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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Yesterday, the FCC officially granted the 600 MHz spectrum licenses that T-Mobile successfully secured in the recent broadcast incentive auction. The Un-carrier now officially possesses a staggering average of 31 MHz of 600 MHz spectrum licenses across the nation, more than quadrupling its low-band holdings (click for spectrum auction reactions from Verizon and AT&T).
With the spectrum transfer complete, the real fun begins. Despite the cries from skeptics, T-Mobile has already kicked off deployment activities and will see the first sites ready for testing this summer! This timeline - well ahead of expectations – sets the stage for commercial operations later this year.
The source is a bit of a soyvertisement but still interesting if read in that light.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday June 18 2017, @10:22PM (3 children)
Anyone else have their legacy PAYG plan? If they're investing in infrastructure logically they're also going to open up their plan options so that I can finally have data on my modern smartphone without annoying monthly payments right? That I can pay for in units in ratios that make sense?
Ah ahuu
AHHHUACHOURBLRUGHLBURGH
Oh my god sorry I was trying to keep the coffee in with a straight face while I typed that and I spit it out so hard my fingers spasmed. Retaining for posterity and science.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @12:05AM (2 children)
If you want payments that make sense, the best option I know is Ting, an MVNO reselling both Sprint and T-Mobile service. Payments are monthly (I don't think you can avoid that at this point), but at least you pay for (roughly) what you used that month.
OTOH, it's still $6/line/month even at zero usage, which is expensive if you really are a light user. And data/voice/sms are each summed every month (over all lines on the account), which is good, but then tiered for billing. By tiered, I mean that, given the nominal data tiers of 100MB, 500MB, 1GB, etc., you actually pay:
And similarly for minutes of voice and SMSes.
I don't get why they can't/won't just bill per-minute, per-sms, and per-MB, with the marginal rates verying by bracket, but it's a lot better than the usual "Pick the highest you'll ever need, then pay us for that every month." or "Unlimited*" plans.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday June 19 2017, @12:54AM
Yeah so it'd end up costing me more than the minutes I can put in all at once that last a year just to maintain it looks like.
Also I assume they don't do that because then they can't charge crazy amounts and also justify more price increases when people use the data forced on them. I mean people I know seem to use it just to use it since it's there. I'd use it like an antenna.
Normal users need get together and fund our own service. We can totally break in. The future is now in small business telecom!
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday June 19 2017, @01:01AM
Kids these days. Anyone else remember when you had to pay $___/mo (can't recall how much) for basic local service, and then over 20c per minute in the 80s and 90s for long distance. https://books.google.com/books?id=Pc-L2vz0K14C&pg=PA108&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false [google.com]
So a 30 minute long distance call would cost $6.66 in 1990, which equates to $12.41 in 2016 dollars (calculated here: https://westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi [westegg.com] ). In the county I live in, it was long distance to call from one part to the other, 25 miles away. At least by the time I was paying for my own phone service, you could actually own a telephone rather than lease it from the phone company.
I remember those pre-dialing numbers you could call and get rates for seven or eight cents per minute and thinking it was the greatest deal ever. So anyway, $6/mo for service and you whine about it? Get off my fucking lawn!