Just A Minute Can Be Shorter Than you Think
The telco carriers that control mobile communications access learned how to maximize their service charges very long ago. To paraphrase the Bard, it’s good to be a monopoly, indeed.
In many ways, the mobile environment for applications much resemble the myriad CP/M formats from the computer industry’s Bad Old Days. Each carrier has its own flavor of delivery, which fragments any market potential by having to have and maintain multiple flavors, one for each carrier, instead of a single code base.
And pretty much everyone knows about the incremental time charges, based on a granularity of one minute or any portion thereof. It’s certainly no surprise where the minute is metered: At the carrier’s access point, not at the mobile device. So customers are paying for line time inefficiencies that are also controlled by the carriers themselves.
It actually gets better, at least for the carriers. While the connection meter is started at the access point in some central office somewhere, the meter is stopped when the mobile device acknowledges the last packet.
A few seconds here, a few seconds there, it all adds up very quickly. More than likely, carriers’ days have more than 24 billing hours.
This interesting revenue capture is a carry forward from the old days when phone calls were metered, a habit that’s very hard to give up. The focus on voice as a premium service is certainly archaic today, where data is data.
The justification for this carrier advantage has to do the imagined scarcity of ethereal air waves and spectrum allocation, but that seems hard to justify with today’s communications technology. The same argument can be applied to land lines as well. There are, after all, a finite number of them, and the density at any given point is relatively restricted, in much the same way as cellular carrier bandwidth is.
There has to be a nascent MCI out there somewhere, hopefully in stealth mode, that will do for mobile applications and connectivity what open source is doing for enterprise software. And, not least, a minute’s value can be restored, opening up even more opportunities for fire and forget remote services. Can hardly wait.