Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Actually, I think the intent of the article is to show that while Verizon has a 4th gen awesome network, they still have a pricing framework that's about 5 years obsolete.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Spoken like someone who's never been hit with an $800 data bill.
While your interpretation is that the article is looking at the speed of Verizon's new service and then painting it in a negative light, my interpretation is that the article is about the pricing plans Verizon is introducing with their new technology and warning consumers that it's a bit like a booby trap. Take this:
"Verizon has priced LTE pretty much like 3G to encourage data sipping, not guzzling."
He is pointing out that although the service itself is vastly superior as far as speed, it is using identical benchmarks for pricing. As such, it is a warning to the consumer not to get caught unaware and be hit with a big bill. I, for one, appreciate that warning. It's the kind of thing I might not think to check when I go upgrade my smart phone to fast 4g service. I don't look at it as negative slanted journalism, but an article on how Verizon's pricing plans do not seem to be evolving at the same rate as their technology.
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.
There have been plenty of stories about the speed of Verizon's network. This is about something else. Are you suggesting that people shouldn't post stories unless they're positive? It's newsworthy that, although the plans offer great speeds, they offer very low data caps compared to the speeds. As someone who might be switching to Verizon when they get 4G phones, I'm glad that I've been reminded of this.
I mean seriously, you get as little as 1/2 hour of data a month for your $50? That is worth talking about.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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!
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
You're not trying. Where I work there is NO guest-wifi (the wifi that exists requires you to VPN from the wifi to the actual network and the VPN requires an RSA SecurID).
I listen to Pandora when at work, in order to drown out the conversations all around me + the noisy (she has to be the noisiest [sober] drinker I've ever heard) Russian woman who sits behind me.
I hit 2GB easily... I had ~3900MB last month. And the 5260MB the month before. 2000 MB in september. 1200 in August. Ever since I started working here.
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?
Sprint used to, then they amended their Unlimited plan to Unlimited* with an asterisk and a 5 gig cap.
Virgin Mobile Prepaid, however, is $40/month for unlimited 3G internet.. and uses Sprint's network. It's actually Sprint's prepaid brand.
I've pulled down 20 gigs and up per month (downloaded all my Steam games!) without issues.
However, this VM Unlimited plan is pretty new.
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.
You are exactly right, this is mimicking the early days of ISPs in that regard. However, what isn't mirrored here is that the early days of ISPs also had a much lower cost of entry. There were small ISPs all over the nation competing with eachother to gain customers with cheaper service, more time, and more features. They used to offer shell accounts, FTP accounts, free Usenet, and free personal webpage space.
Of course, as we moved to broadband, we started seeing fewer and fewer players involved, competition diminishing, extra frills slowly being removed, and now caps are coming back in.
Like wired broadband, mobile internet also has a limited number of players, high cost of entry, and I think it's more likely to drag it's heels in becoming more consumer friendly compared to the much more highly competitive early days of dial-up internet.