Well Socialism doesnt do that but the people or person does. It's actually a great ideal but people f it up.
Yes, the idea is good, but implementation... All implementations are suffering from human factor, from human nature. Until human nature be changed, every implementation of socialism will suffer from human factor
A particularly unfortunate comparison for the laissez faire crowd.
The Korean Communications Commission is far more involved than the US FCC in regulating and streamlining their 'net.
Which is why the entire country has 100mbps today and will have 1Gbps in 2012, wireless at 10mbps and IPTV.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there? It takes a LOT of money and money to do a major infrastructure transition of any kind. (We still have to deal with 70 year old power infrastructure.)
I'm not saying many of these should be done. But, I do believe it should be handled by the gov't due to the costs involved and the tendencies of our corporate giants to not want to perform any real investment in ANYTHING other than advertising these days.
Perhaps a new 'Technology' model is required rather than a new 'Business" model. The billions spent on overlapping, competing and in many cases incompatible networks in the US seems wasteful IMHO. I realize competition accelerates progress in many cases but it seems to be a little wacky in this case. If the companies could agree on a world wide compatible standard system and pool resources to implement that strategy and share costs surely it would be a better scenario. I also realize this would require some oversight by watchdog groups (with teeth) to prevent the public getting screwed but there has to be a better way than this ludicrous waste going on now.
Entirely too much common sense for the wireless companies to provide.
We should have laid out the ground rules at the beginning of digital wireless networks differently. What you see before you is the ridiculous cacophony that results when the individual network provider is valued above the tech company, above the customer, and above the interests of the country.
Simply put, the network should have been built out with compatible protocols, and all the customer should be is in proximity to any tower to make a connection. After your call is taken an AT&T tower, it should be passed on to Verizon free of charge, and vice versa.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there? It takes a LOT of money and money to do a major infrastructure transition of any kind. (We still have to deal with 70 year old power infrastructure.)
I'm not saying many of these should be done. But, I do believe it should be handled by the gov't due to the costs involved and the tendencies of our corporate giants to not want to perform any real investment in ANYTHING other than advertising these days.
The size is nothing. We have far more customers, too. And we USED to be pretty good at technology, instead of finance, which has grown in this country like a cancer.
AT&T would be happy if they could just give the federal government all their copper. For a price. We could sell it as scrap, or give it to the boys at Caltech to tell us what we could do with it. Reroute it all and scrap all the relays: fast internet!
Finance, and Wall Street, has made us lazy and greedy, and too ready to say, "I can't do that," when what we mean is, "Comcast can't make money that way." Comcast is a bunch of coax bringing us all "I Love Lucy". Screw 'em if they can't give us what we need.
Totally agree. It seems you know what you are talking about
Bull. You're talking about totalitarian communism. Socialism is a great boon to civilization.
Or, you can go the Wall Street way, which is feudalism. I belong to Comcast/Fox -- the whole NASCAR uniform. Their squadrons of lawyers lock me down so hard I can't fart without breaking their rules.
Was Abraham Lincoln a socialist? Well, he brought in a lot of the "infrastructure investment" that we're talking about here. Not socialism. But we got a transcontinental railroad, with a lot of taxpayer funds, and we got universal education. Is that socialist?
The American right thinks they defeated the USSR based on its crazy privatist ideology. Actually, the Beatles did a lot. Blue jeans helped. The hippie movement had a big influence on Eastern Europe. Not having a European nuclear war helped. Life, as they say, is chaotic, and not single-factorial. Seeing anything as explained by a single political ideology is... totalitarian.
The objective of the current political dictionary is to erase all of the previously commonly-held definitions of economic and political systems. Once you've succeeded at that, which requires years of determined linguistic carpet bombing, completely arbitrary but far more convenient definitions can be substituted. Hardly anyone will notice. The political order of the day is to control the debate, and the country, by destroying meaning itself.
