Tag Archives: Carriers

Business, Economy, Media, Mobility, Technology

Free Nights and Weekends Makes a Comeback

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Remember when you could make free mobile calls after 9:30 PM weeknights, and all weekend? For awhile the mobile carriers competed on the time when “off-peak” started, from 10 PM to 8:30 PM. A whole hour and a half! These days we have unlimited domestic calling all the time.

So, now we have varying degrees of data plans, such as AT&T Wireless 3 GB, 9 GB, or unlimited per month, but there are caps where after 22 GB data transfer speeds are slowed down.  22 gigs seem like a lot until you have kids using Snapchat and TikTok.

When you think about it, data peak is when you may not be in a hot spot. At night, you’re at home using your own WiFi, or at an establishment with their complimentary WiFi. Weekends and weekdays are a bit scattered. Your work may have WiFi, but weekdays “on peak” are mostly commuting times, the “rush hour(s)”,

Can wireless carriers bring back on and off-peak for data?  The simplest approach:  “turn off the meter” during off-peak data periods.  Maybe on-peak the consumer can elect 5G, when available, and off-peak at 4G LTE? Our Smartphones can identify low consuming bandwidth opportunities, e.g. when the phone is locked, text messages without graphics and email are semi-passive states. Maybe users are able to prioritize their apps data usage? What about those “chatty” apps that you rarely use? Smartphone settings may show you those apps bandwidth consumption as opportunities to prioritize them lower than your priority apps.

Skeptic, and think there are no Peak or Off-Peak periods with data?  Check the business analytics.  I’m sure wireless carriers have a depth of understanding for their own business intelligence (BI).

Business, Mobility, Technology

Where is My .fon Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD)? .tel doesn’t cut it.

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Every phone number in the world should have an IP address and a domain name associated with it, hence the gTLD proposal for .fon for every phone number.  Things like us.emergency.fon = 911 would be possible.   In addition, a group of cloud vendors would be awarded management of sections of these domains, which may be aligned to the phone number carrier, or if they don’t have the capability, they can ‘sell’ or ‘lease’ out the resource to a third party Internet Provider and Cloud Vendor, similar to the way we sell mortgages, or the mortgage companies sell off our mortgage.

Not only would the service of management of the domain name correlated to an IP address and a phone number, but each IP would have a virtual image managed in the cloud, which could provide to the consumer, cloud storage for storing public and private documents, as well as a ‘home page’, cloud computing cycles for the consumers public and private applications, as well as enabling the services: VoIP, text and email messaging.

These services may be provided free for some basic subset, and the extended subset would charge the customer, e.g. for additional cloud storage space.  In addition, the client may choose to move their service to another provider.  A public index.html home page, and a private index.html home page could be created, so a person may design their own portal, e.g. containing widgets, frequently used numbers, news widgets, etc.  These pages scale downward to a mobile device or up to a high resolution image, e.g. addressable HD television.