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Verizon LTE Can Use the Monthly Data Allotment In 32 Minutes
adeelarshad82 writes "Verizon's new 4G LTE network is so fast that you can use up your entire 5GB in as little as 32 minutes. The 2010-era speeds are soured by the 2005-era thinking on data plans. Verizon has priced LTE pretty much like 3G to encourage data sipping, not guzzling. As soon as you start using the latest high-bandwidth Internet services, your whole month's allotment can evaporate in no time. According to a test, the network's speed maxed out at 21Mbps, which means that it takes only 32 minutes to smoke up the 5GB monthly data cap on the plan. While the 21Mbps speed was hit on a low traffic network, Verizon estimates you'll be able to get around 8.5Mbps with a loaded network which still means that the cap can be exhausted in about an hour and a half."
I bet it doesn't even stop the download when you exceed the limit. It just goes on to charge per megabyte or something.
And why is this a surprise?
Come visit Australia mate.
The land of snags on the barbie and GB's by the dollar.
Oh and not to mention up until as late as last week, the largest provider in Australia (Telstra) still had 100MB plans with excess data charges that would require sacrificing a firstborn or similar.
You aren't going to hit 5 whole GB just by browsing the web. I'm interested in the latency, too.
This is what people mean about journalistic bias. No matter what the topic, no matter what the victim, journalists are always able to slant stories in a negative direction like this. What's the story? New network offers great speeds? Awesome! But no, the guy comes up with a negative interpretation and makes that the focus of the entire article. It happens again and again, and anyone who points it out gets shouted down as obviously journalists are white knights of integrity and are smarter than everyone else. That's an awful lot of undeserved respect for people who were Communications majors.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That LG device is awesome! It has a fixed USB connector (was it broken?), and status LED and and internal antenna! How feature rich!
http://network4g.verizonwireless.com/#/devices
Every cell phone company heavily advertises watching video on their network, but it was video that caused AT&T to yank their unlimited bandwidth and kill it. The second the iPad came out and people wanted to stream video (like AT&T sold them on) they freaked out.
Then again, these are the same companies that asked the government for a hand out in building infrastructure while bragging about profits, pocketed the money, and then still didn't build infrastructure. That is why you can get faster internet and cell phone data plans around the rest of the world.
I keep waiting for the free market to fix this. Shouldn't a competitor come out and win our business by responding to consumer demands and giving us fast access with unlimited data at a good price?
AT&T's network has been exposed. Sprint has a 4G network. Stand apart and keep your unlimited data while AT&T and Verizon remain in the stone age.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Just because your connection is fast doesn't mean you're going to use more data. A website that is 10MB is still 10MB whether or not you download it in 0.00001 seconds or 10 hours. Even video files have finite size. I'm not limited to how many videos I watch on Youtube by the speed I download them at.
Oh I see so we're not supposed to look at all the aspects of the story - only the good bits.
Why don't we just ban journalism all together, get straight to the point, and call advertising 'news' then?
I'm sure that Verizon's press release does a beautiful job according to your standards. So why have journalists?
Wasn't LTE supposed to give speeds up to 100Mbps? I was expecting more, 21Mbps is the max on 3G, I wasn't expecting 100Mbps but maybe something around 30-40Mbps.
You'll be waiting a very long time. Even if you really believe you will get competition in a market with a 10 figure barrier to entry, the spectrum is scarce and the federal government (in the form of the FCC) can't just license new cell phone carriers in your region all day long.
If the government simply ran it, at least there would be more accountability and transparency to the users of the system. Not to mention that the prices could be lowered to have a relationship to the actual costs, and the profits pay for schools and roads, thereby doubly stimulating the economy. But, I know, I know, the government can only run the entire military-industrial complex. :( Far better that we simply allow the owners of the telecom trust to enrich themselves virtually without limit, including, yes, government hand outs to "encourage" them to build their infrastructure, with few meaningful strings attached.
The entire pricing model of the cell carriers in the US is just the outcome of a game to see what tricks will and won't get past the feds. Charging for overages is ludicrous in general. It forces customers into the losing game of predicting their future calling needs and creates the illusion that they are responsible when they inevitably get a $400 bill. Of course, they can pay more every month to avoid that, and if the jump between the first and second pricing tier is inexplicably huge at every single carrier... can you really prove it's price fixing?
The problem with the telecoms is similar to those of the even more transparently criminal "privatized electric utilities" - who can only fail to profit if they somehow manage to build more capacity and alleviate the shortage of their commodity. Don't even get me started on the various funny attempts at market-oriented reform from the 90's.
Caps and per-megabyte charges are obviously rapacious. In a sane, well-regulated system, we could cope with scarcity by letting people pay for priority. Similar to an auction, if you pay more, then when there is contention on the network, your data rates are better than those who paid less. Easy, done.
If you can't understand why we don't already have this, why not call your senator and ask?