So I know that you don't know what you are talking about
I lived in what right-wing extremists would call a socialist country, Canada. It is a lot more socialistic than anything that Obama is trying to bring here.
What was your socialist country? Britain? Or a communist country? That's the difference. Conservatives elected Thatcher, and she brought down large parts of the previous policies. By vote, and by the lawful authority of Parliament. I didn't like much of it, but I didn't live there and couldn't vote.
My experience with refugees from communism is that there are two kinds: those who rejected totalitarian rule, the double-speak, the torture and arbitrary arrests -- (Bush, kaff, kaff) -- and those who are completely phobic to any of the mildest, most common-sense measures that were adopted in most countries during the 20th centuries. The state has things that it can do much better and more legitimately than a corporation. I say, when it's rational, we let the state do those things -- and we constrain its powers in the courts, in the Congress, and in the democratic process. There are those on the right who are either too hysterical or too authoritarian to admit that some things are better left to government action, because no company can (or should be) big enough to do it. Instead, they must manufacture the fiction that life under FDR and the New Deal = Stalin or Mussolini. That, to be frank, is nuts.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there?
70% of the US population lives on 2% of the land.* Fiber to interconnect these urban centers is much longer than S Korea's, but that's a small fraction of total cost.
I don't think anyone would argue in general, however either side can go too far, e.g. 2005 in the USA. The out of control, unregulated free market managed to nearly wreck the entire global economy. There has to to be balance, common sense and controls, as in most things in life.
I disagree. There's nothing out-of-control free market about the USA. EVERYTHING is regulated. And it's often the regulation that causes the problems. Look at our recent economic troubles. Much can be related to Congress regulating (read that as "interfering") in the market place. Forcing banks to loan to customers that can't possibly repay the money, etc. The Community Reinvestment Act is a joke. It was one of the main contributors to the crisis we're in today. And it's still law.
iGenius, this is getting scary. Twice now in the last week or so I find myself agreeing with you. Maybe I'll have to reread all of your posts to see where "I've gone wrong".
If you can figure out when I'm being serious and when I am not, you'll be 90% there. Here's a clue: If I say something absurd, it is unlikely that I am being serious.
That's not a good comparsion. Data doesnt have to be mined and then refined. Its not a limited commodity, the price of it doesnt rise and fall due to supply and demand. None of us complain about the prices we pay for the internet at home, whether we just check our e-mails or download music and movies.
It is a good comparison. There is still a real cost to delivering data, just as there is a real cost to delivering Gas, Electricity, or Water. The price of data usage does rise and fall due to bandwidth supply and consumer demand. The same should be true for data. If a service provider's infrastructure needs upgraded then it makes sense for them to pass the cost onto the consumers who are using that infrastructure. There needs to be competition and their needs to be metered data usage. Then a higher rate can be charge per GB of data usage if it's necessary to make important infrastructure upgrades. It's the only consistent and fair way to charge for data.
Quote:
Why should we pay the penalty for websites becoming more feature rich. The faster the internet gets the more features websites will get. Most websites are now wide screen because of flat panel displays.
I think we should pay for the data we use, not the data we might use. It's inevitable that websites will become more feature rich, however the current business model carriers follow does nothing to motivate developers to write more elegant code or output more optimized imagery. It also prevents carriers from maximizing profits so they can invest in improving their infrastructure. This is because innovation in technology cannot be accurately predicted. Innovative devices, such as the iPhone, Android, iPad, or others consume a lot of data. Their plans were based on current trends and average usage. Their business model failed them. Now they lack the capital to improve their infrastructure because they didn't anticipate data usage would spike and their plans would run them in the red because of the increase in bandwidth consumption.
Quote:
Network neutrality is something we're all for but I'm afraid that it'll eventually bite us in the ass.
Net neutrality is critical. It's important service providers don't get control over how we use data and price it differently accordingly. Anti-Net Neutrality supporters want to charge you more for consuming a 50MB video than a 50MB audio file. That's ridiculous.
