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by tigershark 3008 days ago
Seriously? 200$/month and you have unlimited data only in US? It seems like a really crap offer to me. I pay 17£/month and I have unlimited data in a lot of countries in the world, including US. Sadly my awesome plan got discontinued and now it’s not possible to buy it anymore.
2 comments
taneq 3008 days ago
17£/mo is sustainable when your users are just scrolling through Facebook and streaming Spotify. When they're all using it as their primary data connection and watching a few hours of HD Netflix a night, you need to charge more.

Unlimited mobile data went away or got expensive in most places right around the time that smartphones gained the ability to act as wifi access points.

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gsich 3008 days ago
That doesn't make any sense. An AP is just an AP, it has no internet connection. How does the smartphone get internet connection? With UMTS/LTE or similar. So you still need a data plan (or a combination with it).
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taneq 3007 days ago
The point is that without a way to tether your phone to a 'real computer', you have to be actively trying to use more than a couple of GB of data per month, so "unlimited" really means "up to maybe 5GB". While tethering was possible beforehand, it became much easier when wifi tethering was added to Android. This let anyone push a button and use their 3G / 4G data connection for torrenting, streaming and other such heavy duty usage, and suddenly "unlimited" phone plans were seeing hundreds of GB per month.
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Dylan16807 3005 days ago
These days you can easily consume tons of HD video directly to your phone, even without tethering. So the situation has changed yet again.
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mkingston 3008 days ago
"Incidentally", I suspect your plan was discontinued right about the time the number of competitors in the UK mobile market dropped from four to three. When 3 bought O2. And right about the peak of the 4g rollout. The same happened to my £13 plan. I'm not sure which of the above was the larger factor, or whether it was because usage patterns (tethering, Netflix) did in fact make these plans unsustainable. Interestingly, 3 also had their "one" plan (IIRC) which specifically allowed tethering, with unlimited data, for ~£20/mo.

Also, for completeness, it's probably worth mentioning the conditions of your unlimited data roaming were bandwidth limits, and a maximum trip duration of thirty days. Though I know people who considerably exceeded that duration in Europe and weren't noticeably restricted or penalised. Of course it's moot now (yay!- I write this message from Madrid airport..).

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