AT&T silently killed what formerly was an unlimited plan out of the blue one day, and not many people noticed. I would constantly run into the 3 GB limit a week or two into the month and then suffer through the slow throttled 0.5 Mbps rates for the rest of the billing cycle in agony.
At that point I realized I was essentially paying for a 3 GB data plan (remember, no tethering provisioning was included or even could be added) under the auspices of an 'unlimited' tier. I switched to mobile shared but that turned out to be a huge mistake for other reasons (among which was that corporate discount codes didn't apply to the $30 phone fee on top of the bucket charge), and then shortly after that left for T-Mobile where I now have a real unlimited plan for less money. Not the full speed tiers + throttled data after that plan mind you, the actual unlimited plan.
What's really disappointing is that it took the FTC until now to build a case or whatever legal burden is required to go after AT&T for their elaborate bait-and-switch. This is years after the fact, and I wonder how much extra money AT&T made as a result.
What did you think was a mistake about the mobile shared plan? I just switched to that for my single device and I was enjoying the money saved. Am I missing a "gotcha"?
* I previously had a 23% discount (FAN code) on my account which applied to the unlimited data lines in a favorable way. In essence, it applied to both the $30/month data fee for Unlimited, and the couple hundred minutes of call and unlimited text family plan which were sort of an umbrella for all the lines. With mobile shared, one of the gotchas I didn't discover until well after the first bill (since the perpetual excuse with a FAN code discount is – it takes a while to apply) was that the discount applies only to the mobile shared data bucket charge, not to the $30/phone, $x/tablet, $x/modem device access charge line items which quickly add up if you have more than a single line. This really threw off the math I had done for affordability and made it more expensive for me.
* The tiers previously were structured a bit differently, and with the two lines I had plus another person, I would always hit the 10 GB I had signed up for, then pay the $15/GB overage. Going to the next tier up to avoid paying overage for a GB or two would've still been more expensive, so like clockwork I would always end up paying some overages. Since then they've doubled some of the larger tiers as a reactionary measure.
Affordability wise quite honestly AT&T is close to parity with T-Mobile if you manage to get the mobile shared value plans which have cheaper monthly rates if you bring your own device or buy without a contract.
Some people don't realize that the real cheap rates are because you are giving up a subsidy, and that your next new phone will raise the rates again. OTOH I personally think that's a benefit since I can choose to get the subsidy or Next or just buy the phone outright.
I'm a huge fan of ALIX and its successor, APU. I've built dozens of ALIX boxes and most have years of uninterrupted uptime running either m0n0 or pfsense. I've never gotten anywhere close to that with any of the Broadcom or Atheros based embedded platforms which are essentially what you get with a consumer router.
I'm surprised the EFF isn't championing some fork of those platforms, or just those two themselves. Trying to fix the problem by adding yet another platform is just going to cause problems. I'm a huge fan of the EFF but it seems to be championing rather strange initiatives lately like the open WiFi and now this.
I'm sure Google's efforts to shame ISPs with this new report are well-intentioned, but I really miss the old YouTube speedtest which it seemed almost nobody knew about: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed/
It seemed to show more data – both throughput from your actual cookied sessions and graphs of comparable connections around you. It took months for YouTube/Google to generate these reports when there was existing data out there already. I guess they wanted something that'd be easily digestible for a Netflix-style monthly shame-a-thon.
As someone who regularly switches between Android and iPhone, this is the answer everyone is looking for. It's as simple as turning it off before you switch to a device which is SMS-only.
Moreover, before you sell your device or give it away, make sure you turn iMessage off.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned it yet, but the book that would be most practical to actually recover society after disaster from a purely technical standpoint would be the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
The US GSM model appears to trade WCDMA on Band 1 (2100 MHz) for Band 4 ("AWS" 1700 Tx/2100 Rx). Global GSM includes Band 1 since that's a very popular band internationally, but doesn't have Band 4.
Keep in mind, T-Mobile USA is predominantly Band 4 for WCDMA and LTE, and Band 2 (1900 MHz) with at most a single WCDMA carrier in markets for roaming, iPhones, and improved in-building coverage.
So no, it isn't useless to T-Mobile, and won't be limited to 2G speeds. There's no Band 1 (2100 MHz) deployed inside the USA. Band 4 tried to align itself with Band 1, but manages only to align some of the downlink (tower->handset) spectrum (2110 to 2170 MHz for B1, 2110 to 2155 for B4), the uplink/duplex spacing is entirely different (this is the 1700 MHz "band"), 400 MHz below downlink for B4 as opposed to 190 MHz below it for B1.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. I see the difference now between full 2100 support and receive-only 2100 support.
A little disappointing, since I'm about to travel to the UK and Europe, and it would be awfully nice to have WCDMA everywhere. I guess that's another selling point for the Moto X, or I could just deal with T-Mobile's PCS support.
Word on the street is that Google is working on a new messaging product, so this isn't altogether surprising. Meebo has an awesome iOS native app and web application, however the Android Meebo client has been abandonware for the longest time (last update November 30, 2009!): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meebo&...
I guess I find the fact that Google would be interested in making that kind of commitment very curious. Meebo has stated a number of times that a revamp of the Android client was imminent after I bugged them about why the Android client gets no attention or updates/bigfixes at all. Getting that to fruition would mean a workable cross platform messaging solution with some real scope.
I wonder how this relates to Meebo's pivot toward an information platfrom, versus Meebo Messenger. Surely it can't be worth $100 million to basically get what libpurple offers for free.
I have a bunch of Android phones here (developer/reviewer) and none except for Motorola phones (Droid 4, Droid Bionic) seem to set the time 15 seconds ahead checking using http://time.is
For example, the Droid 4 was 14.6 seconds off, and Droid Bionic was 14.8 seconds off...
This seems to be a vendor specific issue, as none of the non-motorola phones (Galaxy Nexus GSM/UMTS, Galaxy Nexus CDMA/LTE on VZW, Nexus S, Galaxy Note, Tab 10.1LE, a Qualcomm development MDP) are anywhere near 15 seconds, all are +/- fractions of a second, like you'd expect.
My GS2 is also 0.9 of accurate time according to time.is, I wonder if it's just a coincidence or something common... (UK network time being off slightly?)
At that point I realized I was essentially paying for a 3 GB data plan (remember, no tethering provisioning was included or even could be added) under the auspices of an 'unlimited' tier. I switched to mobile shared but that turned out to be a huge mistake for other reasons (among which was that corporate discount codes didn't apply to the $30 phone fee on top of the bucket charge), and then shortly after that left for T-Mobile where I now have a real unlimited plan for less money. Not the full speed tiers + throttled data after that plan mind you, the actual unlimited plan.
What's really disappointing is that it took the FTC until now to build a case or whatever legal burden is required to go after AT&T for their elaborate bait-and-switch. This is years after the fact, and I wonder how much extra money AT&T made as a result.