> The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one

> The way a network works, is that besides upkeep which is a small percentage of TCO, upfront cost scales with total bandwidth, not total number of packets one needs to move across a set of links. This isn't really true for wired networks, and it's extremely untrue for wireless networks. There is only so much total aggregate bandwidth available in a given area's spectrum allocation. If every device at a given base station was downloading as fast as it could, performance for all users would collapse. Wireless ISPs need to get users to limit their usage. In the past they did this by charging the byte. This confused users, and got them angry, so now they've migrated to "unlimited" plans where you effectively pre-pay for (say) 30GB per month and then get slower downloads beyond that. They've also added tricks on top of that to make it harder to use a lot of bandwidth. This includes making it harder to tether, and throttling music/video streaming services.