I wish ISPs would just give up on the whole "Unlimited" concept. Clearly it's not practical for them to offer truly unlimited service, so let's just cut the bullshit and go to usage-based billing.
Unfortunately, the tech community hates usage-based billing about as much as they hate throttling. Baffles me as to why.
I think we need to make it illegal to advertise "unlimited" without it actually being unlimited. I would have thought that existing truth-in-advertising laws would cover this, but apparently they don't.
Make it illegal to promise what you never intend to deliver and this whole problem goes away. If unlimited is practical to offer, then it will be offered. If unlimited is not practical, then ISPs will no longer be allowed to pretend that it is, and will be encouraged to make the limitations of their offers obvious up-front instead of using shady nonsense like this.
I prefer a mobile data plan that’s throttled after a certain bandwidth use to paying overage fees. What I don’t like is marketing that as “unlimited”. (I think all carriers in Germany only have plans like that. Some market them as unlimited, some don’t.)
For example: I pay 13.50€ per month for 1.5GB of data (for my iPad). After those 1.5GB my speed is throttled, I do not ever have to pay more, though. I like that. I want it to be like that.
The only thing I don’t like is that I can’t yet buy additional bandwidth at full speed from my carrier. (One carrier recently started doing that. 5€ for every additional GB. But it’s not automatic, you have to manually initiate that. I would prefer that massively to overage fees.)
As I see it there are three reasons the tech community hates usage-based billing.
- First, any time a company tries usage-based data billing, they charge absolutely criminal rates. If you paid attention to usage-based cell service over the years, you'd know what I speak of.
- Second, in an "unlimited" model, some users use more, some use less. In general the tech community will be the ones using more- so they benefit at the marginal expense of other users. They pay comparatively less by volume for their usage.
- Third, in my opinion there's at least a tiny bit of entitlement going around in the online community as a whole. Nobody wants to pay for anything. You know, because "information wants to be free!" and all.
AT&T's overage rates are pretty reasonable. They charge $10/GB, which is about what you pay for the initial monthly data plan anyway. Of course, there's probably leftover sentiment from times when overages were much less reasonable, and there are still plenty of such places remaining.
The second two I agree with, but they're sad reasons.
I think people object less to general bandwidth caps than to traffic discrimination. For example, Shaw Cable was accused of throttling Skype traffic but not their competing VOIP product.
Unfortunately, the tech community hates usage-based billing about as much as they hate throttling. Baffles me as to why.
I think we need to make it illegal to advertise "unlimited" without it actually being unlimited. I would have thought that existing truth-in-advertising laws would cover this, but apparently they don't.
Make it illegal to promise what you never intend to deliver and this whole problem goes away. If unlimited is practical to offer, then it will be offered. If unlimited is not practical, then ISPs will no longer be allowed to pretend that it is, and will be encouraged to make the limitations of their offers obvious up-front instead of using shady nonsense like this.