This would be like an electric company charging you more for the electricity to run a microwave than the electricity to power your blender... even though they use relatively the same amount of power. Net Neutrality says, "Data is just 1's and 0's, it shouldn't matter what they add up to or are used for. I should be billed for the total data I use... not what I use the data for!"
What will bite us in the *** and hurt the most is service providers forcing us to pay higher rates for information they know we'll use more.
I disagree. There's nothing out-of-control free market about the USA. EVERYTHING is regulated. And it's often the regulation that causes the problems. Look at our recent economic troubles. Much can be related to Congress regulating (read that as "interfering") in the market place. Forcing banks to loan to customers that can't possibly repay the money, etc. The Community Reinvestment Act is a joke. It was one of the main contributors to the crisis we're in today. And it's still law.
It's also a straw man, because the CRA does not do what its (brand new) critics claim. The CRA has never required any bank to make any loan to any person. Ever. Not once. It does not to require the banks to change their lending standards. Not any. Not at all. Specifically, not. The people who are now blaming the CRA for the banking crisis are making this up for pure political purposes, and you are and many others who want to believe it, are falling for it. They are lying, plainly, simply, and factually. It is the lenders who threw out their lending standards. They did it completely voluntarily.
How about this for a business model, take all of the insane amounts of money you're reaping from customers and pump it into your infrastructure.. eventually, you'll have enough hardware to support your user base.. Telco's are penny pinching misers and they're too used to making something for nothing. They need to open up their wallet and make it rain if they want to keep their customers.. if one company doesn't, another eventually will.. and hopefully, that's what will keep them honest.
The size is nothing. We have far more customers, too. And we USED to be pretty good at technology, instead of finance, which has grown in this country like a cancer.
AT&T would be happy if they could just give the federal government all their copper. For a price. We could sell it as scrap, or give it to the boys at Caltech to tell us what we could do with it. Reroute it all and scrap all the relays: fast internet!
Finance, and Wall Street, has made us lazy and greedy, and too ready to say, "I can't do that," when what we mean is, "Comcast can't make money that way." Comcast is a bunch of coax bringing us all "I Love Lucy". Screw 'em if they can't give us what we need.
It is a good comparison. There is still a real cost to delivering data, just as there is a real cost to delivering Gas, Electricity, or Water. The price of data usage does rise and fall due to bandwidth supply and consumer demand. The same should be true for data. If a service provider's infrastructure needs upgraded then it makes sense for them to pass the cost onto the consumers who are using that infrastructure. There needs to be competition and their needs to be metered data usage. Then a higher rate can be charge per GB of data usage if it's necessary to make important infrastructure upgrades. It's the only consistent and fair way to charge for data.
I think we should pay for the data we use, not the data we might use. It's inevitable that websites will become more feature rich, however the current business model carriers follow does nothing to motivate developers to write more elegant code or output more optimized imagery. It also prevents carriers from maximizing profits so they can invest in improving their infrastructure. This is because innovation in technology cannot be accurately predicted. Innovative devices, such as the iPhone, Android, iPad, or others consume a lot of data. Their plans were based on current trends and average usage. Their business model failed them. Now they lack the capital to improve their infrastructure because they didn't anticipate data usage would spike and their plans would run them in the red because of the increase in bandwidth consumption.
Net neutrality is critical. It's important service providers don't get control over how we use data and price it differently accordingly. Anti-Net Neutrality supporters want to charge you more for consuming a 50MB video than a 50MB audio file. That's ridiculous.
This would be like an electric company charging you more for the electricity to run a microwave than the electricity to power your blender... even though they use relatively the same amount of power. Net Neutrality says, "Data is just 1's and 0's, it shouldn't matter what they add up to or are used for. I should be billed for the total data I use... not what I use the data for!"
What will bite us in the *** and hurt the most is service providers forcing us to pay higher rates for information they know we'll use more.
