this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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I still kick myself for not getting one of the first Kindle models that had free 3(4?)G built in.
I don’t think it was free, you still had to pay for data
No, it was free. Not really usable for web browsing given abysmal performance of Kindle Keyboard, but 100% free.
Huh how does that even work? Amazon doesn’t have a mobile network so were they just paying some third party and eating the costs?
Yeah they were using AT&T. Remember that at the time Kindle books were limited with respect to images so you're talking a couple megabytes tops. The Lord of the Rings trilogy in its entirety, images and all, is 12MB. The primary use case was whisper sync which is just sending page numbers.
Plus this was on 3G while AT&T had moved mostly over to LTE, so you weren't competing for bandwidth with most subscribers. I imagine Amazon got a pretty good deal, but more importantly it helped cement them as the default option for e-readers.