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Comment by brandon272 | Hacker News Reader

I always find it amusing when these issues come up and people need to remind us all that "UNLIMITED SHOULD MEAN UNLIMITED!" ... I've always assumed it was common sense that "unlimited" is essentially a marketing buzzword.

No network is capable of offering "unlimited" service to all customers. It means they aren't going to enforce draconian caps on every day usage. It's to give the typical user the reassurance that they have nothing to worry about in terms of overage. It's not to provide people with 2TB a month of transfer.

Frankly, I find using 2TB a month on an "unlimited" plan to be abusive and disrespectful to other customers. These networks obviously have real limits and capacities. Clearly abusing an "unlimited" plan does little but encourage service providers to enforce data caps and overage fees.

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T-mobile does actually honor their unlimited plans (unlike AT&T and Verizon). This article is about people explicitly breaking the TOS on a non-unlimited part of the plan.

I switched to T-mobile recently and it's been a breath of fresh air - I think people are used to being skeptical of mobile providers after years of abuse. The first intuition of commenters in this thread was to find something to criticize, despite that fact that T-mobile never promised anything it isn't delivering.

Unlike Verizon? Could you elaborate on that point, please?

Verizon throttled their unlimited 3g plans for years (apparently they just stopped this month: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/13...). They planned to do this to 4g unlimited customers too, but backed off after a stern warning from the FCC. I have friends who are grandfathered in their unlimited plans and as I understand it they do everything they can to get you off of it.

Unlimited is an actual word with a fairly clear definition (unlike, say, 'natural'), and reasonable people assume that when someone says 'unlimited', what they mean is 'unlimited by anything other than natural constraints' -- such as, is the case with an 'unlimited buffet', the amount you can eat in one sitting.

This is not dissimilar to internet service; you're limited by the available bandwidth to a certain amount of transit you can consume in a period of time.

If businesses don't actually mean 'unlimited', then they can say what they do mean. 2TB? 4TB? 10TB?

I've always taken it to mean "unlimited within reason". 2TB of transfer in a month over an LTE connection is obvious abuse from my perspective.

I've always assumed it was common sense that "unlimited" is essentially a marketing buzzword.

Yeah, they're lying. And users are simply calling their bluff.

Frankly, I find using 2TB a month on an "unlimited" plan to be abusive and disrespectful to other customers.

I find "abuse" and "disrespect" to be an incredibly dishonest characterization of the situation.

Firstly, what do you base that number on? The cellular technology's capacity, historical network usage data and their wired backhaul capacity analyzed in the context of the cost of ongoing network capacity expansions? Or just the fact the T-Mobile CEO says it's over a line that the company would prefers to lie about the existence of? And, well, "2T" still feels big-ish in 2015 and vague impressions that cellular spectrum is crowded from the carefully crafted public messaging of cellular providers that want to influence RF licensing and policy?

How does or should any one user know when their data usage starts to be inhospitable to their fellow customers? Personal example: our aging internet connection at work would suffer when too many people were streaming music. As of two months ago we have a much nicer link, streaming is cool again and the change was entirely behind the scenes. Without clear and open communication I have no way to know what data rates at at what time of the day are OK for the office.

Secondly, the ideas of abuse and disrespect are wedging social pressures into a business transaction. I suddenly have to meter my usage, with little guidance, because using what I thought I bought from T-Mobile will prevent T-Mobile's other customers from access to what they bought? Even if I don't break the TOS to tether, my actual verizon plan is capped is 5 GB and I think that's still the highest-data single phone plan available there. Does that mean 5, 10 or 20 GB would be past the unfriendly barrier on a T-Mobile unlimited terms?

Large faceless corporation T-Mobile doesn't follow all the social norms you would expect from a person when they're seeking profit, why should the suddenly get to use social pressures to limit costs? Because they have the technical ability to make other customers collateral damage?

That was quite the performance!

> Firstly, what do you base that number on? The cellular technology's capacity, historical network usage data and their wired backhaul capacity analyzed in the context of the cost of ongoing network capacity expansions?

Yes.

