Great interview! Really liked the point about companies reimbursing workers for a phone and cell coverage since it’s a major part of their work and also ridesharing companies benefit when workers have good cell connections! With drivers, you’ll even see workers with multiple phones and/or tablets to manage the different services easily...
It’s totally in the ridesharing companies’ interests to incentivize driver adoption of productivity enhancing technologies/equipment. The simplest way to do it is just pay for it.
sort of a side note, but i do wonder why data/cell service is so expensive in the u.s. because the cost is really the device + the plan, right? in the uk i pay £10 a month for 12gb of data + unlimited talk/text + free eu roaming, just wildly cheaper than anything i ever saw in the u.s.
That's a really great question. Based on some data I was looking at US avg cost per GB is like 10x more expensive than the UK [0] which is mind boggling (how much more accessible could we make the web if it was 10x cheaper?). I believe part of the reason of this huge delta is the lack of antitrust scrutiny in the telecoms space in the US, whereas there are a ton of mobile operators in Europe. Here's an interesting article I read from Matt Stoller on the T-Mobile and Sprint merger: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-up-sprint-t-mobile
Great interview! Really liked the point about companies reimbursing workers for a phone and cell coverage since it’s a major part of their work and also ridesharing companies benefit when workers have good cell connections! With drivers, you’ll even see workers with multiple phones and/or tablets to manage the different services easily...
It’s totally in the ridesharing companies’ interests to incentivize driver adoption of productivity enhancing technologies/equipment. The simplest way to do it is just pay for it.
sort of a side note, but i do wonder why data/cell service is so expensive in the u.s. because the cost is really the device + the plan, right? in the uk i pay £10 a month for 12gb of data + unlimited talk/text + free eu roaming, just wildly cheaper than anything i ever saw in the u.s.
That's a really great question. Based on some data I was looking at US avg cost per GB is like 10x more expensive than the UK [0] which is mind boggling (how much more accessible could we make the web if it was 10x cheaper?). I believe part of the reason of this huge delta is the lack of antitrust scrutiny in the telecoms space in the US, whereas there are a ton of mobile operators in Europe. Here's an interesting article I read from Matt Stoller on the T-Mobile and Sprint merger: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-up-sprint-t-mobile
[0] https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/#pricing
10x!!