I understand all about building infrastructure and the tremendous costs involved, but the cost of cable televsion+internet and the cost of cellular phone service+data are simply ridiculous. The one decent thing Verizon has done is to allow families to bundle phones which has allowed some savings as compared with the option of having to pay for five separate plans. Despite that generosity, it is still damned expensive and we don’t even include data in our plans.
My wife, a son and I all have phones that are eligible for an upgrade. We are holding off because we had heard that Verizon was going to establish a family share data plan similar to the family share phone plan they have now. We don’t need smartphones but figured if the price was right and we could share data rather each having to shell out an extra $30 a month then we’d consider it.
Turns out that the family data share plan offers no savings at all. I guess we’ll stick to our basic phones and rely on guys like Fred to give us the weather and the latest sports scores.
only if there’s a dollar riding on the searches
i have a belief that underlying infrastructure should belong to the government and allow companies to compete on top of that public infrastructure… like ups versus fedex using streets and airports. this b.s. about capitalism and markets saving us and finding the cheapest solutions drives me nuts.
i will use this this post to vent about a tangential issues with very similar result. a couple years ago, you could type a name into google and add a city if necessary and it would spit out an entry that gave that person’s address and phone and possibly an e-mail address. now you google that and it lists several services that will sell you that information. the internet is failing at the most basic level and strictly being commodified by a few monopolies such as google…
google has an opt-out that prevents personal information being displayed on a search. the personal result should display near the top for individuals who have not opted out.