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At risk of being a cellular carrier apologist, I think the idea has some grounds. All cellular customers are not created equal. If a cell phone company sold a

by dangus 2y ago

At risk of being a cellular carrier apologist, I think the idea has some grounds. All cellular customers are not created equal. If a cell phone company sold a $50 unlimited plan and the person used it to host a video streaming business with some rackmount servers in their closet, that user wouldn't really be the same as selling a $50 unlimited plan to someone who just wants to scroll TikTok for a few hours a day. The other factor at play here is that consumers really hate tracking data usage and it's a horrible user experience. Nobody really understands what a gigabyte is and how to control usage on their phone. So really, cellular companies need to sell plan tiers based on usage patterns. Basically, they have Grandma who doesn't give a flying fuck about how nice their YouTube looks, the phone addict who needs lots of streaming video and TikTok, and then you've got the road warrior business person who needs to hop on their computer and do some serious work. In other words, they need to sell the exact same product with very similar usage terms to completely different users who have massive differences in usage patterns between them. And let's be real here, we know that someone with a laptop can push more data than someone with a phone. The workflows are different. Nobody's downloading ISOs on their cell phone. Remember that bandwidth is what cloud providers like AWS charge for. They can do that because their customers are highly technical and can understand those charges. But that business model just won't work for Joe Public on cellular networks.

hakfoo 2y ago
The "we'll throttle you after nnn Gb" is supposed to be the regulator. If they promise me 10Gb of full-rate data, it shouldn't matter whether I burn it in 30 minutes running rsync on a tethered laptop, or over 30 days of doomscrolling. Once it ticks down to the throttled 128kbps rate, then I have to decide to find a different plan. That's something they could be clear about. Instead, it tends to be buried at the bottom of a bunch of obtuse "It's unlimited, for specific values of unlimited, and here are 82 other aspects that aren't quota or bandwidth numbers that make comparison shopping difficult" statements.
- dangus 2y ago
  It’s not really buried at all. It’s right there on the basic plan descriptions for the big 3 carriers. The big 3 US carriers basically tell you that data used by the phone is unlimited with no significant throttling, and that tethering is a separate data quota with more significant throttling after your allowance. The reason this matters is that the aggregate sum of their customers aren’t realistically able to burn so much bandwidth on their smartphones that it causes issues, but someone using a tether could literally run all their home internet including hundreds of gigabytes of streaming TV that is never shut off off of a phone plugged into the wall and used as a router. But the phone company also doesn’t really want to make customers on actual smartphones have to think about data allowance on their unlimited plans. They would rather base plan tiers off of things like video download quality which are drivers of bandwidth usage and are easier to understand to the layperson. It’s could be an analogy to the same reason your car insurance company doesn’t want to insure your car if you’re using it for business purposes, because they know the costs and risks for someone using a vehicle for business are different than someone using a car for personal use, just the same way that someone using a phone to tether to a laptop is inevitably going to have a different usage pattern than someone with a smartphone in their pocket.
  - musicale 2y ago
    > The big 3 US carriers basically tell you that data used by the phone is unlimited with no significant throttling, AT&T definitely throttles you (and sends threatening messages) if (for example) you get a new iPhone and your apps and music library start syncing to it (as they might.) Note by default apps over 200MB aren't downloaded over cellular, but if you have a lot of ~200MB apps that can still add up quickly... I miss the days when you could actually back up your apps (as well as their data) to local storage. I still have copies of apps (most of which paid Apple money for) which have been removed from the app store, or no longer work on current iOS. ;-(

by dangus 2y ago

hakfoo 2y ago

The "we'll throttle you after nnn Gb" is supposed to be the regulator. If they promise me 10Gb of full-rate data, it shouldn't matter whether I burn it in 30 minutes running rsync on a tethered laptop, or over 30 days of doomscrolling. Once it ticks down to the throttled 128kbps rate, then I have to decide to find a different plan. That's something they could be clear about. Instead, it tends to be buried at the bottom of a bunch of obtuse "It's unlimited, for specific values of unlimited, and here are 82 other aspects that aren't quota or bandwidth numbers that make comparison shopping difficult" statements.

dangus 2y ago
It’s not really buried at all. It’s right there on the basic plan descriptions for the big 3 carriers. The big 3 US carriers basically tell you that data used by the phone is unlimited with no significant throttling, and that tethering is a separate data quota with more significant throttling after your allowance. The reason this matters is that the aggregate sum of their customers aren’t realistically able to burn so much bandwidth on their smartphones that it causes issues, but someone using a tether could literally run all their home internet including hundreds of gigabytes of streaming TV that is never shut off off of a phone plugged into the wall and used as a router. But the phone company also doesn’t really want to make customers on actual smartphones have to think about data allowance on their unlimited plans. They would rather base plan tiers off of things like video download quality which are drivers of bandwidth usage and are easier to understand to the layperson. It’s could be an analogy to the same reason your car insurance company doesn’t want to insure your car if you’re using it for business purposes, because they know the costs and risks for someone using a vehicle for business are different than someone using a car for personal use, just the same way that someone using a phone to tether to a laptop is inevitably going to have a different usage pattern than someone with a smartphone in their pocket.
- musicale 2y ago
  > The big 3 US carriers basically tell you that data used by the phone is unlimited with no significant throttling, AT&T definitely throttles you (and sends threatening messages) if (for example) you get a new iPhone and your apps and music library start syncing to it (as they might.) Note by default apps over 200MB aren't downloaded over cellular, but if you have a lot of ~200MB apps that can still add up quickly... I miss the days when you could actually back up your apps (as well as their data) to local storage. I still have copies of apps (most of which paid Apple money for) which have been removed from the app store, or no longer work on current iOS. ;-(