You contradict yourself. How can you be for metered data usage and net neutrality at the same time? Where all the comparsions fail is in the fact that the provider of bandwidth (ATT, VZ,etc...)are not also the provider of data (Google, Yahoo, Youtube, etc....). They charge the providers of data x amount and the recepients of data x amount. Electric, gas, and water companies arent paid by other companies to provide you with service. They provide the service and meter it so you pay for what only you use.
Verizon will be offering LTE for data with CDMA still being used for voice. CDMA has a good voice codec, it's well known and paid for so there is no reason to move from this tech right now. I think it'll be used for the next decade. How GSM-based networks will proceed seems less certain. NTTDoCoMo is adding LTE this year with LTE phones coming in 2011 so we'll get to see how they are handling voice by then.
I agree with you post almost 100%, but why would GSM/WCDMA networks be any different in their proceedings? They already overlay different frequencies for Voice and 384kbps DCH voice in 3G. With CS over HSPA coming out this year, the voice over 3G will be even more efficient (tenfold roughly). Makes sense to do traditional CS voice over 2G or 3G and data over LTE and HSPA(+).
LTE will undoubtedly drive VoIP (no CS voice) and that will eventually drive out old circuit switched voice as data traffic will be in the order of of a tenth of a percent per cell (10-20kbps voice of a 100Mbps cell).
As to the pay per megabyte discussion. That was tried for the last 10 years and it never worked. User's don't know how many bytes clicking on a link will cost so they will not click at all. Operators complained that data is not desired as nobody uses it. Eventually operator's in Sweden went for flat rate pricing on data on data some years ago and suddenly it took off and the declining average revenue per user (ARPU) trend turned around as they had long wanted. That's not the whole story of course, but a point to think about as well.
Comments
Well Socialism doesnt do that but the people or person does. It's actually a great ideal but people f it up.
Yes, the idea is good, but implementation... All implementations are suffering from human factor, from human nature. Until human nature be changed, every implementation of socialism will suffer from human factor
A particularly unfortunate comparison for the laissez faire crowd.
The Korean Communications Commission is far more involved than the US FCC in regulating and streamlining their 'net.
Which is why the entire country has 100mbps today and will have 1Gbps in 2012, wireless at 10mbps and IPTV.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there? It takes a LOT of money and money to do a major infrastructure transition of any kind. (We still have to deal with 70 year old power infrastructure.)
I'm not saying many of these should be done. But, I do believe it should be handled by the gov't due to the costs involved and the tendencies of our corporate giants to not want to perform any real investment in ANYTHING other than advertising these days.
Perhaps a new 'Technology' model is required rather than a new 'Business" model. The billions spent on overlapping, competing and in many cases incompatible networks in the US seems wasteful IMHO. I realize competition accelerates progress in many cases but it seems to be a little wacky in this case. If the companies could agree on a world wide compatible standard system and pool resources to implement that strategy and share costs surely it would be a better scenario. I also realize this would require some oversight by watchdog groups (with teeth) to prevent the public getting screwed but there has to be a better way than this ludicrous waste going on now.
Entirely too much common sense for the wireless companies to provide.
We should have laid out the ground rules at the beginning of digital wireless networks differently. What you see before you is the ridiculous cacophony that results when the individual network provider is valued above the tech company, above the customer, and above the interests of the country.
Simply put, the network should have been built out with compatible protocols, and all the customer should be is in proximity to any tower to make a connection. After your call is taken an AT&T tower, it should be passed on to Verizon free of charge, and vice versa.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there? It takes a LOT of money and money to do a major infrastructure transition of any kind. (We still have to deal with 70 year old power infrastructure.)
I'm not saying many of these should be done. But, I do believe it should be handled by the gov't due to the costs involved and the tendencies of our corporate giants to not want to perform any real investment in ANYTHING other than advertising these days.