If you think cellular networks are built to handle anywhere close to 2TB a month per user you are extremely uninformed.

> How does or should any one user know when their data usage starts to be inhospitable to their fellow customers?

I think you're the one being dishonest here. At 2TB+ a month of data usage that you've acquired after altering your phone's functionality to intentionally get around T-Mobile's restrictions, that is so obviously crossing a line that one should not have to "wonder" if they are using the service as it was intended. I'd actually have to wonder how a single customer reaches 2TB in transfers. My household downloads its fair share of ISO's, Netflix series', software updates, games, backups etc. and doesn't come anywhere close to 2TB on our fibre connection.

> I suddenly have to meter my usage, with little guidance, because using what I thought I bought from T-Mobile will prevent T-Mobile's other customers from access to what they bought?

You thought you were buying the right to circumvent their usage restrictions? What?

You don't have to do anything. You are not a lone user on a network just as you are not a lone citizen on this planet. We share resources. You can behave however you choose to. If you want to max out your connection and skirt a service provider's policy to maximize what you feel you're entitled to in your business arrangement with them, be my guest. Just don't think I have accept your rationale for doing so.

These networks obviously have real limits and capacities.

There are only real limits in terms of bandwidth, and not the quantity of data transferred.

You are 100% right. Unfortunately, due to the way wireless spectrum works you have no choice but to oversubscribe available bandwidth in the hopes that not every user is using their devices at once. While they suck for a consumer, limits on total data transferred allow wireless providers to allow users the ability to use their devices but limit the amount of time they are consuming available bandwidth.

And someone using 2TB a month is going to be using a lot more of that bandwidth over time than someone using 5GB.

Unless you have a magical infinite SNR, limited bandwidth ensures limited data transfer.

These towers have a monthly data transfer maximum.

"unlimited plan" means "you pay for a bandwidth instead of an amount of data downloaded". And if you're able to download 2TB in a period of time, you have the right to do so.

Yes, I know, common carriers are overselling bandwidth like hell, but it's not a good excuse for blaming customers for using the service they paid for.

One idea I've always liked for solving the "unlimited" problem and complaints about overage charges is to provide fixed data transfer but do exponential throttling: the first X GB are unthrottled, the next X GB throttled to half the advertised bandwidth, then quarter, 1/8, 1/16, ... so customers can never go over the limit despite how hard they try, but they can still try to use as much as they want.

Another alternative would be constant, but very low-bandwidth, "unlimited" plans.

I agree completely. So many on XDA forums brag about downloading terabytes a month. I'm not sure why T-Mobile doesn't just cut them off and let those who accidentally go over a tiny amount to browse un-throttled. I recently downgraded my "unlimited" plan to 2gb since I got a Verizon hotspot, and whenever I go anywhere close to 2GB the phone almost immediately stops working on data. So much worse than AT&T ever was to me.

How about T-Mobile make data plans more realistic and stop throttling to absurd lengths. I like the focus on the cheaters, but for those playing by the rules it's absolutely shit.

Then don't call these “unlimited”, because otherwise it's a pure lie. Unlimited is unlimited.

Can we agree that if a company advertises a service as unlimited, and in fact it IS limited and you CAN hit that limit easily under what should be considered normal use then it is false advertising?

I agree that it's strictly impossible to allow for 'unlimited' bandwidth, but I'd argue that the clear meaning of the word in this context leads you to assume that it's unmetered and you can reasonably assume that you can make use of the service at a consumer level without worrying about hitting a cap.

I'm not arguing that you should be able to download 2TB's of data a month on a cell phone hotspot, but there's a whole lot of "unlimited" plans that have caps far far far lower than that which is kinda BS.

That's not the case here, though. They advertise unlimited mobile data with a 7 GB limit on data use through tethering. I'm a T-Mobile customer on this same plan, and when I signed up, T-Mobile was completely honest and explicit about what they were offering.

These people are attempting to cause data that is contractually limited to get counted as part of their unlimited data. What T-Mobile is saying here is that they are going to start counting the data correctly — they're not going back on the unlimited data they promised.

I still think it's crazy to call a 7GB cap unlimited. Call it what it is.

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