Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 3:05 PM EST

Here’s a quick thought for you for the day.  Maybe even a conversation piece if you talk mobile. Why can’t we buy a bundle of megabytes from our cell phone carriers and use that bucket across all our devices.  Let’s say I buy a 2GB data plan from Telco A, I can only use that data on 1 device like my smartphone but what if I also have a tablet?  Well I need a second bucket of data.  If I also have a mobile hotspot I’d need a 3rd bucket of data.  So my question is, when are the telcos going to allow their customers to share 1 bucket of data for all the devices on a contract?  I have 3 devices (phone, tablet and mobile hotspot), my wife has 1 (just a phone) but she wants a tablet to compliment her phone, if this happens my wife and I will need 5 buckets between the 2 of us.

Think of it like this, back in the 1940’s when my track of homes was built most people had 1 car, 2 was a luxury, so they didn’t make the streets wide enough for cars to be parked on either side of the street and still have 2 cars drive past each other between the parked cars.  Why because everyone just had 1 car and it was parked in the driveway.  Now when track homes are built they make the streets wide enough for 4 cars.  Times change and so do customers needs so it’s time to give us the ability to share 1 bucket of minutes.  I know lots of businesses that spend thousands of dollars every month on separate data plans for employees though all the phones share the minutes.

Here at Phone.com we’re on the single bucket train of thought.  All our plans share 1 bucket of minutes except for our unlimited extensions.  So if you have a Virtual Office account with us and you have 2 phone numbers and 10 different extensions they all draw from 1 single bucket of minutes (except for unlimited minute extensions).  So you never have to think that you should make a call from one of your extensions versus another because one is out of minutes.  Plus you just have 1 bucket to worry about if you go over your minutes, not multiple buckets so it’s much more manageable.

–

Jeb Brilliant

Phone.com

Community Manager