9 ms·

Great. Now I'll be able to use up my monthly data in 2 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Edit: I don't mean to poo-poo the advance of tech, but this really highl

Great. Now I'll be able to use up my monthly data in 2 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Edit: I don't mean to poo-poo the advance of tech, but this really highlights the disconnect between what's possible and what consumers actually want/value.

lylecubed 8y ago
T-Mobile still has an unlimited plan, right?
- pjm331 8y ago
  yup
- emodendroket 8y ago
  I'm assuming that, like most "unlimited" plans, it includes substantial data caps after the first few GB.
  - lylecubed 8y ago
    They increased it last year from 32GB to 50GB a month. Frankly, I think even a 50GB cap on an "unlimited" plan should be illegal, but it's better than most carriers. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimited-data-cap-increase-32gb-50gb-deprioritization https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimit...
    - asdkhadsj 8y ago
      I just wish they'd stop selling unlimited. Everyone. I want to pay for my bytes, and I want you (carriers) to give me the service I pay for, at an guaranteed rate. A SLA, basically. Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/
      - rayiner 8y ago
        > Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/ Consumers greatly benefit from these deals, because they pay a fraction of what it would cost to get service with an SLA. (Put another way, it costs a fraction as much to build a network with over-subscription than it costs to build a network where each user has guaranteed bandwidth.) Where I work, we pay Cogent almost $1,000 for sub-gigabit, and that's in a building with several competing providers to choose from. I pay a tenth that for consumer gigabit from Verizon. That's because I'm sharing a 2.4 gigabit PON node with 16-32 other users, and Verizon can assume that nobody will be using the full gigabit more than a small fraction of the time. If Verizon was only allowed to sell guaranteed bandwidth, they could only sell a 75 mbps service. Which would suck for the consumer when they went to go download an iTunes movie or a game on Steam.
      - zanny 8y ago
        Until there is legitimate competition in these spaces you will keep getting "up to X mbps" and "for the first 50GB, subject to change" in every providers terms. It doesn't help that actually pricing out Internet access is more complex than X cents per byte. For most providers data between the hours of 0100 to 0600 would be free because of how little network usage there is, while data from 1700 to 2300 would be most expensive due to that being when everyone is using the network simultaneously. But throughout the years there have been very few time limited unlimited plans. And even then, its not actually "expensive" to use the Internet in the evening. Its just saturated, and pressures the ISP to either throttle everyone or expand capacity. Expanding capacity is expensive, but just promising "up to X mbps" is easy and I'm surprised at how eager operators are to adopt data caps over simply throttling heavy data users during peak times. Well, I'm not really surprised, because the former lets you hit people with surprise bills for ludicrous amounts while the later just saturates your useless customer support lines with complaints.
        namibj 8y ago
        My old university dorm internet was like that. There were 3 or 4 time zones per day, and only the few hours in the middle of the night were unlimited, otherwise iirc 500GB/month, measured by double and iirc. even triple-counting during prime time and such. For some reasons they were rather oversubscribed, offering 1000BASE-T in the dorms (with some L2 crypto auth), but only had 10Gbit/s fiber uplink in a few dorms. Considering they already had active equipment on both sides, this shouldn't be much of a problem though.
    - Analemma_ 8y ago
      It's not a cap. Once you exceed 50 GB in a month your speed is throttled if and only if the cell is congested.
      - lylecubed 8y ago
        It's a limit. It's called an unlimited plan. That's deceptive advertising at best and fraud at worst.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      It's not a cap, you're just throttled. If they advertise unlimited 4g or whatever speeds then it already is illegal. No one does that though, they just say unlimited data
- celim307 8y ago
  The one plan throttles video quality at the base unlimited, unless you were grandfathered into the simple choice
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Brakenshire 8y ago
I think it depends where you are. I’ve just looked, you can get 100GB for £20 a month in the UK (sim-only), cost of data is not a big issue here. I agree top speed isn’t too much of an problem in itself, but if with contention that speed can drop a hundred fold and still provide a good connection, the leeway is worth having. And presumably there are range and robustness of connection benefits as well.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Higher frequencies... Lower range, but better channel and beam management, so better in dense cell areas. Connections should be more robust due to what's been learned about customer mgmt and use cases.
- Matrixik 8y ago
  In Poland now I have 100GB for 29zł (so around 8$). Also sim-only.
jesseb 8y ago
Yeah, I share this sentiment. I live in Canada, we get gouged bad here. Thankfully my employer covers my cell phone, because my bill would regularly be well over $100/month with the amount of data I use.
trizic 8y ago
It would be great to see wireless providers becoming competitors to home ISPs. If some day wireless speeds become comparable, the problem of having only one home ISP would go away.
- gascan 8y ago
  Couple things- the range of 5G is pretty limited. Getting a cell down the block from your house would seem to be nearly as hard as running a line to your door. Also, with wireless, never forget about bandwidth. Bandwidth is the reason living next to thirty other WiFi networks tanks your speeds (but not your cat5 speeds!)
  - zaphod12 8y ago
