"See John, it's a Question of Capacity..."

This pic is too money

Cellular providers are working hard to retain their customers as the market reaches the point of ubiquity. The advent of (relatively) hassle-free number portability, and network exclusives such as the iPhone has meant that operators have to come up with convincing reasons for their customers to stay put, and opening up the bandwidth taps is a pretty good one.

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint now all offer unlimited calling plans for $99 per month, and Sprint goes the extra mile by including data services in that price.

Interesting to see if the infrastructure will be able to take it.
Just last week, Rogers, a Canadian cable/wireless/internet Service Provider introduced much tighter bandwidth restrictions because of this very issue.
Now of course we have terrible infrastructure compared to you southern neighbours, but with the exception of a couple metropolitan areas, the US is pretty far behind Japan and Europe.

Maybe they're banking on the fact that Wi-Max will be absorbing a majority of the bandwidth in the near future, thus not straining their systems. Who knows...

The problem is that the Telcos are not seeing a dime from content providers for all the bandwidth they take up, so a serious industry shift needs to take effect.


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