For instance, I'd love to hear my voice mails on my laptop. The actual features that would be awesome were never part of the conversation. The actual effort to create additional income streams was ridiculously wasteful. No metering, no discounts, no custom phones, no carrier add-ons. And some overhead of the basic infrastructure services like provisioning numbers and 911. The carriers would print money forever if they simply fired everyone unrelated to the actual network (cables and towers) and charged everyone a flat rate. I assume there was at least one other group trying to 'accomplish' the same thing. To build something biggly impressive for which there would never be customers or revenue. And lots of agile, kanban, scrum masters, velocity. Convened by empire builders and corporate climbers. But there were lots and lots of meetings. I was briefly on the 'mobile app services' team, it took me about 3 months to figure out what we were even doing. They thought there were helping me, get me some cheddar too. My buddies were contractors, loved this kind of work, the money was good, and you could never fail. I'm having trouble remembering the details because I didn't even understand it at the time. Like make a list of data provided by stock mobile runtimes (Android, iOS), such as location data, and then create a developer portal for accessing that same data thru web services. One group was trying to monetize services which were already free. I've been out of the industry several years now, and my opinions are my own. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this model, I'm just trying to explain where I believe this perspective comes from based on my experience. They have departments to tailor make plans that only work if they're able to dictate how the internet is used. There are entire teams dedicated to just figuring this stuff out.Īnd this leads to some of the stuff I would get thrown from time to time, like the $60k bills (no longer allowed in canada, a rule was created to prevent surprise bills, but used to be a thing) when someone bought unlimited mobile browser for $7, and thought that meant unlimited usage for their tethered computer and started torrenting all day which was pay per use.Īn unlimited $7 plan only works in the context of the way a user can use a mobile browser, and that's why the carriers think they can dictate how you use the internet connection. Or we can have a $35 plan for just mobile browsing, since that's more efficient and allows us to be more competitive when using the phones browser, and a $15 add on for tethering for those who want it and cost the company more. They'll look at this and say, well we can have a $40 plan for just internet access. So if you put yourself in the shoes of a business dev person at a wireless carrier. With a better optimized network and devices loaded with chatty apps, this difference is probably disappearing. The current gen techs like LTE do operate much differently, to support chatty devices and apps. So connecting a computer via tethering that behaves differently and is far more chatty on the network, is actually a much costlier device to support. The access network was optimized for the usage patterns of a mobile browser, in the way it scheduled and idled the radio (I'm glossing over a large number of details). To be fair, in the older gen access technologies, all internet access isn't equal. This is also where you get lots of the anti-competitive behaviors, like not investing the effort to make a competitors service optimal within a network, as the carriers would rather launch their own service instead of making someone elses service they don't generate revenue off of work great. As being just the pipe is not considered a lucrative market, and open to lots of competition where the race is to the bottom on price. In my opinion the biggest fear of those business development teams is to be treated as or thought of just as providing internet on a device.

The ip connection on a device is a gateway towards a service, and the telecoms want to be providers of services, and the differentiator from competitors is having better and different services. In my experience in Canada from several years ago, the business teams in wireless telcos don't see it as providing you internet on device x.

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