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O2 Scraps Unlimited Data Usage For Smartphones
Jagjr writes with news that O2, a major UK wireless provider, appears to be following in AT&T's footsteps by scrapping its unlimited data plan for smartphone customers. New customers, or ones who upgrade, will be capped at either 500MB or 1GB per month. Reader Barence adds this excerpt from PC Pro:
In a blog post defending the new policy, O2's CEO claimed 0.1% of the network's users were consuming almost a third of the traffic, while the average O2 user consumes only 200MB of data. By PC Pro's calculations, that means those 26,000 heavy users are consuming an average of 65GB per month over a 3G connection. O2 had 26 million customer accounts at the start of 2010, so it has 26,000 heavy data users. 26 million x 200MB = 5,200,000,000 MB total data usage across the network per month. 5,200,000,000MB ÷ 3 = 1,733,333,333MB per month used by the 26,000 heavy data users. That means the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month."
I work for Rogers and Fido dealership here in Canada and I can say that the vast majority of smartphone users rarely go over 1gb and most even stay within 500mb (I've been shown the internal numbers). Hell I have a dealer line with 5gb and I find it rare for me to break 2gb without tethering.
It's not the limits I have a problem with, it's the pricing. I'm sure the cost for O2's data plans are WAY higher than they need to be.
Considering that 3G allows usually something in the range of 5.2Mbps, that gives ~ 0.58MB per second effective throughput that you could record, or a total of 50 GB per day.
Tether a computer, download all of your favorites movies or whatever, and 1.5TB can be yours in the month, which is quite a lot more than the '''so big''' 65GB per month that they advertised for their top 1/1000. Now, if they were to look at the top 1/10000, I wonder what it would be like :)
I have no idea what O2's data transfer speeds are like, but look at the numbers:
65GB/month is roughly 2GB/day
2GB/day is roughly 83MB/hour
83MB/hour is roughly 230Kbit/sec.
This means that a few thousand customers are using their data connection 24/7 at an average rate of 230kbit/sec, or 8 hours a day at a rate of around 700kb/sec.
Yes, that's excessive.
But based on those numbers, you could bounce past 1GB in one day. Where is the balance here?
Hence why I just get a hard copy of the contract and actually read it. There's no gray font BS, etc. Although IANAL, tiny gray text that isn't legible on a hard copy of your contract is obviously going to make it hard to enforce the contract. The technical nitty-gritty is minimal, so even a non-techie should be able to read both pages of it, and know what the scoop is.
I recall some issue with Telus in Canada trying to terminate 3-year "unlimited" contracts for iPhones (I think it was some sort of "blogger plan", if I recall). I don't know what became of that though.
More recently, they've implemented a 5GB cap on iPads without informing the public.
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/06/01/telus-stealthy-adds-ipad-data-limit-canadian-ipad-data-plan-isnt-unlimited-as-telus-adds-5gb-limit/
A 5GB cap seems pretty fair, but Telus doesn't offer the option to just pay another $30/month if you go over your limit, no way: they'll ding you a fortune per 10MB you go over your limit. So using 10GB, instead of being 2x$30/month=$60/month, ends up being roughly $500. Fun times are had by all.