The size is nothing. We have far more customers, too. And we USED to be pretty good at technology, instead of finance, which has grown in this country like a cancer.
AT&T would be happy if they could just give the federal government all their copper. For a price. We could sell it as scrap, or give it to the boys at Caltech to tell us what we could do with it. Reroute it all and scrap all the relays: fast internet!
Finance, and Wall Street, has made us lazy and greedy, and too ready to say, "I can't do that," when what we mean is, "Comcast can't make money that way." Comcast is a bunch of coax bringing us all "I Love Lucy". Screw 'em if they can't give us what we need.
Totally agree. It seems you know what you are talking about
Bull. You're talking about totalitarian communism. Socialism is a great boon to civilization.
Or, you can go the Wall Street way, which is feudalism. I belong to Comcast/Fox -- the whole NASCAR uniform. Their squadrons of lawyers lock me down so hard I can't fart without breaking their rules.
Was Abraham Lincoln a socialist? Well, he brought in a lot of the "infrastructure investment" that we're talking about here. Not socialism. But we got a transcontinental railroad, with a lot of taxpayer funds, and we got universal education. Is that socialist?
The American right thinks they defeated the USSR based on its crazy privatist ideology. Actually, the Beatles did a lot. Blue jeans helped. The hippie movement had a big influence on Eastern Europe. Not having a European nuclear war helped. Life, as they say, is chaotic, and not single-factorial. Seeing anything as explained by a single political ideology is... totalitarian.
Bull. You're talking about totalitarian communism. Socialism is a great boon to civilization.
Did you live in a socialist country? I did.
So I know that you don't know what you are talking about
Did you live in a socialist country? I did.
So I know that you don't know what you are talking about
I lived in what right-wing extremists would call a socialist country, Canada. It is a lot more socialistic than anything that Obama is trying to bring here.
What was your socialist country? Britain? Or a communist country? That's the difference. Conservatives elected Thatcher, and she brought down large parts of the previous policies. By vote, and by the lawful authority of Parliament. I didn't like much of it, but I didn't live there and couldn't vote.
My experience with refugees from communism is that there are two kinds: those who rejected totalitarian rule, the double-speak, the torture and arbitrary arrests -- (Bush, kaff, kaff) -- and those who are completely phobic to any of the mildest, most common-sense measures that were adopted in most countries during the 20th centuries. The state has things that it can do much better and more legitimately than a corporation. I say, when it's rational, we let the state do those things -- and we constrain its powers in the courts, in the Congress, and in the democratic process. There are those on the right who are either too hysterical or too authoritarian to admit that some things are better left to government action, because no company can (or should be) big enough to do it. Instead, they must manufacture the fiction that life under FDR and the New Deal = Stalin or Mussolini. That, to be frank, is nuts.
Oh, you mean OTHER THAN THE FACT that the US is much much larger than pretty much any other country out there?
70% of the US population lives on 2% of the land.* Fiber to interconnect these urban centers is much longer than S Korea's, but that's a small fraction of total cost.
(*Another 10% are near/on the fiber trunklines.)
What was your socialist country? Britain? Or a communist country?
An exUSSR country.
You should divide communist idealogy and socialist planned economy. I'm talking about economy only.
North Korea -- State-controlled and planned economy
South Korea -- Capitalism economy
Do we have to go any further to know which system seems to produce better results?
Yes. They are different in more ways that those you identify. ANd two data points is not enough information.
I don't think anyone would argue in general, however either side can go too far, e.g. 2005 in the USA. The out of control, unregulated free market managed to nearly wreck the entire global economy. There has to to be balance, common sense and controls, as in most things in life.
I disagree. There's nothing out-of-control free market about the USA. EVERYTHING is regulated. And it's often the regulation that causes the problems. Look at our recent economic troubles. Much can be related to Congress regulating (read that as "interfering") in the market place. Forcing banks to loan to customers that can't possibly repay the money, etc. The Community Reinvestment Act is a joke. It was one of the main contributors to the crisis we're in today. And it's still law.
iGenius, this is getting scary. Twice now in the last week or so I find myself agreeing with you. Maybe I'll have to reread all of your posts to see where "I've gone wrong".