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Then how do you explain these glowingly positive stories about the LTE rollout on PCMag (the same site linked in this article)? Or these non-critical postings here on slashdot? Maybe journalists just like to cover different aspects of an event rather than solely regurgitate press releases.
should air travel be charged less because it's faster?
the slashdot editorial bitching has become unbearable.
...and the small print taketh away.
I have a grandfathered unlimited 3G data plan for Verizon Mobile Broadband. I use it for my primary internet access method (3 the Mifi). I exceed 15 Gb monthly on a routine basis. If it wasn't grandfathered, they'd want to charge me in excess of $100 for the overage. Now that I know about the deal with LTE, they can kiss my upgrade from 3G goodbye.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Make you pay to call on skype and it's no longer a competitor but a service they support.
If a user wants to guzzle gigabytes, Verizon wants that person to sign up for DSL or FiOS.
TFA gives the above as a reason Verizon caps the LTE service. That's stupid as Verizon has no presence in many locations like mine. In those locations I bet many people would pay more for mobile wireless broadband. What Verizon could do also is bundle that 5GB LTE with DSL or FiOS.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Welcome to America's broken mobile phone market. Customers have little to no choice that the carriers can get away with selling plans with data volume caps that made the service impractical to be actually used.
In Asia, we have the opposite, carriers sell 3G plans priced by data volume, more data = more expensive, but with the option of a FEE cap that limits the max fee you need to pay if you downloaded way over your plan's volume.
Oliver.
No. This is by no means what people mean by journalistic bias. Reporting that they have great speeds, without pointing out that you had better not actually make use of the feature for very long would be in favor of Verizon, and would be bias. Reporting the facts, and then focusing on one of the most important facts which people may not have considered and Verizon is not mentioning in their ads is not bias. Biased journalists don't write things like: "My tests maxed out at an impressive 21Mbps." They also don't allow a company representative to make their position clear on the subject like this: ""As the network evolves, other aspects around our offerings will evolve as well, and pricing is an aspect of that," he said. Let's hope so."
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think someone's been smoking a little too much medicinal pot if they think this is a good deal.
But while surfing via DSL i tend to use something like 100Meg-500Meg/Hour.
When you get a plan with a smart phone such as Android, Verizon tries very hard to sell you a data plan for $39.99 per month. This is the "unlimited" plan. the $9.99 er month plan gives a limited amount of bandwidth. An older phone tiat just does text wevsites will do just fine on that plan, but a smart phone will go over the data usage quickly. I expect that there will soon be another more expensive plan for those who want to stream movies and such.
Imagine if they priced your internet usage like this? No one would use the internet either.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe because it's tethered and being viewed with a laptop?
I'm typing this on a 17" laptop and I don't know if there will be much difference between watching a standard and an HD video on it. Sure, there would be a difference if it were being edited, but then again if so then a larger external monitor, one that can be calibrated with high fidelity, should be used instead. I got a 17" laptop specifically to have a larger display for outdoor photography, but I would not use its monitor to do much editing.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
All this hype about new 4G and it only does 21Mbps? Telstra have had that for a quite a while here in little ol' Australia (as a theoretical lab speed, at least), and I thought that was 3.5G at most. Very much the same thinking on data allotments, alas.
Why the hell are you measuring bandwidth in seconds?
Cost per tyme was used, "Nearly three cents per second?".
And why do you need over 5 GB on your phone?
Elsewhere I said why I would love to use mobile wireless broadband.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Most people aren't downloading huge amount at a time. They're checking facebook, twitter, and browsing the web. Even if they were streaming video, it'll still take a lot to reach 5 Gigabytes.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Now you know how it feels. Outrageous data prices... smoke your cap in a few minutes and then get charged $5/MB excess.
The real bottleneck that wireless carriers worry about is not their network. It's the capacity of a single cell tower to carry a finite number of simultaneous connections.
Have a look at the info about LTE frequency assignments. OK, all you hams out there, how many MHz of the frequency band to carry a data rate of 21MHz at the various assigned frequencies? How much frequency spectrum is available? Divide X by Y and you get the number of simultaneous full-speed downloads. Exceed that, and you have to start some sort of time-sharing scheme in which individual users grab a few milliseconds of exclusive ownership of each channel at a time. (Token Ring, anyone?)
Because of the way radio works, you can only get so much network bandwidth out of a particular frequency spectrum. You can do phasing tricks and subcarrier acrobatics to squeeze more out, but there will be a point at which you can't handle more devices per cell tower, no matter how much (wired/fiber) network there is behind it. And putting two cell phone towers right next to each other doesn't double the number of connections that can be handled; a phone connecting at 2410MHz to one cell phone tower will be putting out radio noise that a second tower right next to it will pick up. This is why AT&T is getting hammered in places like San Francisco and New York where there is a very high density of 3G users; they just can't add more cell towers. They're saturated; it's not because they're cheap bastards (they are), it's physics. That's how radio works.
