iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| reply to swintec
Re: If its not Free, I'm not going to have it. You're forgetting that AT&T is already getting $40+ per month (or $10+ per month on a family add-a-line) for service. So they're getting paid for the infrastrucure.
An unlimited cellular plan (voice) is now hovering around $40 per month. Of course this is Verizon and not AT&T but the point stands.
VoIP has a premium of about $10 per month between minute-limited and unlimited service. There are VoIP providers that have unlimited service for under $20 per month.
As such, my estimate is that unlimited calling on femtocell pricing should be at most $10 per line for any cellular provider. Again, the $10 is a marginal cost; AT&T is already getting at least $40 per month from you for a contract plan, probably a good bit more.
For added coverage, the femtocell should be offered for free as a retention tool, or as a monthly charge or upfront purchase for ormal customers. This is in alignment with normal billing practices for extra features. The $5 per month or so would be simply for rental of the device, not per se as an addon to the person's cellular plan.On the buying side of things, the 'cell should probably be subsidized so its price is in the $100-$125 range or people won't pick it up.
On the data side of things, the femtocell should allow for unlimited data if the connection just dumps onto a customer's regular network. If there's a VPN tunnel involved even for data I can understand why this wouldn't be the case, but even then data allotments should be increased because AT&T doesn't have to spend any money between the consumer and their own backbone network to get traffic to where it needs to go. Even then pricing is about $5 per Mbit at most, or a few cents per GB... |
