The Apple iPad event is still on, and the Internet is crumbling… Twitter barely crawls, CoveritLive isn’t exactly live, the major sites providing blog coverage are barely accessible… this is iKill – the day Apple Killed The Net. 
But I want to talk about something more important:
It’s a screenshot from Engadget’s coverage. Yes, reasonable data plan prices. Except… how many of them do you need? An iPhone data plan, too? A data plan for your USB stick for the times you do need a “regular” notebook to work on?
Remember this?
Yes, phones looked like that. And there was a time when phone companies (Ma Bell) charged extra when you had more then one outlet in your home….
Remember the early days of cable TV? You had to ( well, were supposed to) pay extra for each additional cable outlet.
How about the early days of the Internet, before wireless became pervasive? Yes, ISPs expected us to pay extra for each outlet.
These anachronistic charges are all gone – we pay for the service, no matter what device we use to access it.
So why would wireless access be any different? We will soon have an increasing number of devices, but the underlying service is the same. In fact chances are when I use my iPad (which I don’t have), I will not be using my Netbook / Notebook, or browse the Net on iPhone, Google Nexus One … as a consumer I may own a variety of devices, but chances are I will only use them one at a time.
It’s time wireless providers wake up to the 21st century and charge for consumption on a per account (person) basis, not per device.
If you want to share your data plan with multiple devices you can always get a mifi. They’ll convert your 3G connection into a wifi hotspot you can share with multiple devices.
Admittedly it’s not exactly what you wanted, but I’m not sure your analogy is a perfect fit.
Every past example you cite is of fixed geographic location. There was only one line into your house.
With mobile devices each one could be connecting to a different tower, in a different city, with different costs associated.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to dump my houses’s wired connection and just have every device on 3G no matter where it is. But I think it might take longer than it did for phones or TVs.
[...] Ok, I’ve stolen that title from Jason Perlow on ZDNet. And I’ll steal from myself quite liberally, in just a moment. That’s because I fully agree with Jason, who makes the point that Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab is an attractive device, but he really wants to just outright buy it, without yet another data plan contract. His logic is simple: the Samsung Tab is a supplementary device, it will not cause extra data usage. How many times should we pay for the same thing? And this is where I “steal” from myself: [...]