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The UK's 5-Minute 4G Data Cap
Barence writes "The tariffs have been announced for Britain's first 4G network and they include a data cap that customers will break within five minutes. EE's high-speed data service will start from £36 a month — or £21 a month SIM-only — although the lowest package's 500MB download limit might put data-focused early adopters off. With EE claiming average network speeds of up to 12Mbits/sec, that means users could theoretically exceed their cap in just over five minutes of full-speed downloads — or a little over ten seconds a day. There are no unlimited data deals."
So, guys... how's that whole "Let the market decide" argument working out for you? Capitalism works great for non-critical, non-infrastructure goods and services... but when it gets its hands on something everybody needs, it's gonna take you to the cleaners. Every single time.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
My cap is 500MB in Canada, granted I'm not on 4G currently. Regardless, if you have such a low cap you probably aren't using your device for bandwidth intensive applications when on data, if I want to watch videos, etc. I wait until I'm on WiFi (and networks are available virtually everywhere, at least in Ottawa where I live). You can also reverse-tether your phone to a computer if there is no WiFi around. That being said, I do disagree with the idea of data caps, looking forward to switching from Bell to Wind when my contract is up (as they offer unlimited data).
They found out what the capacity of the whole network is, and divided by the number of people that could potentially buy a smart phone.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
#ERROR: Bandwidth usage exceeded.
What a joke. Here in Portugal, I have not bought a "4G" iPad, because the "unlimited service", with a hidden clausule of a "fair use" of 15GB only allows you to work for 1 week or at most two until it gets capped to 128kbps. With 12Mbps, Id guess that in a weeks time with fairly modest use you will exceed the cap.
If the bottom plan (500MB) is five minutes (10 seconds a day), the top plan is only 8GB, which, by my calculations, is only 16 times.
So... 160 seconds a day on average? That's the maximum plan?
What's the point of even having speeds that fast? (besides marketing)
Some things never change: http://faildesk.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2011-08-30-Verizon-Data-Plans.jpg
by the telecom operator just to show that they've a 4G network ready. Happened in India when operators started coming out with their 3G tariffs. Look ma, my network is on 3G now, although I admit I can't use it for more than a few seconds a day!
Data, data, everywhere,
Nor any cap can take
Obviously they don't want people using it. They just want you to pay for nothing. I don't imagine this is going to be too popular. They are going to have to be less miserly if they want paying customers.
Rs[ecially your heart, and prolonged exposure to such acceleration is likely to cause oxygen shortage in parts of the brain - and permanent brain damage
9.8 Metres per second squared should be enough for everybody.
Don't sign up. When they see the lack of custom - they will rethink the idea/deals.
In many cases people are their own worst enemy by signing up to things that are not in their favour. Apply an evolutionary curve to problems, let bad ideas/products die/ let the good ones survive.
In some ways, I'm surprised that no mobile vendors have realised that they could decimate the old school ISP model with an aggressive take on this. All you can eat for £25 a month. They would unhinge the old bandwidth supply models too - as business realises that its mobile workers benefit greatly from an always on/always available model over the old 'on this WAN/LAN/WWAN model. A £60 all you can eat business tariff. Yum Yum.
We`re all equal
Once they get their network set up they will sweep the competition.
We'll have cheep prices, but some fear the evil Google overlords.
Pick your poison.
Also if you don't think Google will move to wireless broadband once they steamroll their ground fiber, you're a fool.
There was never a bad time to invest in this company, and I say this with a fear of what a company that strong can do.
Bandwidth in the air is limited, and everyone has to share. Perhaps this will teach some people to return to wired connections.
I'm in Austria and I just have to say ... I love my ~$20/month, unlimited everything cellphone plan. I'm moving back to the US in a few months and it's going to be tough.
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
Imagine if even 25% of the new phone buyers took a look at these plans and said, "Wow, that's a terrible option. I'm going to roll back to my old Nokia flip-phone and wait for industry to get its act together."
