Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"Today I came home to find my 15 MB down/3 MB up Comcast broadband service had been shut off due to exceeding their 250 GB/month data cap policy. This had happened the month before, and I called and had a polite but irritated conversation with Comcast's "Customer Security" department (since the regular customer service folks could not help.) According to them I had exceeded their 250 GB monthly cap, and they asked how that might have happened."

Whoa boy. I read this story with a grimace on my face. On the one hand, you have Comcast's completely over-the-top reaction to a customer blowing his data usage cap two months in a row: total account termination. That's just insane. That's the sort of extreme measure you take if your customer was doing something illegal or unethical. Going over a data usage cap? Bill the customer extra, but don't terminate his account. Read more...

This is one of more easier to understand videos when it comes to the issue of Usage Based Billing - UBB - and what it really means. I'm putting this on every site in the network because if you're in Canada, you need to understand what's happening (everyone else in the world might find it interesting). Now that one of the ISPs here in Canada has admitted that the pricing of their plans is not linked to actual use, the logic behind UBB start to become even more baffling. We know the motivation is money, but as a "small c capitalist" I believe there's room for plenty of profit while still being fair to your customers. The model of usage-based billing we use in society for buying clothes and food should be applied in the same way for a data connection. Read more...

"The reality is that more and more of us have more than one wireless device in our lives and are finding it difficult to justify paying for multiple data plans just because we want to own a smartphone (or two), a tablet, and a laptop. You can see the carriers straining to figure out the right way to price data service on Samsung's new Galaxy Tab tablet (the subject of an earlier newsletter); a shared data plan would make it so much easier for someone to buy one and just add it to their existing plan or bump up their plan a tier."

People reading these sites in other parts of the world - namely Asia and Europe - will, right about now, be thinking "Yeah, we already have that - why are you guys in North American so ass backwards?". Well my Asian and European friends, you're entirely right. We are ass backwards. Our wireless carriers here want us to pay a contract fee for every device we connect - I already pay for Internet access once for my home connection, once for my phone, and they want me to pay another fee to connect my laptop - oh, and once to connect a tablet. This is the way things are, though in 2011 the wireless carriers in North American might, MIGHT, get that this is not a customer-friendly approach.