3 ms·

> What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn’t seem that important. I think this is in part due to data caps. Nobody takes ad

> What consumers see is much higher data rates for the same price, which doesn’t seem that important. I think this is in part due to data caps. Nobody takes advantage of the speed, because that could mean burning an entire month's worth of data in 10 minutes.

Nursie 6y ago
In circumstances where there is such a thing as a "month's worth of data". Which is still a lot of places, but you can get truly unlimited contracts in some places now, for reasonable amounts.
- AnssiH 6y ago
  > you can get truly unlimited contracts in some places now This makes it sound like this was not possible before. But e.g. my mobile provider Elisa never did have data caps in the first place, it's been unlimited since GPRS (and no weird tethering limits either).
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Probably very country dependent! I've only had that sort of deal for the last 5ish years.
- ClikeX 6y ago
  I have "unlimited". In the sense that I have a daily 5GB cap, if I hit that I have to manually trigger 1GB more. But I can do so as much as I want.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I have (as far as I can tell) truly unlimited, including tethering. When we had trouble getting a fast connection to the house, for a couple of months we just hooked up my phone to the router and burned through 100GB+ per month, with not a squeak from the provider. These deals seem to be getting more common here in the UK, and I pay around £20 per month for it.
    - ClikeX 6y ago
      It's €25 here for unlimited. So only slightly more expensive after conversion. I really hope they'll drop the daily "limit". They can't legally complain about tethering here. But the daily abuse limit is just an annoying thing.
hnlmorg 6y ago
That whole meme about people burning an entire months worth of data in 10 minutes really misses the point though. What matters is the quantity of data you're transferring, not the duration it takes. If you're just surfing the web like usual then you're never going to be transferring gigabytes of data. In fact most of the wait time is humans reading the content rather than you magically downloading 4 GB of Javascript because you have more bandwidth (the caveat here being video streaming which usually does scale the bitrate up or down the depending on the users bandwidth; but you're still likely to quickly chew through your data allowance even on 4G).
asutekku 6y ago
We don’t have data caps in Finland and the ISPs have not lobbied for those, as most people simply do not use large amounts of data a month. We also have a relatively fast internet so if I wanted to, i could burn terabytes of data a month.

Nursie 6y ago

In circumstances where there is such a thing as a "month's worth of data". Which is still a lot of places, but you can get truly unlimited contracts in some places now, for reasonable amounts.

AnssiH 6y ago
> you can get truly unlimited contracts in some places now This makes it sound like this was not possible before. But e.g. my mobile provider Elisa never did have data caps in the first place, it's been unlimited since GPRS (and no weird tethering limits either).
- Nursie 6y ago
  Probably very country dependent! I've only had that sort of deal for the last 5ish years.
ClikeX 6y ago
I have "unlimited". In the sense that I have a daily 5GB cap, if I hit that I have to manually trigger 1GB more. But I can do so as much as I want.
- Nursie 6y ago
  I have (as far as I can tell) truly unlimited, including tethering. When we had trouble getting a fast connection to the house, for a couple of months we just hooked up my phone to the router and burned through 100GB+ per month, with not a squeak from the provider. These deals seem to be getting more common here in the UK, and I pay around £20 per month for it.
  - ClikeX 6y ago
    It's €25 here for unlimited. So only slightly more expensive after conversion. I really hope they'll drop the daily "limit". They can't legally complain about tethering here. But the daily abuse limit is just an annoying thing.

hnlmorg 6y ago

That whole meme about people burning an entire months worth of data in 10 minutes really misses the point though. What matters is the quantity of data you're transferring, not the duration it takes. If you're just surfing the web like usual then you're never going to be transferring gigabytes of data. In fact most of the wait time is humans reading the content rather than you magically downloading 4 GB of Javascript because you have more bandwidth (the caveat here being video streaming which usually does scale the bitrate up or down the depending on the users bandwidth; but you're still likely to quickly chew through your data allowance even on 4G).

asutekku 6y ago

We don’t have data caps in Finland and the ISPs have not lobbied for those, as most people simply do not use large amounts of data a month. We also have a relatively fast internet so if I wanted to, i could burn terabytes of data a month.