How much?
$50 for 2GB???? What on earth are they thinking? Almost as bad a EE with their 500Mb plans.
Sprint and T-Mobile US are introducing "all you can eat" internet plans, and as you might expect, someone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco is horrified. Somebody always is. The EFF tut-tutted at dirt-poor Indian farmers getting Ceefax pages on their mobiles for free – and the Indians obligingly banned it …
The problem is that the current ISP model is like an all you can eat buffet, where one in 10 customers eats all the food, one in 100 takes his chair home too, and one in 1,000 unscrews all the fixtures and fittings and loads them into a van as well.
www.telco2.net/blog/2008/02/bbcs_iplayer_nukes_all_you_can.html
This was written in 2008 about fixed line ISP offerings, but nothing really changes ...
I already have unlimited mobile data on a second tier provider and have for the last 3 years. For $40 per month.
The catch? Throttled after 2GB from 4G to 3G. As I don't watch movies or play bandwidth sucking games or music, I'm usually not throttled until the last few days of the month.
Frankly, when I need it, it's just because I'm doing some tasks complex enough which my phone can't handle, which usually doesn't involve watching some silly movie or show. Everything is becoming so monodimensional due to media and CEOs who can't look beyond their nose people who actually use their connections in different ways are hampered in their use, and find themselves to pay more than needed.
Luckily bypassing some tether blocks is not so difficult.
I had a look at the Terms and Conditions (yes I know no one is supposed to read them) of one carriers offering Unlimited calls and text. Their idea of Unlimited calls was 2000 minutes per month which I worked out to be just over 1 hour per day. Not exactly my idea of unlimited...
I did find one operator that offered a "limited" offering of 43200 minutes per month (30 day cycle not calendar month) now that is what I call unlimited (do the maths).
In Australia "Unlimited Data" on a mobile is like Oz (fantasy land)... I keep living in hope though that one carrier will break free and the rest will have to follow.
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For some the monthly option works out cheaper. The US still has the quaint concept of minutes that expire, so you're looking at a monthly payment of some sort anyway even on prepaid. When you've got a family, the cost of adding an extra phone to a monthly plan is cheaper than adding to a set of prepaid phones.
In the UK we had a spare phone for emergencies or to lend to overseas guests with a PAYG SIM in it and provided it was interacting with the network enough, it stayed valid and didn't cost anything. It did get an awful lot of ambulance-chaser text messages though. That's not practical in the US, if you don't keep paying you lose it.
You write: " And not one, anywhere, has lasted very long." I beg to differ. Swisscom in Switzerland has been offering these all-you-can-eat/doownload packages since at least 2010 and they're still going strong.
Mind you, they have priced them accordingly.
Enjoy: https://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/mobile/subscription-tariffs/natel-infinity2-xl.html#handy=ja
I've been on Three all you can eat data for £13 a month for god knows how long, think they've forgotten I exist as the price has not changed since I first started. Regularly go over 10 GB a month as I have no need to use the work wifi. Was a godsend when I first moved into my flat as BT didn't see fit to install the internet for 2 months. Have to pay extra to tether but iirc it's only an extra fiver.
Virgin Mobile, my carrier, is now owned by Sprint. My monthly plan costs $35. No idea how many phone minutes that buys -- I never use it up. But it offers "unlimited data." Ha! After 2.5 GB they'll throttle the download speed. Got a warning last week that I'd reached 85% of allowance.
OGs like me carry GPS-enabled phones in hope the authorities will find our remains before the vultures do, so neither minutes or bandwidth are a problem for me. Does seem pretty cheesy, though. So I use Wi-Fi when I need to update the few apps I have. The Joy of Capitalism.
The one with the cheap Moto G in the pocket.
T-Mobile only knows how much tethering data you're using when it passes through their custom tethering app. Without it, tethering data is normal data like it should be. It's an odd and expensive penalty for buying your phone from a T-Mo store rather than from the manufacturer.