Maybe, but I feel like there'd be a pretty easy calculus on it at scale— like "your competitor is cheaper. We're going with them unless you can cut your rate in half. One way you can do that is by giving us SIMs that only unlock for an hour once every 24 hours, and you can decide when that hour is, as long as we see our devices at least once a day."
This should be pretty easy to implement on the telco side and it would let them monetize the dead time in the network, same as TOU pricing for electricity.
If you ship a device with a SIM card you then need to follow regulations to ship it. This means you, the buyer, can find out from the FCC what spectrums it speaks on. I don’t think mobile connectivity is a much needed option on TVs so you won’t find it. Connecting to open WiFi hotspots is a completely different beast and doesn’t leave behind a tell-tale trace
You would think it would be easy to implement ... technically ... but one has to remember that as well as being businesses many Telcos are large hulking great slow moving monsters draped with red tape and politics - anything that changes the existing ways of doing things is often a Herculean act and that strips any dynamism in the market. Don’t misunderstand me there are many discussions in the industry around realising the kind of utopian vision you espouse but these are all bound up in committees with a typical lifespan of > 10 years ...
Well, I'll take your word for it, as it sounds like you have first hand experience and I'm just speculating. But it doesn't feel like this should be the kind of thing that requires a standards committee to be involved— it's literally just a SIM whose ID is mapped on the backend to reject connections most of the time, or be so heavily throttled as to be practically unusable. There's no new protocol needed here, just a profile added to existing traffic shaping/limiting systems, all of which already have time of day awareness in support of commonly-available features like free data after 5pm or whatever.
OTOH, perhaps it's simply a question of an insufficiently large addressable market for non-realtime data like this. Maybe there's room for an M2M-focused MVNO to negotiate a block of off-hours data for dirt cheap and offer this kind of service, maybe paired with some kind managed platform to handle the storage and transmission side.
You’d think ha. Economists have a term for this “deadweight loss”.
MVNO are probably the best place for this kind of dynamism but they are always limited by the tools that the tier 1 carriers give them.
There is stuff like you describe on the way but progress is glacial. You’ll get bits and pieces dripped out bit by bit as the big guys satisfy themselves they’re not missing out on anything.
Just a note that this was one of the puzzles Steve Jobs managed to crack. We had smart phones before the iPhones but progress was stymied by the industry - thankfully jobs recognised the potential and had the wherewithal to put the Telcos over his knee and make them his bitch.
Steve is gone now, and there aren’t too many players like that around now and you can see how gradually the smartphone market has started to tend back towards the more orthodox again.
