I’m not really sure why you are angry at the carriers. Knowing about the limits and how much you need is kinda your job. I know that I need at least half a terabyte per month when I’m using my laptop and I know to always check how much bandwidth I can get from the carriers.
I think anger is justified to the degree the plan is structured to cost significantly more than a reasonable person would expect - i.e. caveat emptor should not be the approach of reputable companies.
While it is perhaps somewhat legitimate to criticize an HN'er for failing to calculate the rate at which a data plan will be consumed at a given bandwidth, it is of questionable appropriateness in regard to the general public.
Depends. I don’t care about it if it’s clearly stated just how much bandwidth you get. I’m not in the US but in Germany carriers will often tell you they have unlimited flatrate plans but also state that if you go above a certain bandwidth use you will be throttled to GPRS speeds. I have no problem with that. It depends on how clearly it’s communicated.
I can see how others may be misled by that marketing, though, so it’s no super great. No reason to get angry, just reason for concern. Some German carriers are much more upfront about that (they might say “1GB of data, throttled to GPRS speeds above that”) and I obviously prefer that kind of marketing. It’s less confusing and more honest.
Maybe they shouldn't force customers to take an unlimited plan in the first place if they couldn't support it. For a very long time, until you could actually use that much data, att forced us to sign 2-year contracts with unlimited data.
I know enough to conclude that it hasn't gotten more expensive to ship bits in the past ten years. Yet, here we are in the US, shifting from unlimited data plans to rate-limited, capped plans, and no one seems to have come up with a convincing explanation as to why that's occurring.
Of course it has become more expensive to ship bits. More people are finding more uses. Are you deluded or what? How disconnected from reality and how entitled can one be?
Really? Entitlement? The rest of the developed world has faster, cheaper, and in many cases unlimited data, and you're calling me "entitled" for being incredulous about claims of the "ever-increasing cost of data transfer".
But, thanks for the insults. This place is really friendly!
I know enough to conclude that it hasn't gotten more expensive to ship bits in the past ten years.
Are you kidding me?
We went from simple networks to 3G to 4G --which requires new infrastructure deployments every few years.
We went from the mobile web being almost nothing to hundreds of millions of very capable mobile web devices in the past ten years (iPhone/iPad/Android...).
Network usage increased exponentially with the newer, more useful devices. People were buying "unlimited" plans and used 100-300MB per month, not they can easily go to over several GBs.
It's like you have a "unlimited free refills" soda fountain. When everyone has 2-3 drinks it's ok. When everyone starts having 10-20 sodas, well, you start putting some limit to those "unlimited refills".
Your responsibility.