    that's incorrect. contention is the reason being next to all of those other wifi networks tanks your speed. Only 1 device can transmit on a given channel at a time. It's as if everyone is plugged into the same handful of ethernet cables.
    - gascan 8y ago
      Ok, maybe I used the wrong word, but I meant the bandwidth of the air. As you say, only 1 device can transmit at a time.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > Getting a cell down the block from your house would seem to be nearly as hard as running a line to your door A 5G cell will be 0.1-1.0 km in radius and cover dozens to hundreds of users. In a suburban area, that might be an entire large subdivision. The cost of getting fiber to the cell might be just as much as getting it to a fiber distribution hub in the subdivision, but with 5G once you do that you're done. With FTTH, you have to then run it to each house, which will take (in the aggregate) way longer than it took to run fiber to the subdivision. The branch factor kills you--yeah, it's just a couple of hundred feet to each house, but it's a very labor-intensive couple of hundred feet (under yards, into basements) that you have to do for each subscriber. Also, all bandwidth is shared--it's just a question of where the sharing starts. GPON--what's typically used for FTTH--involves sharing 2.4 gigabit down/1.2 gigabit up between 16-32 users per PON. That comfortably supports gigabit service with reasonable oversubscription. A 5G small cell will have less bandwidth shared between more users, but will be in the same ballpark.
gascan 8y ago
I was a little excited for 4G, because while 3G achieved respectable throughput, the latency was terrible- 4G seemed to dramatically improve. IMO 4G is pretty solid all around, and for the first time people are going, "5G? Why?"
- cududa 8y ago
  4G doesn’t work very well in heavily congested areas, and you can just fit more bandwidth over 5G by having more cells and less people on each cell
- ksec 8y ago
  >"5G? Why?" It depends. As you can read from the replies, 4G in different market has different situations. The main theme of 5G will be bringing more capacity, and lower running cost for carriers ( At least that is what they said, I am not convinced on this matter ) . Top Speed is no longer a major selling point anymore, they want more Data, and 5G will bring anywhere from 5x to 10x capacity improvements. In theory, that should mean US telecoms has incentive to provide much Data for the same price, and EU citizens will enjoy higher speed as their Data package are cheap already. The good thing abut 5G is, for possibly the first time in history Carrier is well prepared in technology stack than consumer counterparts, may of the carriers are installing and upgrading to 5G equipment now, but they are for now running 4G signals. All of them ( not just Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei ) allow software update to enable 5G signals. Those equipment already provides better LTE performance, making 4G and 5G transition much smoother. Every step from 2G > 3G > 4G were like revolution, 5G was more of a evolution of 4G.
rayiner 8y ago
Do ordinary consumers actually run into data caps routinely? When I was on T-Mobile, I used hotspot extensively and never paid attention to my data usage, but never hit the soft cap on their unlimited plan. Also, data caps grew a lot in the 3G -> 4G transition, and will grow a lot in the 4G -> 5G transition: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-caps-for-5g-home-service https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-c...
- babypuncher 8y ago
  T-Mobile only enforces their soft cap when the tower you're hitting is at capacity. Basically their soft cap deprioritizes your traffic rather than throttling it.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Yes definitely. Caps can be as low as 500MB and you can easily hit that with a few online videos and some music.
babypuncher 8y ago
I was under the impression that the real improvement in "5G" systems was in how many concurrent users they can handle, not the amount of bandwidth they can offer a single user.
- cududa 8y ago
  So, kind of. There’s two parts to it.. By creating more cells you free up the number of users per cell and the bandwidth demand on that cell, providing lower latency and higher speeds. Millimeter-wave technology is another component of 5g that is going to take a while to materialize in phones and to even solve many of it’s fundamental transmission issues. Eventually, mmwave tech will lead to massively faster speeds, but who knows if it’ll ever make sense to put in a phone.
devy 8y ago
5G wireless data plans have to be different or it won't make sense to have such high speed.
- trumped 8y ago
  more expensive plans is probably the way they'll go.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Did you have a smartphone 10 years ago? Do you remember what 3G was like? Wasn't so bad, right? Try using 3G in any metropolitan area today, a lot of times it's painfully slow. Why is that? Congestion. The reason to upgrade isn't necessarily to improve the best case performance for a single user it's to provide a better quality of service for a larger number of users. Anyone who's attended an event like comic-con or PAX knows just how easy it is for even 4G LTE to get saturated with connections.
- dnautics 8y ago
  probably part of it is also inconsiderate developers.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    And cell carriers running 3G networks with minimal spectrum. Why leave spectrum on older protocols like 3G, when it could be making your LTE network faster? Hence T-Mobile killing 3G in many areas, with 2G stuffed into the guard bands of their LTE broadcasts. Not much spectrum allocated for 2G either...
- worble 8y ago
  It still is, when you're not on a website that takes forever to load it's javascript bloat nonsense. I'd far prefer it these networks worked on expanding their coverage. Living in the south of Wales both my house and work are almost complete dead zones, and it boggles my mind this is still an issue.
tjoff 8y ago
It highlights the effects of lack of competition and a broken market. I have more monthly data than I can ever use up.

