Verizon just announced Save Everthing plans (http://tcrn.ch/LYyxpS). Get one bag of minutes, text & data and share across the family.  The cost can get high for a family of four (in the $250 a month range), but still – looks like a deal.

And it got me thinking: are we looking at the start of the wing of the pendulum back to all-you-can-eat?

When we first had cell phones, we paid by the minute and got ugly bills.  Then the phone companies built out the infrastructure, and got to the point where it made better business sense to have a predicatable revenue flow (and ore appealing offerings) to get everyone to pay for unlimited time.  In the States, we then all fell in love with texts and they milked us for a while…and then started offering plans that made the cost predictable.  Then data came along – all-you-can-eat, they said, basing their projections on not-smart phones.  Along comes the iPhone and destroys the network, so we get ratcheted down – but if hostory is any guide to the future, we will eventually get back down to all-you-can-eat of some kind, just as soon as the infrastructure can handle the traffic.  Assuming this happens, I think it’s fair to say we will then have a repeating/repeatable model that we can apply to other things.

One of those things is the delivery of Internet to the home.  Look, for the time being the only ratcheting down is in terms of speed – you know you can order different speeds in your package, even though we all hare, I think, a nagging suspicion that this is a bit of a shell game (the burst-y nature of Internet means we’re getting only roughly what we’re paying for).  We also know the cable companies would like to throttle this service so we can pay them some more, especially as we start to consume more content on the web rather than through the cable box itself: there’s plenty of ‘experiments’ going on by the big providers.  If our model is correct, however, we’ll end up going through a rather unpleasant period where they’re nickle-and-diming us to death, followed by some relative tranquility with high set prices but no surprises.

I’m still not convinced that TV is dead, despite the feverish predictions of the pundits (most of whom, so far as I can see, have shares in Web TV start-ups!) – in the end, the infrastructure companies (cable, satellite, etc) are still going to deliver the entertainment to our homes, and we’re still going to need someone to tell us what to watch (which is really all the networks do).  I am convinced that the infrastructure providers are going to be casting around looking for changes to their model that keep the dollars flowing, regardless of what we consume and how we consume it…and that if there’s a cable or satellite provider that doesn’t have the capacity to provide us Internet, they are worth shorting right now.

In the end, everything will/should come back to a fixed fee whenever the variable costs go constant (i.e. when it makes little-to-no difference to the provider how much of a given product their customers use): once there’s enough bandwidth that the system doesn’t croak, it’s more expensive for, say Verizon, to track what we’re all using than to sell us an unlimited chunk for a predictable revenue stream.  Eventually, I believe every service will reach this point.  It’s during the build-out phase when there’s a limited supply (and thus a high variable cost when more people start using – and exhausting – it) that the pricing goes loopy.  Here’s hoping that the appearance of Verizon’s new plans marks the start of a new phase for all wireless providers, and the harbinger of what’s to come in home internet infrastructure,