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Comment by rodionos | Hacker News Reader

As an end-user, I'm ok with current 4G/LTE link speeds. What would be great is they could minimize TTFB on mobile devices. It takes a second or two for the first bits of content to appear in the browser/mail, especially after the phone has been in sleep mode.

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The only reason the speeds seem fine is because due to data caps people are too afraid to actually use the data. With more capacity in the networks, data caps can rise, and usage will go up. I don't want to have to mess around with connecting to coffee shop WiFi networks all the time. Every computer should have a wireless chipset that simply uses the WWAN when a WLAN is not available, without you worrying about that OS update downloading in the background.

Maybe in the USA, in the UK at least plenty of people have unlimited/large data plans, and the speeds are still fine.

In Denmark data caps are rising a lot. It's not unusual to have 30 or even 50 GBs of data. I don't know the reason why, but it's most likely not capacity since we are probably using the same system.

>> With more capacity in the networks, data caps can rise, and usage will go up.

If I was a CEO at a major wireless carrier, I would be thinking that means we can charge people more per month, and generate more revenue. Anytime you increase usage, the carriers are going to find a way to squeeze some more money out of their users.

The rising capacity will be offset by rising average page size. What the network giveth, the browser taketh away.

Its just like building highways to alleviate traffic.

Bandwidth caps exist to destroy demand, and they do the job well (no different then London's congestion charge).

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