I use GoPhone on a Canadian iPhone and it works fine. I buy 200 MB of data when I need data for a US trip. I understand that AT&T iPhones may not work on GoPhone (because AT&T prevents it from working) but non-AT&T ones (e.g. unlocked ones sourced from Apple, or officially unlocked by foreign providers) seem to work fine. So it can be done.

You're right, but you won't like the implication.

The solution is to not sell unlimited bandwidth. If AT&T sold data in packages by amounts, people would use that amount. If they went over, they'd pay more. They could raise their package to a higher allotment for a higher cost.

This would do two things:

1. AT&T would generate more revenue which would let them develop better cellular infrastructure to meet demand.
2. (And more importantly in the short term) It would discourage consumption. Lower consumption equals higher levels of service for those who choose to pay. If consumption is far below what the network can handle, a rate reduction will increase demand. If consumption is too high, a rate increase will reduce it (or supply extra funds for network improvement, if demand remains high).

Cellular never was unlimited at its beginning. We paid for blocks of minutes. As technology improved and supply of airtime increased, airtime prices went down. Unlimited airtime didn't appear for years after networks began.

Unlimited usage services are great if that usage doesn't harm other users. This is often true. Landline capacity is so high that local calls rarely interfered with others who wanted to make calls. There was no need to reduce call length. Long distance bandwidth, on the other hand, was relatively scarce (it wasn't uncommon to be unable to make long distance calls on Mother's Day or Christmas due to the trunks being full) so long distance rates discouraged people from calling unless they had the need. That also kept call length down which freed up the resource.

I'm not saying data needs to be expensive... it's just not practical for it to be unlimited, that's all; not, at least, until there's enough LTE and other technologies deployed so that everyone can use the technology and not be greatly affecting other users.

As a final point, some might argue that competitors are managing their bandwidth better. That might be true, and if so, people will be motivated to change providers. This will do as much to solve the problem as anything.

The cellular companies let us down in a way, letting us taste this cheap bandwidth and now we want to stream video and audio over it, download huge files, and access network content like we're at home no matter where we are. The airwaves can't handle it. It's time for a paradigm shift.

(I live in Canada, but we have similar problems. This isn't unique to AT&T.)

Whether it's obscene or not, it's a 9.9% reduction in EBITDA since 2010 (.464/.422 - 1). It's very significant.

If it continues then changes will definitely occur.

One has to remember that the wireless business is a pretty high-risk business. It is very capital-intensive and customer demands are quickly increasing (it wasn't long ago that 2G was more than good enough; now we want multiple megabits per second and we want it now).

That's something people forget about analog technologies.

A few years ago I still had an analog bag phone in my car (I had a digital phone too but I had the analog phone on another network because I knew it would have better coverage and, well, I'm a geek and I though it was cool to have a bag phone that still worked and had active service). One day, in rural Saskatchewan, out on some remote highway where my digital phone didn't work, my wife called me. My bag phone rang. I answered. The call was badly staticky but I could understand her, and she could understand me, and we could have a conversation. On the coverage map, there wasn't even any coverage there but an analog phone could sometimes work well enough that you could still use it.

This aspect of analog isn't always good - the static and noise of analog TV is pretty annoying, and I love getting beautiful HD ATSC signals now - but if you had bad signal, noisy analog was always better than the unusable signal you'd get using a digital technology.

It's the same with photography to some degree. A scratched negative can be salvaged, but a corrupted digital file is probably not usable at all.

I like digital technologies fine, but the point about a worn VHS tape being annoying as compared to a worn DVD being unusable is a completely valid one.

I miss one thing about it: it was easy to record something and then let someone else watch it. Oh, you missed Television Show last night? Here's the tape. (Tapes were also cheap so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't get the tape back.)

Of course, you can do this today but it's significantly more work to do it. I actually picked up a cheap DVD recorder so that I can dump content onto DVD painlessly, but unfortunately it won't turn HD video downconverted into 480i into anamorphic format so that you can still watch it as widescreen content. It's less work to go get the HD torrent, but I have a little better technical knowledge than the average person.

Automatic tracking and automatic tuning became universal in VCRs after a few years and helped a lot.

I bought my first VCR in about 1990 - I know, late adopter - and it had both of these features. It even had a "cable eye" that would let it control cable boxes (and it still works on modern digital cable boxes, although the highest channel number it will take is 199).

Once we got automatic tracking on VHS VCRs - which if I recall became common in the late 1980s - this problem substantially disappeared. You could still manually track automatic-tracking VCRs if you knew how, and once in awhile it was helpful to avoid video or audio distortion.

The consistent issue I saw was that of the three recording speeds - SP, LP (doubled recording time) and EP (tripled recording time), few VCRs supported LP well. Video usually disappeared during fast forward and rewind tape scanning, when it wouldn't using the other two speeds. Also, most "modern" VCRs won't record at LP speed although they will play it back. Still, it was not very commonly used.

I'm not against using analog technology (I still do my photography with film after all) but it's relatively easy to get around the my-computer-died problem. My digital music is on a server with RAID-1 disks for redundancy, and is backed up nightly to both a local external hard disk and a remote plug computer (at a family member's house). I'll never lose much, if anything, if I have a catastrophe unless it takes my family member's house out too. (3 km between us, so possible, but unlikely.)

I buy my music on CDs and rip them though - that way I have a pressed original, too, and I can determine the ripping. That lets me have both FLAC and MP3 rips, and I have the original CDs to play if I want.

I don't know what they call them in the US, but in Canada, what you call a "news agent" is a newsstand.

Indeed I made a typo, but the iPhone is more than the sum of its parts. It's not just what it does... it's how it does it and how easy it is to use.

In any event, the market has spoken. The market doesn't always make the best decisions, but Apple is giving people what they want and other companies aren't succeeding as much in that regard. Apple's profitability says it all.