Editing P2p mobile carriers (section)

= Towards a better phone system =

To address the elephant in the room: '''Only nerds really care about privacy and security anyhow, and the ones who do rarely have the skills needed to make a difference.''' I’m not saying that’s a bad thing– but one needs to be aware of these factors if they want to change anything.

The reality is, security-based products are hard to sell because their value is only realised in a worse-case scenario. Before then, the customer is left trying to guess which company offers the best defence against a proverbial ghost. And since that’s the case, companies can get away with offering a sub-par solution. It would appear that the main benefit to having good “security” is psychological– at least until a real attack occurs!

What I’m getting at is this: if you want to solve these problems, then you first have to solve a problem people care about, and then you can build privacy and security in as a kind of benevolent trojan horse. Reverse haxing.

'''So what are some related problems people might care about?'''

# Pre-paid credit normally expires if more credit hasn’t been bought by a set date. '''This is a very unethical business practice.''' How is this even a thing? A customer should be able to keep what they pay for.
# SIM cards are '''designed to prevent changing carriers''' and hence are '''anti-competitive''' by nature. For a similar reason, pre-paid credit MUST expire in order to prevent a second-hand market for credit from emerging. Less competition = higher prices, and worse options.
# The anti-competitiveness of carriers is extreme in how '''competing carriers refuse to provide network access to non-customers.''' A person can be standing right next to a base station and still not have any signal. Surely there is a better way to use these resources?
# In post-paid plans there is often a fixed amount of resources that is included each billing cycle before incurring a penalty. A customer may only need a small amount but because carrier plans only offers a small range of plans at a higher price point, the customer is forced to waste resources every single month. That’s not the best experience.
# Every carrier implements their own billing systems which has generally resulted in a lot of bad billing software. Even having access to accurate usage data is not available on most operators and you only seem to find out when you’ve been penalised hundreds of dollars.
# The phone system is possibly t͟h͟e͟ ͟l͟e͟a͟s͟t͟ ͟s͟e͟c͟u͟r͟e͟ ͟s͟y͟s͟t͟e͟m͟ ͟e͟v͟e͟r͟ ͟b͟u͟i͟l͟t͟. Multiple flaws in its design allow third-parties to spy on calls, track users by their phone numbers, and remotely install spyware. It’s that bad.

'''Too long; didn’t read?''' A p2p carrier would save the customer money, prevent their credit from expiring, and even improve mobile coverage. Plus, enhanced privacy and security is always useful. I’ll show later on how a p2p carrier can also support some truly novel use-cases.

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