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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 used to be an O2 customer until about 8 months ago when they silently changed my (sim only) contract that I paid an extra £7.50 per month to get unlimited data. This was on top of the £15 pound I paid for calls and text messages. They silently amended the "fair use" policy from 4Gb per month to 500Mb. They did not reduce the £7.50. I immediately jumped to a different company and told them why after having been a customer for about 5 years or so.
There network in the UK has been hopelessly overloaded since they got the exclusive deal on the iPhone. In central London you would be unable to get a line quite regularly. They are desperately trying to keep their network alive without spending any money since they know most people will now be leaving them since the iPhone is available from other networks.
I dont read
What if I want to use tons of bandwidth and pay for it? I want to stream MythTV to my smartphone; I want to keep my phone continually synchronized with my fileserver at home (including any pictures or videos I take), even if I'm in another state; I want to be able to listen to any of the hundreds of gigabytes of music available to me, be they on YouTube, the Internet, or my fileserver at home no matter where I am; I want to connect a Bluetooth webcam to my phone and stream everything that happens to me to a remote server.
I'm willing to pay for that; why aren't they willing to offer the bandwidth to do it? It'll be expensive, but there's bound to be some people for whom price doesn't matter, and it's not like a real unlimited plan is going to take up extra space on their shelves. Why not offer a real unlimited plan, at its actual price?