Month: July 2020

Varying Policies For Prepaid Plan Auto Pay Discounts

Christian

Verizon and AT&T both offer discounts on most prepaid plans when subscribers enroll in automatic payments.1 The carriers have different policies for when discounts kick in.

With AT&T, customers can enroll in automatic payments when they first place an order, and the discount for automatic payments kicks in immediately. I like AT&T’s approach. It’s simple.

With Verizon, the discount only kicks in after the first month of service. There’s a sense in which this is logical. Subscribers placing an order must manually pay for the first month of service. The first payment can’t be automated. On the flip side, it’s confusing. When discussing Verizon’s plans, it wouldn’t be accurate for me to say something simple like:

Verizon’s Plan X is $50 per month for new customers that enroll in automatic payments.
Instead, I have to say something wordy like:
For new customers that enroll in automatic payments, Verizon’s Plan X is $55 for the first month of service and $50 per month thereafter.

I’m not sure why Verizon doesn’t just offer a discount in the first month. Does the carrier benefit from making things complicated? Do fewer people enroll in automatic payments when the first month of service isn’t discounted?

Tracking 5G Strategies and Deployments

Christian

I’ve created web pages to track the 5G strategies used by each major network in the United States. The pages go into detail about networks’ 5G strategies, compatible devices, and coverage profiles. I plan to update these pages regularly as 5G deployments move forward.

I intentionally omitted Sprint from the list. T-Mobile has been pulling the plug on Sprint’s 5G service. The spectrum Sprint used for 5G will be redeployed in the New T-Mobile’s network.

Abstract photo representing wireless technology

Variable-Rate Pricing, Network Switching, and Mobile X

Christian

Urban planners have a joke: “You aren’t in traffic; you are traffic.”

While most people consider how long they’d have to wait in traffic if they travel, almost no one thinks about how much worse they’d make traffic for everyone else.

Conventional tolls charge road users the same rates all the time. Variable-rate tolling is a clever alternative. Under that approach, people pay high tolls when roads are congested. Tolls are low (or non-existent) when roads are wide open. When managed well, variable-rate tolling can lead to huge improvements in efficiency.

Conventional cellular pricing is inefficient

Most of the time, cell phone networks are not at their max capacities. In these situations, a mobile subscriber can use data without degrading service quality for other users on the network or incurring substantial costs for the network operator. On the other hand, network capacity is a precious resource when networks are congested.

With conventional wireless price structures, a gigabyte of data use costs a subscriber the same amount regardless of how congested a network is. There’s a sense in which it would be way more efficient to vary the cost subscribers pay for a gigabyte based on how congested a network is.

With variable-rate pricing, people with money to burn and a need for high-performance could get great speeds all the time. Budget-sensitive consumers could get super cheap data most of the time, then reduce data use when bandwidth is in high demand.

Network switching

If a small town could have its entire population covered by one cell tower, multiple networks may still build towers. In some sense, this is horribly inefficient. On the other hand, it’s unsurprising given the structure of the wireless industry in the U.S. While roaming agreements allowing subscribers to use other carriers’ towers do a lot to reduce inefficiencies like these, the situation is far from optimal. Mobile phone subscribers are at the whims of whatever roaming agreements are in place between network operators.

Imagine an individual T-Mobile subscriber is out of the range of T-Mobile’s network and near another network’s tower. What if the subscriber could pay for temporary coverage from the tower? It’s not an option today, but there’s no technical obstacle making it impossible.

Google Fi uses a form of dynamic network switching that has huge benefits. While Google Fi typically uses T-Mobile’s network, Fi subscribers are automatically switched to Sprint or U.S. Cellular when those networks can deliver better performance.1 Currently, only a tiny portion of U.S. consumers have access to this kind of network switching.

If more carriers embrace dynamic network switching, consumers will benefit. If dynamic network switching is combined with variable-rate pricing, consumers will benefit enormously.

Mobile X

Yesterday, Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile, began to tweet teasing a new carrier he’s working on called Mobile X:

While the first tweet was vague, it seemed to hint at some of the unconventional features I’d like to see. Today, Adderton shared a more promising tweet:

The image is the part I find most interesting. While I don’t know what Adderton is building, the mockup interface sure looks like it fits with a service that involves both dynamic network switching and user-selected levels of service quality.

Verizon’s 5G Mobile Hotspot & Tethering Policies

Christian

Verizon’s higher-end unlimited plans come with monthly allotments of full-speed 4G hotspot data.

