8 ms·

4G is fast enough for me right now. My problem is the ridiculous pricing of wireless data. In ideal circumstances, I can hit nearly 75mb/s over LTE... but that

4G is fast enough for me right now. My problem is the ridiculous pricing of wireless data. In ideal circumstances, I can hit nearly 75mb/s over LTE... but that just means that I could burn up my entire 3GB allotment in under 6 minutes. At $15 for the next 3 gigs, my marginal cost is nearly $1/minute for full-speed 4G data.

mkane848 10y ago
Even between wifi at home and work, streaming Spotify while driving and miscellaneous app usage off wifi gets me to basically 4GB a month. I can keep downloading more songs since I'm on Premium, but I think even with that I still actively have to watch my data usage and make a conscious effort to conserve data. I dunno, it's just nuts to try to do anything online without breaking your data cap in the world of 1080p and high quality audio streams
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Your carrier might be "zero-rating" your music streaming provider. A lot of them do now.
pkaye 10y ago
I doubt wireless data will get really cheap give than wireless bandwidth has a physical limit. There is only so much capacity and the infrastructure is not cheap so providers need enough customer to subscribe to pay for it. That means oversubscribing customers or throttling in some manner. Ask yourself if you would prefer 75mb/s for burst use vs 75kb/s sustained use?
- jacquesm 10y ago
  All bandwidth has a physical limit. Without seeing the books on capacity planning for your average wireless provider it is impossible to know what the current situation really is but with what I know of telcos if they can get away with billing for 'air' they definitely will. Note how it is just about impossible to get any usage statistics other than 'per person' from the various providers. See also: 'roaming charges' and 'air time'.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    Everyone bills for what they can--that's why you pay $2/GB for more flash on an iPhone. The question is: why do data caps persist despite pretty much everyone having four different major carriers to choose from, plus often one or more MVNOs?
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      > why do data caps persist despite pretty much everyone having four different major carriers to choose from, plus often one or more MVNOs? For the same reasons that it took government intervention in Europe to get rid of roaming charges.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        Which is what? What market failure was that a response to?
        jacquesm 10y ago
        Carrier collusion.
        rayiner 10y ago
        Not only is there no evidence of carrier collusion in the U.S. market, the idea doesn't even make logical sense. Cartels are inherently unstable.[1] Participants only have an incentive to continue colluding when everyone is making money. T-Mobile is barely breaking even, and Sprint is actively losing money. It's absurd to argue they are colluding to protect a status quo they don't benefit from. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainabil...
        jacquesm 10y ago
        I think you missed the word 'Europe'. And of course, in America there would never be such a thing as carrier collusion, that's totally unthinkable, so what those carriers in Europe were up to would not at all be done on other continents.
- vardump 10y ago
  That's pretty much what the carriers want you to think. Their main talking points to convince you. https://levels.io/korea-4g/ https://levels.io/korea-4g/. He used 4 TB of 4G data for $48. Yup. In high density South Korea. Or maybe you'll want 200 GB plan in low density Sweden? 699 SEK/month (~$82), rather expensive as Nordic countries go, but at least no one can say I'm cherry picking. http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/ http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/. Please don't buy the propaganda spread by the carriers. It's just full of excuses. In their material you'll hear about how difficult it is to provide service for some unusual special case, like a stadium somewhere during a huge event and that's why. Stop asking, just buy our overpriced plan.
- norea-armozel 10y ago
