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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit like how T-Mobile does it. You get 50GB/month that is always at full speed, and then after that you get deprioritized if you're on a busy tower.

So it doesn't depend on time of day, but how many other customers are sharing your tower.

https://www.t-mobile.com/customer/mydatausage.html

> Data prioritization will only be noticeable when you access a congested tower and have used over 50GB of data in a particular billing cycle. You will continue to get unlimited high speed data on your smartphone when you aren’t accessing a congested tower. In that way it’s different from data throttling, which slows you down for the remainder of your bill cycle regardless of network conditions, all the time.

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That's tantalizingly close, but the goal is a plan that lets you use low-priority downloads to avoid using up your full-speed data allowance.

Yeah, there are two aspects that keep me from ditching Comcast at my apartment. Burning through the data limit on bulk downloads that I'm happy to run overnight when it's not congested, and ping, which is the harder one to fix. But it's not _that_ bad on T-mobile, so if it weren't for the data allowance problem I might be willing to suck it up.

I'm on an old 5GB then throttled plan from T-mobile, the new ones sound pretty good if they didn't cost more than twice as much.

Crazy that you'd have to pay more for 10x the data and higher speeds...

I already have LTE and don’t need 50GB, but their cheapest single line if I were signing up today is $45/month for 4GB.

So yes, I’d expect cell service to get either cheaper or better over time instead of more expensive and worse.

It looks like MintSIM is the cheap option now, they do 5GB for $30 or 10GB for $38.

I’m paying $100 flat rate for 3 lines. About $33/line for unlimited calls, text and data.

T-mobile doesn’t even charge for roaming on a whole bunch of countries. In my Australia vacation I didn’t even need to buy a new SIM card. Whatsapp and google maps all the way.

Their speeds also beat Sprint and AT&T. It’s the only carrier I have faith that screws it’s consumers the least.

AT&T has my blood on its hands by charging me $500 for roaming in Canada when I didn’t even cross the border.

T-mobile is a night and day difference.

The problem is that T-Mobile has poor coverage. Enticing me to switch away from my cheap pre-paid T-Mobile plan actually works against them, because at that point I'll absolutely switch to another carrier.

That's a very good deal. Is that a standard or expensive subscription?

It's their standard ONE plan: $70/month for 1 line, but much cheaper with more (for four lines its $160/month).

Tmobile does have some prepaid plans and older grandfathered plans, but the ONE plan is pretty good, especially at the multi-line rates.

Any carriers do better pricing for a single line with high caps? $840/year on service for a single phone feels crazy to me.

You'd probably need to go with an MVNO plan like PagePlus or Mint SIM.

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