If you can figure out when I'm being serious and when I am not, you'll be 90% there. Here's a clue: If I say something absurd, it is unlikely that I am being serious.
That's not a good comparsion. Data doesnt have to be mined and then refined. Its not a limited commodity, the price of it doesnt rise and fall due to supply and demand. None of us complain about the prices we pay for the internet at home, whether we just check our e-mails or download music and movies.
It is a good comparison. There is still a real cost to delivering data, just as there is a real cost to delivering Gas, Electricity, or Water. The price of data usage does rise and fall due to bandwidth supply and consumer demand. The same should be true for data. If a service provider's infrastructure needs upgraded then it makes sense for them to pass the cost onto the consumers who are using that infrastructure. There needs to be competition and their needs to be metered data usage. Then a higher rate can be charge per GB of data usage if it's necessary to make important infrastructure upgrades. It's the only consistent and fair way to charge for data.
Why should we pay the penalty for websites becoming more feature rich. The faster the internet gets the more features websites will get. Most websites are now wide screen because of flat panel displays.
I think we should pay for the data we use, not the data we might use. It's inevitable that websites will become more feature rich, however the current business model carriers follow does nothing to motivate developers to write more elegant code or output more optimized imagery. It also prevents carriers from maximizing profits so they can invest in improving their infrastructure. This is because innovation in technology cannot be accurately predicted. Innovative devices, such as the iPhone, Android, iPad, or others consume a lot of data. Their plans were based on current trends and average usage. Their business model failed them. Now they lack the capital to improve their infrastructure because they didn't anticipate data usage would spike and their plans would run them in the red because of the increase in bandwidth consumption.
Network neutrality is something we're all for but I'm afraid that it'll eventually bite us in the ass.
Net neutrality is critical. It's important service providers don't get control over how we use data and price it differently accordingly. Anti-Net Neutrality supporters want to charge you more for consuming a 50MB video than a 50MB audio file. That's ridiculous.
This would be like an electric company charging you more for the electricity to run a microwave than the electricity to power your blender... even though they use relatively the same amount of power. Net Neutrality says, "Data is just 1's and 0's, it shouldn't matter what they add up to or are used for. I should be billed for the total data I use... not what I use the data for!"
What will bite us in the *** and hurt the most is service providers forcing us to pay higher rates for information they know we'll use more.
I disagree. There's nothing out-of-control free market about the USA. EVERYTHING is regulated. And it's often the regulation that causes the problems. Look at our recent economic troubles. Much can be related to Congress regulating (read that as "interfering") in the market place. Forcing banks to loan to customers that can't possibly repay the money, etc. The Community Reinvestment Act is a joke. It was one of the main contributors to the crisis we're in today. And it's still law.
It's also a straw man, because the CRA does not do what its (brand new) critics claim. The CRA has never required any bank to make any loan to any person. Ever. Not once. It does not to require the banks to change their lending standards. Not any. Not at all. Specifically, not. The people who are now blaming the CRA for the banking crisis are making this up for pure political purposes, and you are and many others who want to believe it, are falling for it. They are lying, plainly, simply, and factually. It is the lenders who threw out their lending standards. They did it completely voluntarily.
How about this for a business model, take all of the insane amounts of money you're reaping from customers and pump it into your infrastructure.. eventually, you'll have enough hardware to support your user base.. Telco's are penny pinching misers and they're too used to making something for nothing. They need to open up their wallet and make it rain if they want to keep their customers.. if one company doesn't, another eventually will.. and hopefully, that's what will keep them honest.
The size is nothing. We have far more customers, too. And we USED to be pretty good at technology, instead of finance, which has grown in this country like a cancer.