  • Play More Unlimited – 15GB
  • Do More Unlimited – 15GB
  • Get More Unlimited – 30GB

Subscribers that burn through all of their full-speed 4G data can continue to use more hotspot data with a 4G connection throttled to a sluggish 600Kbps speed.

Verizon doesn’t prominently advertise it, but the company has separate policies for 5G hotspot data. Here’s a bit from a section of Verizon’s website that gives additional details about one of the carrier’s unlimited plans:1

Unlimited 5G Ultra Wideband Mobile Hotspot

An unlimited 5G Ultra Wideband mobile hotspot means your smartphone becomes an ultra-fast and reliable Wi-Fi connection for your other devices. Service available in select locations and requires a 5G capable device.

Yesterday, I was exploring my Verizon online account for the Play More Unlimited plan and found this:

Screenshot of Verizon account interface showing a 5G hotspot allotment

Verizon is currently allowing 50GB of full-speed 5G hotspot use each month on the Play More plan. After 50GB of use, speeds are throttled to 3Mbps. While 3Mbps isn’t a great speed for hotspot use, it’s still fast enough that most people could browse the internet and do work on a laptop without overwhelming frustration.

I’m guessing the Do More and Get More plans have the same 50GB allotment, but I’m not sure. It’s odd that Verizon’s 5G hotspot allotment on the Play More plan is so much larger than the regular (4G) allotment.

I wonder if the large allotment is a promotional thing. Will we see the allotment shrink as more subscribers get 5G-compatible phones?

Post publication update: As of January 1, 2021, Verizon appears to have dropped the data cap and throttle for Ultra Wideband hotspots.

Opensignal’s Report on U.S. 5G Performance – No Big Surprises

Christian

Earlier this week, Opensignal released a report on the performance of 5G networks in the United States. Opensignal’s report puts some numbers and data behind two things that were already clear:

  • T-Mobile is destroying the competition in terms of 5G coverage, but T-Mobile’s 5G isn’t very fast
  • Verizon’s 5G is outrageously fast, but the coverage profile is terrible.

Opensignal primarily collects its performance data by crowdsourcing data from tests that run in the background on regular people’s phones. It looks like the company restricted the data underlying this report to include tests run from 5G-compatible phones.

Speeds

Verizon destroyed the competition with an average 5G download speed of 495Mbps. The other major networks in the U.S. had 5G download speeds averaging around 50Mbps. Verizon’s dominance in download speeds is due to the company’s focus on rolling out millimeter wave 5G.

Coverage

Unlike Verizon, T-Mobile has focused on deploying sub-6 5G. This type of 5G is great for covering large areas, but less impressive for delivering high speeds. Unsurprisingly, T-Mobile dominated in terms of 5G availability. According to Opensignal’s data, T-Mobile subscribers were able to access 5G 22.5% of the time. Verizon did about fifty times worse with an availability score of 0.4%.

While 0.4% is low, it’s still a better availability score than I would have predicted for Verizon. I wonder if Opensignal’s crowdsourcing approach might lend Verizon’s availability scores a leg up. If living near a Verizon 5G deployment makes a Verizon customer more likely to purchase a 5G phone, selection bias can creep in and cause Opensignal to overestimate Verizon’s actual 5G availability.

Silly press releases

Following Opensignal’s release of its report, T-Mobile published a press release. The company bragged about the network’s excellent 5G coverage without mentioning that the network got demolished in the download speed results.

Verizon published its own press release bragging about ludicrous download speeds. Verizon’s awful 5G availability score was not mentioned.

Download Speed Experience – 5G Users

Opensignal’s report included a metric called Download Speed Experience – 5G Users. The results for this metric were calculated by looking at users with 5G-compatible phones and tracking their average download speed even at times where they did not have 5G connections. In some sense, this single metric does some accounting for both 5G speeds and 5G availability.

Verizon and AT&T tied for the top spot:
Results graph showing AT&T and Verizon tied for the top spot

The metric is interesting, but I don’t think it quite captures how users will feel about the quality of their download speed experiences. The marginal value of a 10Mbps boost in download speeds that moves a subscriber from 5Mbps to 15Mbps is much greater than the marginal value of a 10Mbps boost that moves a subscriber from 500Mbps to 510Mbps. Collapsing a distribution of download speeds into a single, average download speed masks this reality.