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> Over here, unlimited mobile data means unlimited mobile data. This. Although India has the cheapest data next to Finland, the ground reality is quite differe

• dheera 6y ago
  I really wish the US could institute some legal framework against deceptive advertising. Unlimited should mean unlimited, not throttled. If you are offering a 20GB plan, just say you are offering a 20GB plan. I've tried to use a 4G hotspot to setup my laptop and do work in outdoor parks but the number of times I can do that per month is limited.
  • jiggawatts 6y ago
    This kind of thing was forced upon Australian telcos, and it's great for consumers. For example, they can no longer advertise the "up to" speeds, they have to use the "typical evening speed", which is what's more relevant to the actual experience.
    • voltagex_ 6y ago
      It doesn't apply to LTE plans though - at least that I've seen. If you want an interesting test, find someone with a Telstra post-paid plan, and get a Boost Mobile SIM in another phone. Run speedtests side by side. Boost, although it's technically Telstra Pre-Paid, seems to be heavily throttled.
      • xuki 6y ago
        I have a legacy Telstra plan that allows unlimited data, it's truly unlimited.
        • fphhotchips 6y ago
          Assuming that you have the Ultimate plan as I do, have you found a way to get a new phone on it without losing the amazing roaming privileges?
          • xuki 6y ago
            I don't think so :(.
      • paranoidrobot 6y ago
        I thought it was well known that MVNOs are on lower QoS/prioritisation than the carrier's own main brand(s)? A mate works for Optus and had for a while a bunch of different iPhones of the same generation for testing. Each had the same OS version/etc. One on Optus Business, one on Retail Postpaid and one on a reseller (iirc Virgin). Speed tests side by side were pretty interesting. You could quite clearly see the business service was getting prioritisation over all the others. Retail was generally better than the Reseller by quite a margin. Some locations (like shopping centres) would restrict the reseller from working at all, and retail would be clamped down on bandwidth.
        • viraptor 6y ago
          Does it actually impact speed or just QoS? I'm on an Optus reseller network and basically can't see any problems - 1080p streaming and Duo video calls work without and with low latency. Even if I'm prioritised lower than business, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
          • paranoidrobot 6y ago
            It definitely affected throughput. i.e take the phones out, and run all the speed tests at once - the business plan was guaranteed to run faster. It wasn't like it was an issue with one particular phone just being better - you could swap the sim cards between phones and no matter what device the business sim was in, it got the best throughput. How they actually implemented it I don't know, all we could go on was based on some testing from an end-user perspective.
            • viraptor 6y ago
              I should've been more explicit. I meant, does it impact speed in a meaningful way? Once we can send+receive real time high quality video stream on a retail plan... Does it matter that is slower than the business one?
              • paranoidrobot 6y ago
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      I've long thought those should be legally pro-rated. Based on distance and signal quality there's a "per user" number for all of these. If you said "X" but based on my distance you can only give me 0.75X then that's how much I pay. There should be a real financial incentive to upgrade their lousy infrastructure.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    It's tricky because for 98% of consumers, "unlimited" is unlimited enough. The realities of operating a mobile network mean you will be throttled when there are a lot of users in your cell so that your Youtube stream drops from 4k to 480p so that someone can browse their Facebook feed. How to advertise this so it isn't deceptive? I'm not sure. https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2dmfnSarDI?feature=oembed https://www.youtube.com/embed/E2dmfnSarDI?feature=oembed
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      The bitrate you get when on "unlimited 480p" is typically 1.5Mbps. The bitrate you get when most plans throttle is 128Kbps, less than a tenth of that speed.
  • conanbatt 6y ago
    Nothing is infinite however. The concept of unlimited is never correct without disclaimers.
    • hansvm 6y ago
      That's just a distinction between "as much data as you _want_" and "as much data as you're _able_" to download though. I think the latter fits better into a common understanding of the term "unlimited" as it pertains to data usage, especially when the pricing tiers are explicitly based on max throughput and thus have an implicit max data transfer volume.
    • eru 6y ago
      Well, it's limited by the advertised max speed times one month (per month).
  • pathseeker 6y ago
    >Unlimited should mean unlimited, not throttled. Throttled is still unlimited in the same way as any other connection. Your connection is always throttled, it's just a question if there are two different speeds with the latter triggering after a particular threshold.
    • msh 6y ago
      If there is a threshold then it's not unlimited!
    • dheera 6y ago
      On many carriers you get only 2G speeds after you hit a certain point. I consider that disingenuous and deceptive to call it "unlimited" data when 2G speeds are basically unusable for most modern apps.
    • Sharlin 6y ago
      That’s just semantic trickstery.
  • mr_toad 6y ago
    > I really wish the US could institute some legal framework against deceptive advertising. Trouble is that the politicians are some of the worst offenders when it comes to deceptive advertising.