Yeah, well... they don't do that. They keep buying overpriced cable, ridiculous cell phone plans, Nickelback, lies by politicians, McRibs, etc.
The problem is that the consumers will deny themselves nothing, and if it's a bad deal, they just pass the buck along to someone else.
Over here, we can take a full 20 minutes to use all of ours unlimited data plan at 12MB/s. (For the non-residents, unlimited has a different definition in the US, usually 2GB a month)
$31.50/month service that includes voice, text and data*.
* Includes up to 50 MB of data per month. 15 per additional MB.
Frankly, apart from email, I don't see how useful 50MB can be. Forget websites, YouTube or Netflix, even 500MB wouldn't be enough for that. But 50MB is a sick joke if you ask me.
The premise is wrong. At 12Mbps, it takes 44 minutes to move 4GB.
according to their site, http://ee.co.uk/plans#section-phones, the 500mb option is on the cheapest plan. for 36gbp you get 5gb. The previous highest i could find when shopping around early in the year was 2gb from vodafone.
While I would prefer an unlimited plan, this doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, or am i missing something?
If you bring your own 4g phone, you can have unlimited calls and texts, with 5gb of 4g data, for less than $60 USD a month.
For comparison, pay $50 to t-mobile prepaid in USA, and I'm pretty sure you get unlimited calls and texts with 500mb of data.
Considering this is a the first 4g service offered in the UK, I really don't think that price is unreasonable at all.
just to use it?
Faster data rates just mean that you will finish your download faster. The data doesn't get any bigger. If you are downloading the same content you would have downloaded at a slower rate you won't hit your cap any faster at the higher rate.
Sure, phones are useful, and they help us be more productive (sometimes) but we don't need it. It's not a human right and it shouldn't ever be. I also would vouch for these providers in this case because just like how a new TV comes out to market, you don't expect to only pay $200 for it, you pay $15,000 -- well some do. And it is those people that you should be grateful to. I remember when cellphone calls cost $2/minute and internet was about the same price. Instead of complaining, enjoy how this new network is becoming available.
And it calculates around 330 seconds (5.5 minutes)
As for where you got 4GB...
I fail to see what all hype about 4G is about.
How is this at all different from US data plans?
I can theoretically exceed my bandwidth allowance for the month in 20 minutes (4 GB @ 25 Mb/s).
That isn't even a full order of magnitude better than 5 minutes quoted in the summary.
What are the price of spectrum and the price of tearing up roads other than "ACTUALLY artificial prices"?
What they'll "rethink" is 4G service, not their pricing. If customers aren't signing up, why invest in new equipment when your old, mostly paid for by now, 3G network is making you more money and the customers have nowhere else to go?
Having been on Orange at work, and then transferred to T-Mobile, I find it hard to believe the EE's service will provide anything like this kind of throughput. You'd be lucky to hit 500MB downloading non-stop for a month.
With Orange, the 3G data service was frequently utterly unusable. Imagine coming out at Oxford Circus in London and trying to use maps on an iPhone and giving up waiting for it to load and it being quicker to walk around Soho in circles to find your intended destination. Or taking the train to Edinburgh and data connections timing until shortly after leaving Newcastle when suddenly the connections starts flying (bandwidth shaping or over-subscribed?)
On T-Mobile, when my connection stalls, I find I have a T-Mobile Orange signal. Forcing it back to T-Mobile fixes the throughput. Recently a colleague was changed to EE and seems to be only getting Orange's data service.
"average network speeds of up to 12Mbits/sec" since when do 'average' and 'up to' refer to the same thing?
Anyone who has looked at the utterly ludicrous and swingeing bandwidth caps and the data rates of 4G would have seen this coming. I really don't see ANY reason for these high speeds unless it comes with a monthly cap of at least 50GB or more to justify it.
Who needs local apps and data?
