And nearly every phone I've seen in the last few years is attached to a carrier that charges extra for the WiFi access point feature, and even then is limited to 5GB of data. Updating your car over LTE-connected WiFi could cost you a pretty penny.
Just ridiculous. Our carriers in Switzerland tried to pull that after iPhone brought that 'feature' to them, but this was quickly ironed out by some actual competition. We have three carriers with somewhat good coverage.
I know that the US is much larger than Switzerland, but we have four carriers with good coverage. The problem is, there's only one carrier that is both willing and able to be competitive (T-Mobile). There's another one that is willing to be competitive, but due to some technical limitations, unable to (Sprint). AT&T and Verizon are both big enough to not need to compete with anyone (including themselves).
And then you remember that AT&T and Verizon used to be the same company...
I'd argue that in a bigger country there should be more competition rather than less. Of course you have the issue with population density, but if you just look at your densely populated areas, they should allow much more competition than what you have now. Once again it seems to be lobbying leading to monopolies that hamper the economy. People need to start to understand that US style capitalism isn't really deserving its name in many fields - if a market is so skewed it can't be entered anymore, then it by definition can't be a working capitalistic system.
The flip side is that the build out of a satisfactory nation wide network ought to be a lot cheaper in total in a small country. Maybe even less political depending on how Switzerland's federal system works, e.g. how involved are cantons in telecom regulation, access issues (back haul) etc.?
I would also expect Switzerland to have less regime risk than the US.
> how involved are cantons in telecom regulation, access issues (back haul) etc.?
They aren't. I also wouldn't compare a Swiss canton to a US state - Switzerland in total is about as large and about as populated as an average US state - which is true for most
many European contries. So IMO it's a better comparison to just look at Europe as a whole and you'll probably find much more regulatory grind for the carriers. And yes, of the three Swiss carriers only one is domestic only, so the others deal with this vast landscape of regulations just fine.
So to conclude I don't see how regulations are the problem - the US with a more centralistic system than Europe as a whole should do better there. My suspicion is that because the US regulations can be influenced at the federal level, it's just much easier for Big Corp. to pour lots of money into lobbying to get their way. In European countries you (a) don't get as much ROI and (b) the political system doesn't lend itself as much to it because there is a more diverse party landscape in almost all European nations, so you would have to deal with more people to get a majority. This is why I think that the US needs two things politically:
1) a switch to a more proportional election system in order to break gerrymandering and the two-party system.
2) decentralisation for industry regulations.
Both these would lead to more difficult lobbying and it has better political representation as a nice 'side effect'.
We do have more competition, or at least we have more carriers. That was partially my point. We have one more carrier than you do (although we are much larger). The problem is merely that the competitors don't really compete too much.
Whenever I read Americans complaining about their carrier, there's lots of people saying that they can't switch because only their current carrier has the coverage they need. With good coverage I mean at least 95% of the population being covered by a particular carrier, so the people who can choose between all three are 0.95^3 ~= 86% of the population. In Switzerland all three have >99% coverage of population. Granted, that's much easier than doing it for all of the US, but how about similarly dense areas? In the US there are three metros with more people than Switzerland: New York, LA and Chicago. Note that this comparison is going easy on American carriers, since Switzerland does not have the density of a metropolitan area, and is geographically much more difficult. Do you get a choice of at least three carriers with >99% there?
On a Blackberry Z10 it's just two touches: the first touch gets the main settings menu from the top (I think the same as any Android), then hitting the Hotspot icon. I use this all the time to feed the Internet to my laptop and even a couple pieces of remote machinery. I'd expect to do this to update such a car as well. And I'm really old in HN years.
How can carriers know when the phone is acting as a hotspot, and why are those bytes more expensive?