  • eru 6y ago
    Legal frameworks are mostly there to help the people / companies with the better lawyers. What you are looking for is competition, and lower barriers to entry.
    • Sharlin 6y ago
      Do you have any examples of competition leading to more honest advertisements? It seems to me that it mostly leads to a race to the bottom that just optimizes for hiding your dishonesty better.
      • eru 6y ago
        Of the top of my head: grocery retail in the UK and the impact of the German hard discounters Aldi and Lidl. The UK used to be famous for really confusing strategies, like bogus discounts (50% off on an item that's just priced 2x normal), or buy-3-get-5 offers, that sometimes mysteriously wouldn't be registered at checkout. The UK regulator often dinged the supermarkets for such behaviour, and gave them various stipulations. But as far as I can tell, they only really got better when Aldi and Lidl seriously started taking market share. Aldi and Lidl have a very German no-nonsense approach to advertising. There's a single simple price that you pay. Similarly in the UK, the regulator always told off the retail banks for their bad behaviour, but they never really changed their tune much. I am hoping that challengers like Monzo are changing that. (I left the UK nearly three years ago, so I don't know how retail banking has come along in the meantime.) UK retail banks usually advertise that their accounts are 'free', but then have lots of hidden fees. Monzo doesn't have those hidden fees. (Eg when you try to make a transfer when you are out of money, Monzo just fails your transfer. My previous British retail banks charged you for that. And they typically gave you an 'unarranged overdraft' that you couldn't decline.) Keep in mind that these are two examples of the top of my head. You can probably find more with a more scientific inquiry. > It seems to me that it mostly leads to a race to the bottom that just optimizes for hiding your dishonesty better. Do you have any examples of that? Competition usually leads to customers getting more of what they are willing to pay for. Of course, that's not always what customers say they want, if you ask them outright. (Eg Starbucks sells well. But what they are selling is not what people say they value in coffee. I wouldn't call that dishonesty on Starbucks site. People pay for having a spot with free wifi to idle or work while sipping some acceptable beverages. People who go to Starbucks are not there to satisfy a distinguished taste in coffee. But Starbucks advertisement compliments on their good taste, anyway.)
• flak48 6y ago
  Can confirm I've had a similar experience, especially recently. A 4g hotspot worked perfectly for my work from home situation up until July. Post July I started seeing significant degradation in connection quality on Zoom calls that didn't occur on a WiFi network in the same house. Plus reduction in overall speeds beside Zoom during specific times of the day almost like clockwork, this too in recent months also made me feel that there is some hidden throttling at play.
  • shiftpgdn 6y ago
    This is a good use case for a VPN.
  • iagovar 6y ago
    That may be just saturation, which isn't rare if a lot of people is connected to the same BTS. Your ISP can do little to nothing about it.
• aero-glide 6y ago
  Indian here. I just use the 3GB/day plan + 50GB top-ups when required. I get a constant 40-50Mbps. My monthly average is around 100GB. Internet cost is around $8 for 55 days. 50GB top-ups cost an extra $4.
  • devxpy 6y ago
    Yeah, same plan. Maybe the throttling is region specific.
• closeparen 6y ago
  >ended up getting a fiber line. This seems like the market functioning correctly. People who can be hardwired should be hardwired, so that scarce RF spectrum is available for those who don't have an alternative.
  • ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
    I'm not sure an economist would call that a case of a well-functioning market. The parent poster pretty much gave up on a product because the information asymmetry made it impossible to choose something that could satisfy his/her needs, and to compare options. If there had been an option to pay maybe twice as much for the subscription to get a reliable connection while saving the cost for establishing fiber, wouldn't all market participants then have been better off?
  • eru 6y ago
    Economics is seldom about absolutes. It's about trade-offs. Ie how much would it inconvenience you to be hardwired vs the other guy? How much are you willing to pay?
    • closeparen 6y ago
      I’m sure there is a price for which you could actually saturate an LTE connection around the clock, but it would be a “we’ll fly out some engineers to sit down with your engineers” kind of deal. Not offered through a mass market consumer sales channel.
      • eru 6y ago
        Depends on the market, I guess? Saturating the connection between your handset and the LTE cell tower shouldn't put that much of a strain on the fibre glass backhaul of the tower. At least where I live, I doubt it would warrant flying engineers around some planes. (But then, you'd be hard pressed to find a domestic hardwired connection below 500 Mbps. 1 or 2 Gbps are more common for domestic connections here. And we have some spots with faster than gigabit LTE connections.)
  • 6y ago
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  I'm using my Jio hotspot as WFH occasionally. It works well, can't say I've hit any hidden limits. Just need to be careful not to blow through the 2GB daily limit by watching some Youtubes.