Has Amazon found the ultimate lock-in? Cheap cellphone service for Prime Folks in the United States might one day have another option for cheaper cellphone service: Amazon Prime. Bloomberg claims Amazon is in talks with major US carriers, including Verizon, T-Mobile US, and Dish Network, to offer low-cost phone service to Prime customers. The move, if true, isn't all that surprising. Mobile …
I switched to MVNOs years ago, first AT&T's prepaid service and now Verizon's (Visible) as of the beginning of this year. The only gotcha is that you are generally at a lower priority for data than the more expensive postpaid plans which can impact you in places like stadiums where there isn't enough capacity to go around. Hopefully that will sort itself out as 5G is deployed more widely.
That's the nice thing about eSIM, I would be able to install Amazon Prime's free service (even if it isn't free I'm sure it would have a free trial) and try it out while keeping my current service to see if it works well enough.
When troubleshooting support services for an individual life's needs, bundles represent a monolithic approach.
Problem with monolithic approaches, is that is your bottlenecked through one authentication system that if it goes down cut you off from everything.
Responsible planning acknowledges that every system has issues at times, and avoids vendor lock-in as if it were the bubonic plague.
You always have to be ready to switch vendors, or else be held hostage to artificial limitations and unexpected price hikes that puts you , the honorable civilian just trying to get by, at a disadvantage.
I say civilian because competitive economics is modeled as like unto a war game. So I differentiate soldiers (that setrying to climb the economic ladder for sport) from civilians(those who are simply trying to survive the world and and scrape what they must before eagerly returning to family and personal life)
Collectively to help ourselves we must promote casual vendor overturn. For when vendors perceive their user base secured, it is the users of those vendor's services that suffer.
That's a nice theory, but far from reality. The bottleneck is usually physical infrastructure, whether it's running lines through neighbourhoods, putting up base stations, or building retail stores. So these virtual systems, whether it's MVNO's or online shopping, are the only way to compete once an incumbent has settled in. I mean there's five hardware stores in my area, but only one in my neighbourhood - so who do you think gets 90% of business just by virtue of proximity? And if they don't have what I want the next stop is Amazon because they are literally at my door step (virtually)!
> They used to bundle a low rate cellular data connection with Kindle ebook readers so they could sell you an ebook anywhere.
That's different. e-book transfers will tolerate seconds of delay, so can run absolute lowest priority. Wait for all the talk-phone customers to take a breath at the same moment. It is only a minor annoyance to wait minutes for an e-book. And you only "need" the first 10k of e-book to start reading, the rest will trickle in faster than your eye can read. Interesting use of a switched packet network, buying the micro-slices of silence, but not generally "good service" for talk-phone or Facebook data.
> Limits on data speed and capped limits, access to 5G spectrum, tethering, and streaming video quality...
I just changed carriers. In my neck of the woods, if you have the wrong carrier, you have to stand in the driveway in a snowstorm to get one stuttering bar. AT&T is by far the best signal (I can see the tower in the cemetery) but I'm not paying AT&T's rates for my modest needs (10 minutes and 0.12GB per *month*). So MVNOs. I did not find any which excluded 5G (OTOH, none promised 5G would work). All listed data caps which may be unnoticed by many punters. All offered IMHO degraded video speed, though it was not that long ago that the median cell stream would have been considered excellent home cable/DSL service. My last cell plan nominally banned tethering but it worked great for an hour of power (and cable) failure, so that may be unenforced until all your neighbors hop on.
A 2-year buy of Tracfone cost $6/month in 2021 but Tracfone is falling apart (or Verizon, same thing). This year Cricket (AT&T puppet) is $30/month with a buggy customer portal but great service for my needs.
"I did not find any which excluded 5G (OTOH, none promised 5G would work)."
Out of curiosity, why do you want that? If your device doesn't support it or the signal isn't present, it won't be used. If your device does support it and you travel somewhere that has it, you get to use it. They tend not to exclude it because they don't really care which signal you're using, so whatever they have, they'll use that to provide you the service. The rest of your considerations make sense, but I'm not sure that finding one that is specific about that will be possible or would be helpful.
I don't think that Amazon is interested in getting into the cell carrier business (although they'd probably lend branding to another carrier if it made business sense). I suspect what they're after is connectivity. One thing that limits the usability of intelligent gizmos is that they have to be connected to the Internet which effectively means "home WiFi, router and internet connection". Cutting out these middlement opens the doors to a lot of interesting services, especially as the device is then not tethered to a location.
That's probably true, and they'd have to make the system themselves because the mobile providers I'm aware of don't tend to make it easy to buy a lot of individual connections that are mostly unused. I've commented on this before, but I wonder if the costs are really high enough that they don't want to let people have lots of connections which are charged by the data used, not by just having a line open. If I could connect something cheaply without having to pay a frequent renewal payment, I'd probably have quite a few of them.
However, if this is limited to the United States, then Amazon may have an alternative since that's also where they have the Amazon Sidewalk (use your neighbor's bandwidth) system.
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