lylecubed 8y ago

T-Mobile still has an unlimited plan, right?

pjm331 8y ago
yup
emodendroket 8y ago
I'm assuming that, like most "unlimited" plans, it includes substantial data caps after the first few GB.
- lylecubed 8y ago
  They increased it last year from 32GB to 50GB a month. Frankly, I think even a 50GB cap on an "unlimited" plan should be illegal, but it's better than most carriers. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimited-data-cap-increase-32gb-50gb-deprioritization https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16334690/t-mobile-unlimit...
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    I just wish they'd stop selling unlimited. Everyone. I want to pay for my bytes, and I want you (carriers) to give me the service I pay for, at an guaranteed rate. A SLA, basically. Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/
    - rayiner 8y ago
      > Consumers get shafted on these deals. We pay for products with no agreement over what we're actually going to get. It gets tiring :/ Consumers greatly benefit from these deals, because they pay a fraction of what it would cost to get service with an SLA. (Put another way, it costs a fraction as much to build a network with over-subscription than it costs to build a network where each user has guaranteed bandwidth.) Where I work, we pay Cogent almost $1,000 for sub-gigabit, and that's in a building with several competing providers to choose from. I pay a tenth that for consumer gigabit from Verizon. That's because I'm sharing a 2.4 gigabit PON node with 16-32 other users, and Verizon can assume that nobody will be using the full gigabit more than a small fraction of the time. If Verizon was only allowed to sell guaranteed bandwidth, they could only sell a 75 mbps service. Which would suck for the consumer when they went to go download an iTunes movie or a game on Steam.
    - zanny 8y ago
      Until there is legitimate competition in these spaces you will keep getting "up to X mbps" and "for the first 50GB, subject to change" in every providers terms. It doesn't help that actually pricing out Internet access is more complex than X cents per byte. For most providers data between the hours of 0100 to 0600 would be free because of how little network usage there is, while data from 1700 to 2300 would be most expensive due to that being when everyone is using the network simultaneously. But throughout the years there have been very few time limited unlimited plans. And even then, its not actually "expensive" to use the Internet in the evening. Its just saturated, and pressures the ISP to either throttle everyone or expand capacity. Expanding capacity is expensive, but just promising "up to X mbps" is easy and I'm surprised at how eager operators are to adopt data caps over simply throttling heavy data users during peak times. Well, I'm not really surprised, because the former lets you hit people with surprise bills for ludicrous amounts while the later just saturates your useless customer support lines with complaints.
      - namibj 8y ago
        My old university dorm internet was like that. There were 3 or 4 time zones per day, and only the few hours in the middle of the night were unlimited, otherwise iirc 500GB/month, measured by double and iirc. even triple-counting during prime time and such. For some reasons they were rather oversubscribed, offering 1000BASE-T in the dorms (with some L2 crypto auth), but only had 10Gbit/s fiber uplink in a few dorms. Considering they already had active equipment on both sides, this shouldn't be much of a problem though.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    It's not a cap. Once you exceed 50 GB in a month your speed is throttled if and only if the cell is congested.
    - lylecubed 8y ago
      It's a limit. It's called an unlimited plan. That's deceptive advertising at best and fraud at worst.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    It's not a cap, you're just throttled. If they advertise unlimited 4g or whatever speeds then it already is illegal. No one does that though, they just say unlimited data
celim307 8y ago
The one plan throttles video quality at the base unlimited, unless you were grandfathered into the simple choice
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Brakenshire 8y ago