  The reality is the scarcity of bandwidth is minimal because the infrastructure itself gets cheaper the more customers you have. So adding a new tower or just adding more hardware to existing towers is a fixed cost which it's effects go down with the number of paying customers. This is classic economies of scale working in the favor of the Telcos they just don't want to admit it.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    "Economies of scale" means that your per-customer costs go down as you get more customers.[1] Cellular deployment has almost no economies of scale. Deploying a new cell tower costs the same whether you already have 10 towers or 100. Meanwhile, just a handful of users can saturate a tower and/or its backhaul, so more customers requires smaller cells and more towers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Most towers peak below 50% utilization as bandwidth decreases with range. So, your average cost drops. Put another way, to have good coverage and 1 customer would be ridiculously expensive. There are always going to be areas with few customers. You add towers in areas with lot's of customers.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        Your average cost only drops over a relatively narrow range: from where N towers is enough to support your users to where N+1 towers are necessary. After N is big enough to cover your area, cost still goes up basically linearly with the number of users (just in a saw-tooth fashion rather than a straight line). It's totally unlike the costs of any service with real economics of scale, such as software.
        Retric 10y ago
        Your thinking in terms of a small coverage area. Networks needs to be nationwide and users are not limited to a single tower. As density increases infrastructure can more closely map to usage. Net effect if 50 million people take X towers then 100 million people take less than 2x towers.
- gst 10y ago
  Wireless is much cheaper in other countries. In Austria I can get a LTE flatrate (no hidden data limits, tethering allowed) for around 20-30 Dollars a month (depending on the speed, see https://www.drei.at/portal/de/privat/tarife/internet-tarife/internet-fuer-zuhause/ https://www.drei.at/portal/de/privat/tarife/internet-tarife/...). The wireless carriers there compete with the cable providers and market their product as cable replacement. In the US the cheapest flatrate costs around 100 Dollars, and even then the amount of included data for tethering is still limited to some ridiculously low amount (I think something like 16 GB for T-Mobile).
  - rayiner 10y ago
    Boost and MetroPCS offers unlimited LTE with hotspot for $55-60/month.
    - gst 10y ago
      "For unlimited smartphone LTE data plan, full available speeds apply to 6 GB of hotspot data per payment cycle, then speeds slowed for remainder of payment cycle."
      - jlappi 10y ago
        For example, StraightTalk gives 5GB at 4G speed, however will slow you to 56Kbps (yes, dial-up speed) after.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        That's for the hotspot. You get unlimited LTE on your phone for that price.
        khedoros 10y ago
        gst was talking about a mobile plan offering unlimited tethering/hotspot access. You're comparing that to a much more expensive plan with unlimited on-device LTE but limited hotspot access (8GB on Boost).
- acdha 10y ago
  It's true that it has limits but does a monthly quota make any sense as a way to prevent that? Right now, you pay the same for a photo upload during a 4am backup window as you do for uploading the same photo during e.g. a ballgame where 10,000 other people are doing the same thing. If you were trying to run a network, wouldn't you instead have things like differential pricing based on traffic priority or payment plans which allow you to pay more for a greater share of the available capacity? That would directly align the users’ interests with the network operators’ and would provide a strong incentive for things like backup software to make sure they send traffic with a low QoS level and back off when the network indicates congestion. Most people aren't going to care if their phone waits until they leave the stadium to upload their photos but that'd make a huge different for the network operator having to handle 50,000 people in a small area.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It's a bullshit argument that exists because the US has allowed the industry to rebuild Bell System style telcos, unlike those anti-business socialists in places like South Korea. Without a strong regulatory hand, the carriers' incentive in the US to to provide the highest return for the spectrum they've acquired. That extracting the highest revenue for the smallest capital investment -- means fewer towers optimized for coverage vs speed. Performance optimization requires more smaller facilities, which is capital intensive and appears wasteful from a Verizon/AT&T POV.
joshkpeterson 10y ago
5G is not about speed, but about supporting millions more devices on the network in IOT applications.
bogomipz 10y ago
Agreed. Don't need it, don't want it. Every new generation of wireless broadband has greater and greater spectral efficiency and yet none of that savings is ever passed on to the customer. The rates we pay to move bits over a radio interface is extortionate. The carrier will use 5G to sell phones and a largely uninformed public will line up to to buy them.
anentropic 10y ago
sounds like a lack of necessary regulation enjoy your libertarian ideologies and try not to get shot

