mobile data as their primary Internet connection] and determined the three best companies for their needs were Simple Mobile, Twigby, and TextNow, but there are others and the optimal answers may have changed since then.

(I just looked at them again and Twigby's plans start at $20, which translates to about €16, *and* it comes with unlimited talk and text! They'll try to sell you on their flex plans where you stay on fast data and at the end of the month they charge you for whichever quantity tier you ended up using that month, but you can just say no and they'll leave you on the lowest price tier and give you free slow data instead.)

The United States has *lovely* data availability. No, the thing that's *actually* bullshit about your mobile-phone system is the rampant use of carrier locks. (Canada outlawed carrier-locking several years ago.)