I think it depends where you are. I’ve just looked, you can get 100GB for £20 a month in the UK (sim-only), cost of data is not a big issue here. I agree top speed isn’t too much of an problem in itself, but if with contention that speed can drop a hundred fold and still provide a good connection, the leeway is worth having. And presumably there are range and robustness of connection benefits as well.

sgt101 8y ago
Higher frequencies... Lower range, but better channel and beam management, so better in dense cell areas. Connections should be more robust due to what's been learned about customer mgmt and use cases.
Matrixik 8y ago
In Poland now I have 100GB for 29zł (so around 8$). Also sim-only.

jesseb 8y ago

Yeah, I share this sentiment. I live in Canada, we get gouged bad here. Thankfully my employer covers my cell phone, because my bill would regularly be well over $100/month with the amount of data I use.

trizic 8y ago

It would be great to see wireless providers becoming competitors to home ISPs. If some day wireless speeds become comparable, the problem of having only one home ISP would go away.

gascan 8y ago
Couple things- the range of 5G is pretty limited. Getting a cell down the block from your house would seem to be nearly as hard as running a line to your door. Also, with wireless, never forget about bandwidth. Bandwidth is the reason living next to thirty other WiFi networks tanks your speeds (but not your cat5 speeds!)
- zaphod12 8y ago
  that's incorrect. contention is the reason being next to all of those other wifi networks tanks your speed. Only 1 device can transmit on a given channel at a time. It's as if everyone is plugged into the same handful of ethernet cables.
  - gascan 8y ago
    Ok, maybe I used the wrong word, but I meant the bandwidth of the air. As you say, only 1 device can transmit at a time.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > Getting a cell down the block from your house would seem to be nearly as hard as running a line to your door A 5G cell will be 0.1-1.0 km in radius and cover dozens to hundreds of users. In a suburban area, that might be an entire large subdivision. The cost of getting fiber to the cell might be just as much as getting it to a fiber distribution hub in the subdivision, but with 5G once you do that you're done. With FTTH, you have to then run it to each house, which will take (in the aggregate) way longer than it took to run fiber to the subdivision. The branch factor kills you--yeah, it's just a couple of hundred feet to each house, but it's a very labor-intensive couple of hundred feet (under yards, into basements) that you have to do for each subscriber. Also, all bandwidth is shared--it's just a question of where the sharing starts. GPON--what's typically used for FTTH--involves sharing 2.4 gigabit down/1.2 gigabit up between 16-32 users per PON. That comfortably supports gigabit service with reasonable oversubscription. A 5G small cell will have less bandwidth shared between more users, but will be in the same ballpark.