AT&T would be happy if they could just give the federal government all their copper. For a price. We could sell it as scrap, or give it to the boys at Caltech to tell us what we could do with it. Reroute it all and scrap all the relays: fast internet!
Finance, and Wall Street, has made us lazy and greedy, and too ready to say, "I can't do that," when what we mean is, "Comcast can't make money that way." Comcast is a bunch of coax bringing us all "I Love Lucy". Screw 'em if they can't give us what we need.
I like the way you think!
It is a good comparison. There is still a real cost to delivering data, just as there is a real cost to delivering Gas, Electricity, or Water. The price of data usage does rise and fall due to bandwidth supply and consumer demand. The same should be true for data. If a service provider's infrastructure needs upgraded then it makes sense for them to pass the cost onto the consumers who are using that infrastructure. There needs to be competition and their needs to be metered data usage. Then a higher rate can be charge per GB of data usage if it's necessary to make important infrastructure upgrades. It's the only consistent and fair way to charge for data.
I think we should pay for the data we use, not the data we might use. It's inevitable that websites will become more feature rich, however the current business model carriers follow does nothing to motivate developers to write more elegant code or output more optimized imagery. It also prevents carriers from maximizing profits so they can invest in improving their infrastructure. This is because innovation in technology cannot be accurately predicted. Innovative devices, such as the iPhone, Android, iPad, or others consume a lot of data. Their plans were based on current trends and average usage. Their business model failed them. Now they lack the capital to improve their infrastructure because they didn't anticipate data usage would spike and their plans would run them in the red because of the increase in bandwidth consumption.
Net neutrality is critical. It's important service providers don't get control over how we use data and price it differently accordingly. Anti-Net Neutrality supporters want to charge you more for consuming a 50MB video than a 50MB audio file. That's ridiculous.
This would be like an electric company charging you more for the electricity to run a microwave than the electricity to power your blender... even though they use relatively the same amount of power. Net Neutrality says, "Data is just 1's and 0's, it shouldn't matter what they add up to or are used for. I should be billed for the total data I use... not what I use the data for!"
What will bite us in the *** and hurt the most is service providers forcing us to pay higher rates for information they know we'll use more.
You contradict yourself. How can you be for metered data usage and net neutrality at the same time? Where all the comparsions fail is in the fact that the provider of bandwidth (ATT, VZ,etc...)are not also the provider of data (Google, Yahoo, Youtube, etc....). They charge the providers of data x amount and the recepients of data x amount. Electric, gas, and water companies arent paid by other companies to provide you with service. They provide the service and meter it so you pay for what only you use.
Verizon will be offering LTE for data with CDMA still being used for voice. CDMA has a good voice codec, it's well known and paid for so there is no reason to move from this tech right now. I think it'll be used for the next decade. How GSM-based networks will proceed seems less certain. NTTDoCoMo is adding LTE this year with LTE phones coming in 2011 so we'll get to see how they are handling voice by then.
I agree with you post almost 100%, but why would GSM/WCDMA networks be any different in their proceedings? They already overlay different frequencies for Voice and 384kbps DCH voice in 3G. With CS over HSPA coming out this year, the voice over 3G will be even more efficient (tenfold roughly). Makes sense to do traditional CS voice over 2G or 3G and data over LTE and HSPA(+).
LTE will undoubtedly drive VoIP (no CS voice) and that will eventually drive out old circuit switched voice as data traffic will be in the order of of a tenth of a percent per cell (10-20kbps voice of a 100Mbps cell).
As to the pay per megabyte discussion. That was tried for the last 10 years and it never worked. User's don't know how many bytes clicking on a link will cost so they will not click at all. Operators complained that data is not desired as nobody uses it. Eventually operator's in Sweden went for flat rate pricing on data on data some years ago and suddenly it took off and the declining average revenue per user (ARPU) trend turned around as they had long wanted. That's not the whole story of course, but a point to think about as well.
Regs, Jarkko