[taneq]

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.

[gsich]

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).

[taneq]

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.

[Dylan16807]

These days you can easily consume tons of HD video directly to your phone, even without tethering. So the situation has changed yet again.