gascan 8y ago

I was a little excited for 4G, because while 3G achieved respectable throughput, the latency was terrible- 4G seemed to dramatically improve. IMO 4G is pretty solid all around, and for the first time people are going, "5G? Why?"

cududa 8y ago
4G doesn’t work very well in heavily congested areas, and you can just fit more bandwidth over 5G by having more cells and less people on each cell
ksec 8y ago
>"5G? Why?" It depends. As you can read from the replies, 4G in different market has different situations. The main theme of 5G will be bringing more capacity, and lower running cost for carriers ( At least that is what they said, I am not convinced on this matter ) . Top Speed is no longer a major selling point anymore, they want more Data, and 5G will bring anywhere from 5x to 10x capacity improvements. In theory, that should mean US telecoms has incentive to provide much Data for the same price, and EU citizens will enjoy higher speed as their Data package are cheap already. The good thing abut 5G is, for possibly the first time in history Carrier is well prepared in technology stack than consumer counterparts, may of the carriers are installing and upgrading to 5G equipment now, but they are for now running 4G signals. All of them ( not just Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei ) allow software update to enable 5G signals. Those equipment already provides better LTE performance, making 4G and 5G transition much smoother. Every step from 2G > 3G > 4G were like revolution, 5G was more of a evolution of 4G.

rayiner 8y ago

Do ordinary consumers actually run into data caps routinely? When I was on T-Mobile, I used hotspot extensively and never paid attention to my data usage, but never hit the soft cap on their unlimited plan. Also, data caps grew a lot in the 3G -> 4G transition, and will grow a lot in the 4G -> 5G transition: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-caps-for-5g-home-service https://www.pcmag.com/news/357374/verizon-no-4g-level-data-c...

babypuncher 8y ago
T-Mobile only enforces their soft cap when the tower you're hitting is at capacity. Basically their soft cap deprioritizes your traffic rather than throttling it.
IshKebab 8y ago
Yes definitely. Caps can be as low as 500MB and you can easily hit that with a few online videos and some music.

babypuncher 8y ago

I was under the impression that the real improvement in "5G" systems was in how many concurrent users they can handle, not the amount of bandwidth they can offer a single user.

cududa 8y ago
So, kind of. There’s two parts to it.. By creating more cells you free up the number of users per cell and the bandwidth demand on that cell, providing lower latency and higher speeds. Millimeter-wave technology is another component of 5g that is going to take a while to materialize in phones and to even solve many of it’s fundamental transmission issues. Eventually, mmwave tech will lead to massively faster speeds, but who knows if it’ll ever make sense to put in a phone.

devy 8y ago

5G wireless data plans have to be different or it won't make sense to have such high speed.

trumped 8y ago
more expensive plans is probably the way they'll go.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

Did you have a smartphone 10 years ago? Do you remember what 3G was like? Wasn't so bad, right? Try using 3G in any metropolitan area today, a lot of times it's painfully slow. Why is that? Congestion. The reason to upgrade isn't necessarily to improve the best case performance for a single user it's to provide a better quality of service for a larger number of users. Anyone who's attended an event like comic-con or PAX knows just how easy it is for even 4G LTE to get saturated with connections.

dnautics 8y ago
probably part of it is also inconsiderate developers.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  And cell carriers running 3G networks with minimal spectrum. Why leave spectrum on older protocols like 3G, when it could be making your LTE network faster? Hence T-Mobile killing 3G in many areas, with 2G stuffed into the guard bands of their LTE broadcasts. Not much spectrum allocated for 2G either...
worble 8y ago
It still is, when you're not on a website that takes forever to load it's javascript bloat nonsense. I'd far prefer it these networks worked on expanding their coverage. Living in the south of Wales both my house and work are almost complete dead zones, and it boggles my mind this is still an issue.

tjoff 8y ago

It highlights the effects of lack of competition and a broken market. I have more monthly data than I can ever use up.