mkane848 10y ago

Even between wifi at home and work, streaming Spotify while driving and miscellaneous app usage off wifi gets me to basically 4GB a month. I can keep downloading more songs since I'm on Premium, but I think even with that I still actively have to watch my data usage and make a conscious effort to conserve data. I dunno, it's just nuts to try to do anything online without breaking your data cap in the world of 1080p and high quality audio streams

bogomipz 10y ago
Your carrier might be "zero-rating" your music streaming provider. A lot of them do now.

pkaye 10y ago

I doubt wireless data will get really cheap give than wireless bandwidth has a physical limit. There is only so much capacity and the infrastructure is not cheap so providers need enough customer to subscribe to pay for it. That means oversubscribing customers or throttling in some manner. Ask yourself if you would prefer 75mb/s for burst use vs 75kb/s sustained use?

jacquesm 10y ago
All bandwidth has a physical limit. Without seeing the books on capacity planning for your average wireless provider it is impossible to know what the current situation really is but with what I know of telcos if they can get away with billing for 'air' they definitely will. Note how it is just about impossible to get any usage statistics other than 'per person' from the various providers. See also: 'roaming charges' and 'air time'.
- rayiner 10y ago
  Everyone bills for what they can--that's why you pay $2/GB for more flash on an iPhone. The question is: why do data caps persist despite pretty much everyone having four different major carriers to choose from, plus often one or more MVNOs?
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > why do data caps persist despite pretty much everyone having four different major carriers to choose from, plus often one or more MVNOs? For the same reasons that it took government intervention in Europe to get rid of roaming charges.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      Which is what? What market failure was that a response to?
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        Carrier collusion.
        rayiner 10y ago
        Not only is there no evidence of carrier collusion in the U.S. market, the idea doesn't even make logical sense. Cartels are inherently unstable.[1] Participants only have an incentive to continue colluding when everyone is making money. T-Mobile is barely breaking even, and Sprint is actively losing money. It's absurd to argue they are colluding to protect a status quo they don't benefit from. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainabil...
        jacquesm 10y ago
        I think you missed the word 'Europe'. And of course, in America there would never be such a thing as carrier collusion, that's totally unthinkable, so what those carriers in Europe were up to would not at all be done on other continents.
vardump 10y ago
That's pretty much what the carriers want you to think. Their main talking points to convince you. https://levels.io/korea-4g/ https://levels.io/korea-4g/. He used 4 TB of 4G data for $48. Yup. In high density South Korea. Or maybe you'll want 200 GB plan in low density Sweden? 699 SEK/month (~$82), rather expensive as Nordic countries go, but at least no one can say I'm cherry picking. http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/ http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/. Please don't buy the propaganda spread by the carriers. It's just full of excuses. In their material you'll hear about how difficult it is to provide service for some unusual special case, like a stadium somewhere during a huge event and that's why. Stop asking, just buy our overpriced plan.
norea-armozel 10y ago
The reality is the scarcity of bandwidth is minimal because the infrastructure itself gets cheaper the more customers you have. So adding a new tower or just adding more hardware to existing towers is a fixed cost which it's effects go down with the number of paying customers. This is classic economies of scale working in the favor of the Telcos they just don't want to admit it.
- rayiner 10y ago
  "Economies of scale" means that your per-customer costs go down as you get more customers.[1] Cellular deployment has almost no economies of scale. Deploying a new cell tower costs the same whether you already have 10 towers or 100. Meanwhile, just a handful of users can saturate a tower and/or its backhaul, so more customers requires smaller cells and more towers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale.
  - Retric 10y ago
    Most towers peak below 50% utilization as bandwidth decreases with range. So, your average cost drops. Put another way, to have good coverage and 1 customer would be ridiculously expensive. There are always going to be areas with few customers. You add towers in areas with lot's of customers.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      Your average cost only drops over a relatively narrow range: from where N towers is enough to support your users to where N+1 towers are necessary. After N is big enough to cover your area, cost still goes up basically linearly with the number of users (just in a saw-tooth fashion rather than a straight line). It's totally unlike the costs of any service with real economics of scale, such as software.
      - Retric 10y ago
        Your thinking in terms of a small coverage area. Networks needs to be nationwide and users are not limited to a single tower. As density increases infrastructure can more closely map to usage. Net effect if 50 million people take X towers then 100 million people take less than 2x towers.
gst 10y ago
Wireless is much cheaper in other countries. In Austria I can get a LTE flatrate (no hidden data limits, tethering allowed) for around 20-30 Dollars a month (depending on the speed, see https://www.drei.at/portal/de/privat/tarife/internet-tarife/internet-fuer-zuhause/ https://www.drei.at/portal/de/privat/tarife/internet-tarife/...). The wireless carriers there compete with the cable providers and market their product as cable replacement. In the US the cheapest flatrate costs around 100 Dollars, and even then the amount of included data for tethering is still limited to some ridiculously low amount (I think something like 16 GB for T-Mobile).
- rayiner 10y ago
  Boost and MetroPCS offers unlimited LTE with hotspot for $55-60/month.
  - gst 10y ago
    "For unlimited smartphone LTE data plan, full available speeds apply to 6 GB of hotspot data per payment cycle, then speeds slowed for remainder of payment cycle."
    - jlappi 10y ago
      For example, StraightTalk gives 5GB at 4G speed, however will slow you to 56Kbps (yes, dial-up speed) after.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      That's for the hotspot. You get unlimited LTE on your phone for that price.
      - khedoros 10y ago
        gst was talking about a mobile plan offering unlimited tethering/hotspot access. You're comparing that to a much more expensive plan with unlimited on-device LTE but limited hotspot access (8GB on Boost).
acdha 10y ago
It's true that it has limits but does a monthly quota make any sense as a way to prevent that? Right now, you pay the same for a photo upload during a 4am backup window as you do for uploading the same photo during e.g. a ballgame where 10,000 other people are doing the same thing. If you were trying to run a network, wouldn't you instead have things like differential pricing based on traffic priority or payment plans which allow you to pay more for a greater share of the available capacity? That would directly align the users’ interests with the network operators’ and would provide a strong incentive for things like backup software to make sure they send traffic with a low QoS level and back off when the network indicates congestion. Most people aren't going to care if their phone waits until they leave the stadium to upload their photos but that'd make a huge different for the network operator having to handle 50,000 people in a small area.
Spooky23 10y ago
It's a bullshit argument that exists because the US has allowed the industry to rebuild Bell System style telcos, unlike those anti-business socialists in places like South Korea. Without a strong regulatory hand, the carriers' incentive in the US to to provide the highest return for the spectrum they've acquired. That extracting the highest revenue for the smallest capital investment -- means fewer towers optimized for coverage vs speed. Performance optimization requires more smaller facilities, which is capital intensive and appears wasteful from a Verizon/AT&T POV.

joshkpeterson 10y ago

5G is not about speed, but about supporting millions more devices on the network in IOT applications.

bogomipz 10y ago

Agreed. Don't need it, don't want it. Every new generation of wireless broadband has greater and greater spectral efficiency and yet none of that savings is ever passed on to the customer. The rates we pay to move bits over a radio interface is extortionate. The carrier will use 5G to sell phones and a largely uninformed public will line up to to buy them.

anentropic 10y ago

sounds like a lack of necessary regulation enjoy your libertarian ideologies and try not to get shot