Think of it this way: your FM radio has channels from 88.1MHz to 107.9MHz in 200KHz steps. Once all 101 channels are allocated, just "adding more towers" doesn't get you anything.
Smart phones differ from traditional cell phones in that they are "on the air" more than voice-only phones (insert teenage-girl joke here). A voice call might need 50kbit/sec for the duration of the call, and thus consume very little radio spectrum during that call (a handful of KHz). But a data session is a steady high-bitrate stream that can consume several MHz. Yes, interlacing occurs, but it really comes down to this: the limitation is how many MBits per second an allocated frequency spectrum can carry, divided by the number of simultaneous users of that frequency and their data demands. Once it's all in use, there ain't no more. Users get timesliced to slower and slower connections, until the granularity demanded by timeslicing and channel-juggling among X-thousand users of a single tower is so small that you can't even get a voice call through.
So yeah, I understand why wireless carriers would want to cap data usage. It sucks, but physics doesn't care how angry a consumer is, you can't sue to force 1000MHz of in-use spectrum to fit into 200MHz of allocated spectrum, and carriers can't throw money at physics until it goes away. Radio spectrum is a finite resource, data at a given rate requires a specific portion of that spectrum, and that's it. Something has to be capped. Data rate or data cap; something has to throttle usage, because there's not enough to go around for everyone to max it at once.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
See, I made sure to be smart and when I planned on using data, I went with a network that allowed for unlimited.
And there have always been unlimited data plans. NOT!!! I still recall the first mobile phones I saw, they were brick sized and 1 minute of use cost a lot, there were no unlimited plans.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You stupid jerks, don't you get it yet? Verizon is a crime syndicate with congress in their pocket. Its time to take the airwaves back. Wake the fuck up and stop corporate thieves from continuing to steal from citizens. JUST SHUT THEM DOWN AND PUT THEM IN JAIL. Thousands have run up $800 bills in one month of normal internet usage that they were told would cost a fixed monthly fee. Fuck the fine print, and fuck you Verizon. Can you hear me now Bitch?
Amen.
There is no free market. So you can wait forever and a day.
Shouldn't a competitor come out and win our business by responding to consumer demands and giving us fast access with unlimited data at a good price?
Competitors would if there was a free market but there isn't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Bleh, call me back when it's over 9000Mbps.
We don't have the infrastructure to support unlimited mobile data plans on a large scale yet. It makes perfect sense carriers would role out larger networks and cap data usage of mobile customers, because a handful of people would use a large portion of the data, and disrupt the reliability of the network for the rest of us. This is a neat advance, and hopefully sooner rather than later the cellular network will be able to carry the volume of data current stationary ISPs can, but we aren't there yet, and those upgrades will be expansive. The fact is that mobile data is expensive, it's expensive for Verizon to carry that data over their mobile network (and upgrade their network to accommodate it), and they're passing that cost on to their customers.
AT&T is on 3.5G with 2GB per month plans. You can download the whole 2GB in half an hour easy.
Here in Denmark, I think all 3G / UMTS providers does at least 21Mb/s. And one telecom does 42Mb/s in the large cities. That is what we call 3G. People expect 100Mb/s or more for 4G, not just some overclocked 3G
But I guess the US has been left behind and sees everything over 7.2Mb/s as 4G ?
Example:
16 mbps theoretical - 8 mbps in practice
20 GB per month
53 USD per month
This has been available since the start of 2009.
LTE is not 4G. Here in Norway, one provider is in some trouble for falsely advertising their upcoming LTE offering as 4G.
Nokia explains that LTE is not 4G here.
Maybe telecoms should be non-profit organizations.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I don't know mcuh about Virgin internet, but I can say that Spring / Clear have 4G-ish WiMax connections in Houston which run about $40-$60 for true unlimited data plans. I know a couple people that have disconnected their landline internet at home and switched over to wireless completely, and are satisfied with the decision.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Why the hell don't they just go with a utility model? Extremely low cost per MB, for example. You don't pay if you don't use it, but you're not looking at outrageous costs for going over your allowance.
What they're doing now is sucker consumers into paying for speed but then screwing them over because they can't use that speed anywhere near fullest potential.
ISPs all started offering unlimited plans back when there was little chance of anyone taxing their network. They basically followed the model of pay TV. But TV is transmitting the same amount of data constantly, whether or not it's consumed. Internet is more like electric or gas usage.
However, the prevailing model put the consumer in a situation where they were overpaying. At least until streaming media, torrents and whatnot came along. Now the tables have turned and ISPs are scrambling to find ways to put us back in a situation where we're getting screwed.
But still those damn dolby 5.1 enabled phones with high-def sound will burn your datalimit in no time at all...
Privacy is terrorism.