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A comment on The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About. Parent comment

Re:The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About by mindslight on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @07:41PM (#10461983)
It seems like you could solve the "new line" problem within a constant factor - just pay the cost for a pool of triple the number of "lines", which then get allocated a day ahead of time by spending a bearer token (round-tripped through eg TOR such that the provider cannot link the new and the old). Device "identities" can be reused because the mix pool is constrained by the subscriber base anyway.

I'd worry about the IMEI/etc becoming a secret token that could be reused after it was assigned to someone else's device. But even if the SIM's technology couldn't fix that, it could be fixed at a higher level after gaining network transit.

But yeah, I was teetering between $30M and $100M for my estimate, and the unknown unknown wtfs pushed me on up :>

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Re:The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About by schoen on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @07:48PM (#10462015)
I'm not positive whether it counts as a "new line" if you swap existing lines of existing users, but maybe there's some way to arrange it to avoid triggering the tax every day for every single user.
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