Just hope that your ability to access and work with your own data isn't compromised by an arbitrary increase in prices. (along with the ever-present danger of having apps you rely on discontinued and deactivated / have features removed)
Just about every square meter of England is covered in Wifi so I can't imagine anyone being out of range for a meaningful length of time and having to actually use mobile broadband at all.
I'm not trying to Godwin us here. Criticism of democracy is legitimate, and even defense of anti-democratic systems like monarchism, national socialism and Communism are legitimate insofar as they are presented legitimately. All topics should be open for debate, but some must be anonymous because they're unpopular :)
Is it capitalism, or freedom itself?
Freedom: you can do whatever you want, so long as you can pay for it.
What if they don't care that it's a ripoff, or technically inferior solution, or that it generates mountains of waste that get thrown directed into protect environmental regions?
There's no part of freedom that says "you can whatever you want, so long as you can pay for it, and it's not stupid."
Freedom includes the freedom to not want freedom, the freedom to be wrong, the freedom to be stupid, and the freedom to be off-topic. It has no bearing on logical, scientific, historical or political accuracy or even validity.
Freedom means you can write-in Baby Jesus on your ballot while smoking three packs a day and eating nothing but bacon grease.
In addition to choosing not to be reasonable, many are incapable of being so.
First, I think there's a minimum intelligence required for this. What do you think that is? 100, the average? Or higher? Each ten IQ points above that cuts out a quarter of the population, in addition to the third or so of the population below it. (Figures are approximate.)
Second, what about people who are simply too busy? Job, kids, fetishes, lawn care. It all takes time.
Finally, what about education? Many people are by personality type just about ineducable. Others didn't make it through high school. Still others couldn't do the work (see my first point above).
I'm not disagreeing with you, fellow AC, but I think the morass is bigger than you think.
If your point is true, democracy and freedom may be the source of the defective reasoning here, not capitalism.
Not surprisingly, I'll add that if we fixed those problems, capitalism would probably work much better, since consumers would be reasonable and informed to the degree that they could make these choices intelligently.
Or, the mundane truth is capitalist apologists are willfully oblivious to the lack of competing options for the consumer to chose from.
In which case the phone companies will say "okay, cool, no one wants 4G so we can stop investing in it and coast on our 3G network, which becomes ever more profitable as those investments continue to be paid off".
The problem is, apologists will blame the corporations for nothing, and just pass the blame along to the consumer as if he or she has any actual say over what corporate beancounters decide to do in the absence of regulation.
The big 4 here in the U.S. try the opposite routine. They give much more bandwidth and levels of "UNLIMITED" to those who stay on 4G. When they go off onto 3G they have to start watching their bandwidth.
I can't believe that someone found a wireless company even more greedy than Verizon.
From the TFA:
"There are no unlimited data deals"
Why? - There's clearly a market. Just set the price according to expenditures and let the customer decide whether it's worth it.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Example 1:
Lets consider an every day time - for whatever - use of 1 hour of full speed lte (50.000.000 bit/sec):
That translates in a 700 GByte per month usage rate. The above mentioned 500 MByte
per month rate means you can only use for about 0.07 % of the 1 hour of my given example
time.
Example 2:
Using your nice mobile set for mobile television with 512 kbit per second (high quality video and sound) will
ends up after nearly 2 hours 10 minutes.
Example 3:
Trying to hear mp3 enabled radio stations (64 kbit per second) stops after nearly 17 hours or after 8.5 hour -
if you want higher quality.
Using data caps today is like a PERMANENT demonstration of the possibilities of your mobile.
4G Interner needs to be unlimited imagine 40Mbs downloads on a mobile phone I could sit in a coffe shop with no wifi turn on my personal hotspot and start surrfing with a faster connection then I can get at home on ADSL
The smart solution is to make phones smart enough to
not use data except from designated WiFi resources.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
So it appears you agree that in some areas, satellite or cellular is the only available last mile for home Internet access other than dial-up.