In a Business Insider article this weekend about Apple’s FaceTime video conferencing technology, there’s this interesting tidbit at the end:
For the next version of FaceTime that works over 3G, Apple and its carrier partners will need to decide how those calls are billed — as minutes toward voice calling, as data toward monthly data caps, or both, or something entirely different.
Once again, let us remember that with today’s mobile phones these companies are in the business of shifting data. Bits. That’s it. Voice calls are data. Email is data. SMS is data. There is no special kind of frequency or system for voice as opposed to data. There is no reason for “voice minutes.”
But the phone companies rely on the ignorance of their customer base on this count. That’s because they can still charge us using the fee structure they invented back during the age of analog cellular phones, making us pay per minute for calls. And even that is a hold over from the old long distance days, when we all were trained to think of a cost per minute. Even though this paradigm doesn’t apply any longer, it’s a great way to wrest cash out of people.
So now, we’re moving into the Jetsons future of video calls (why I don’t think that will fly is a topic for another post). And the phone companies are going to find whatever way they can to screw us. It’s voice! It’s video! It’s data! Let’s charge them THREE times for the same bits!
They’ve already done this with tethering charges, and they’ve done it with microcells running over someone else’s network. Mark my words, this is another instance where the telecoms will blithely bill us for nothing once again.
