I just saw this http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/att_brings_back_free_1000_rollover_minute_offer/?utm_campaign=feature and needed to rant for a bit.
When AT&T first introduced their rollover minutes plan I thought it would be something new and useful. For anyone that doesn't know AT&T's "rollover minutes" are subscribers unused minutes that transfer over from one month to the next. As an AT&T customer at the time I thought "I get to keep what I pay for? That's awesome!" and left it at that. About a year after this plan was introduced I decided to switch over to a different carrier that didn't offer rollover minutes. When I was first considering switching I thought that I would somehow be losing something by giving up my rollover minutes. So I sat down and thought about the pro's and con's of both plans (one being cheaper, the other having rollover minutes). Until it hit me.
AT&T are evil geniuses.
Think about what a rollover minute actually is. It's a minute that given an entire month to use, you didn't. The idea is to eventually build up a bankroll of minutes that given some catastrophic series of events would allow you to spend 3 straight weeks on your cellphone. But here's the problem. If over the course of 30 days the subscriber doesn't use their total minutes there's a pretty good chance that the subscriber won't use their total minutes the next month, too. This means AT&T is charging people a premium to use something they didn't even use. It's a sales tactic so absurd it's hard to even wrap your mind around it. Imagine if a marketer outside the cellphone industry tried to pull this off. Imagine your ISP adding on 5 additional dollars a month to every price tier, and putting monthly data caps on all their plans. The 5 meg connection gives you 150 gigs of downloads a month. The average user uses considerably less than that, and probably will always do so (at least for a reasonable amount of time into the future). This would allow regular users to bankroll serious download potential, increase their opinion of their ISP ( "hey, at least I get to keep what I pay for!" ) but is actually ripping everybody off.
So beware. Anytime a company gives you something for free there is probably a reason for it. Anyone that's read this probably knows why I think AT&T does this.
They are evil geniuses. =D