No Such Thing As 'Unlimited' Data (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to an article at Wired, the era of 'unlimited' data services is coming to an end. Carriers don't give them out anymore unless they're hobbled, and they're even increasing the prices of grandfathered plans. Comcast's data caps are spreading, and Time Warner has been testing them for years as well. It's not even just about internet access — Microsoft recently decided to eliminate its unlimited cloud storage plan. The big question now is: were these companies cynical, or just naive? We have no way of evaluating their claims that a small number of users who abused the system caused it to be unprofitable for them. (A recent leaked memo from Comcast suggests it's about extracting more money, rather than network congestion.) But it's certainly true that limited plans make costs and revenue much easier to predict. Another question: were we, as consumers, naive in expecting these plans to last? As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Unlimited data plans clearly won't work too well if everybody uses huge amounts. So did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing? T-Mobile plans may also be dropping unlimited data in 2016.

Comments

We weren't suckered into anything

[xaeridus]

With shrinking cable television viewership, and the talk of making internet a utility, of course many of these companies want to find new ways to make money. The customers don't really get a choice - not enough people can get up and move to actually hurt many of these companies in any significant fashion. Look at cell phone plans. The real question is if there is collusion in the industry... To be certain: consumers don't get a real choice when the players are so few and so big.

Yes there is

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is. Your pipe has a max speed. The theoretical maximum amount of data you could use by saturating your pipe 24x7 should be considered unlimited. Nothing less.

Re:How can there be?

[countach74]

I'm not sure why people have been clinging onto these ideals of "unlimited data." The vast majority of us use a very limited amount of data; why would you want to get lumped into a payment pool to help cover those who use excessive amounts? The rest of the world is moving to more finely-grained billing, which helps to more efficiently allocate scarce resources: cloud hosting and car insurance plans come to mind. Yet here we are, begging for a more expensive bill.

Re:Unlimited Data Required

[phayes]

The problem is not with data caps per se it is with the fact that US carriers are imposing an ever lower data cap with insufficient competition to allow customers to be able to pick and choose. In other countries with functional competition in the telecom sector this is not the case. Ex: My ISP here in France has a 3Gb/month data cap on 3G Data. On 4G data the data cap is 50 Gb/month and instead of billing all overage they reduce DL speed on those exceeding the data caps.

I don't have a problem ...

[PPH]

... with metered plans. Just as long as the billing meter is certified by the Washington State Department of Agriculture weights and measures program.

INB4 not applicable because FCC. The airlines tried claiming this due to their status as regulated by the FAA. They got slapped down hard by the courts and must comply with state regs.

Re:How can there be?

[gstoddart]

So, in other words, telco's are large Ponzi schemes whose business model is predicated on misleading customers about what they're actually buying so that faulty business models can be sold as if they weren't complete bullshit?

I'm sorry, but there's a word for that: fraud.

So maybe I can sell 1 million people my car? And then when I don't have 1 million cars I can say "well, I wasn't selling you my car, I was selling you the idea of car?

Sorry, their shitty business model and deceptive marketing are their own damned problems.

Oh, but wait, this was to maximize shareholder value and executive bonuses, so it's perfectly OK to commit fraud, right?

Every other country

[SumDog]

Every other country is offering unlimited plans. Cheaper unlimited plans in Australia and New Zealand are now the norm.

Here's the thing, we're not talking about a resource. There is not finite supply of water pouring into your house. We're talking about bandwidth. We're talking about electrons that are always flowing down the wire. There is no real resource being consumed by using more data.

During non-peak times when your switches are not at capacity, it doesn't really take more electricity to process more data (not really; not measurably). During peak times, it may be more difficult to offer quality of service because everyone is streaming something (even if it's just a video). Your total cost is in the infrastructure for standard data at peak.

It's not a resource like power or water. That electricity is always running over those wires. The more powerful switches you need are a sunk cost!

Re:How can there be?

[DarkOx]

their shitty business model and deceptive marketing are their own damned problems

Yes they are which is why they are moving away from that model.

Unlimited for a flat fee is a stupid model. Economically it makes no sense at. It encourages waste. We have an internet full of people who are busy running p2p clients constantly replicating crap they have no intention of ever looking at. Its dumb its waste.

There may come a time when we have fiber on every door step and time on the network becomes 'to cheap to meter' but we are not there now. A 300GB/m cap allows you to watch plenty of Netflix. One would hope there would be a higher service tier for affordablly available for folks that actually need that sort of thing. The current system though where the majority use 10s GBs a mother subsidize building a network extra big to support a handful of people who want to transfer terrabytes from residential locations isn't exactly fair or reasonable.

Then there is the well they should upgrade the infrastructure more so... crowed. Really explain that! We get a lot crying on slashdot about how $AsianCountry has faster broad band. Nobody can seem to say what they actual economic advantage of that is. What can do at 1Gbps that I can't at say 16Mbps? Currently Comcast is offering 75MBps (down at least) a lot of places that is enough for multiple full HD streams. What economic advantage is there to having more? (well I can download an OS image in few moments, yes and with a smidgeon for fore thought I can start it before I leave for lunch and have it when I get back too as it is. How much investment should we make in making that tiny improvement?)

The internet is not changing as fast as it once was. We moved from online video and streaming anything being almost unthinkable in 1992 to every geocities page embeding real media by 1996. How much has changed between 2012 and today as far as what we can do with the Internet? Not bloody much! The tech is maturing. The information super highway is built out. It should be more about maintenance now than build out. The need for expansion just to be ready to handle what is coming down the pike isn't there anymore. My guess is real time immersive VR will be the next big line of demarcation. spoken word -> written word -> printing -> movable type printing -> photography -> radio -> television -> BBS and similar -> pre-web Internet services -> WWW -> multimedia enabled WWW -> VR.

Most of America probably has enough bandwidth do VR 1.0 whatever that is now. Stop you bitching invest in the technology when it makes sense to do so. Being the first has its disadvantages. Its why we are stuck with all this old copper run around everywhere today. Most of us have more than we can gainfully use already, better to play wait and see and buy into the right tech after the needs change rather than before.

Finite != scarce

[tepples]

Bandwidth is "a finite resource", but it's only scarce when it is congested. Yet many ISPs run the meter the same during uncongested periods, such as early mornings local time, as during congested periods.