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I think we're getting there in some countries, at least for "mobile" needs (read: when outside the home / office). In France, I have a 40 GB mobile plan for €1

I think we're getting there in some countries, at least for "mobile" needs (read: when outside the home / office). In France, I have a 40 GB mobile plan for €10. I know I'm likely below your average phone user, but the most I used out of this was about 4 GB when my home connection was dead, and I was working from home. If I'm not mistaken, an 80 GB plan is less than €20. To me, that's basically unlimited. I can get an extra SIM for €2 a month attached to the same plan. I never bothered because an internal WWAN card for my laptop is outrageously expensive, and since I don't need it often, I just share from my phone.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Even more relevant perhaps : how many of these plans allow you to piggyback on the closest router's guest connection (from the same ISP) as long as you are in Wifi range. (Some of these routers even work as mini cell towers !)
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I think that's usually the case, but it's not transparent. You'll have to connect to a specific SSID and enter some credentials which aren't always your usual credentials and / or use some app. I've tried this once or twice a few years ago, but it was so slow that I went back to using my mobile plan.
bigiain 4y ago
I used to be involved in the captive portal at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne (previously Etihad Stadium). Usage is _very_ demographically aligned. At football games, we’d see connected device numbers somewhere around 10% of ticket sales. At a Justin Bieber show it was over 90%. I have always had more mobile data available than I need, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered using a venue’s wifi (that wasn’t for work/testing purposes) Back in the pre-Netflix days here I .au, I used to have a Raspberry Pi with a USB wifi dongle and a high gain antenna pointed at the local Mac Donalds - that’d monitor MAC addresses on their wifi waiting for one to stop transmitting, then it’d update its own MAC address to piggyback someone else’s T&C agreement, and run bit torrent until the connection ran out of its bandwidth quota, then it’d go back into monitor mode. I pirated the first couple of seasons of GoT ~500MB at a time that way…
csydas 4y ago
I get your point, and actual unlimited plans would be just fine in my opinion. I've done remote work weeks completely from a phone connection, and on average I'd use between 1.2 GiB to 4 GiB per day for just work items depending on what I needed to do. This is chats, calls, RDP, and basic web browsing. Chats likely eat up a good amount of this, but even on good mobile internet, it's not feasible to do such items over a thin-client exclusively. It'd be really nice if we could get to the stage where usage caps just weren't implemented.

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Even more relevant perhaps : how many of these plans allow you to piggyback on the closest router's guest connection (from the same ISP) as long as you are in Wifi range. (Some of these routers even work as mini cell towers !)

vladvasiliu 4y ago
I think that's usually the case, but it's not transparent. You'll have to connect to a specific SSID and enter some credentials which aren't always your usual credentials and / or use some app. I've tried this once or twice a few years ago, but it was so slow that I went back to using my mobile plan.

bigiain 4y ago

I used to be involved in the captive portal at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne (previously Etihad Stadium). Usage is _very_ demographically aligned. At football games, we’d see connected device numbers somewhere around 10% of ticket sales. At a Justin Bieber show it was over 90%. I have always had more mobile data available than I need, and I can’t remember the last time I bothered using a venue’s wifi (that wasn’t for work/testing purposes) Back in the pre-Netflix days here I .au, I used to have a Raspberry Pi with a USB wifi dongle and a high gain antenna pointed at the local Mac Donalds - that’d monitor MAC addresses on their wifi waiting for one to stop transmitting, then it’d update its own MAC address to piggyback someone else’s T&C agreement, and run bit torrent until the connection ran out of its bandwidth quota, then it’d go back into monitor mode. I pirated the first couple of seasons of GoT ~500MB at a time that way…

csydas 4y ago

I get your point, and actual unlimited plans would be just fine in my opinion. I've done remote work weeks completely from a phone connection, and on average I'd use between 1.2 GiB to 4 GiB per day for just work items depending on what I needed to do. This is chats, calls, RDP, and basic web browsing. Chats likely eat up a good amount of this, but even on good mobile internet, it's not feasible to do such items over a thin-client exclusively. It'd be really nice if we could get to the stage where usage caps just weren't implemented.