However, 3G (and 4G) are much more expensive, in terms of the price it costs to transmit a given quantity of data. And compared to glass and copper, the total number of bits available within a given geographic area at any given moment is a fraction as large. Unfortunately, cellular companies failed to realize that offering "unlimited" data plans would set up poor expectations. They (apparently) didn't anticipate seeing a significant percentage of their customers try to use the cellular networks for transferring large quantities of data, and thought that for most people "unlimited" would just be a marketing-friendly euphemism for "a couple hundred megabytes."

In turn, people who assumed that "unlimited" really means unlimited, and assumed that the prices that were originally offered for "unlimited" were realistic prices for high volumes of cellular network usage, now seem to think that the prices that cellular network providers want to charge for data usage are rapacious. On the contrary, it's not that the price they're trying to charge now is disastrously high; it's that the price that they used to be charging was disastrously low.

There's also a serious resource contention issue on cellular data. The towers can only be placed so close together before they start interfering with each other, and the bandwidth that's being advertised is the bandwidth you'll get if you've got the tower to yourself. Chicago's an illustrative story: A company came along offering household internet service through a 4G network, promising impressive bandwidth numbers. And they delivered on them for the few months between when they first opened for business and when they started getting serious traction in the market. Since then, they've earned a reputation as a pretty crappy ISP, simply because the technology itself couldn't deliver quality service to that many users at once. A wireless network cell is effectively a hub, and like on any hub resource contention can be a serious issue.

Which, I suspect, is ultimately why Apple goes along with the file size caps for cellular network transfers: From a user experience perspective, they would much rather allow everyone to transfer small files at high speeds, than let everyone's user experience suffer because the network is being choked by large file transfers.

I wonder if many execs and marketing people at large mobile companies really didn't see this coming, as we had years of 'unlimited texts' being promoted, and an entire generation of people texting thousands of times per day. Did execs get adjusted to 'unlimited' as it applies to texting, and naively assume that 'web' usage wouldn't be significantly different?

I can't really say for sure, but that just struck me as a possibility for why many mobile execs don't seem to 'get it' with respect to mobile data.

I'm pretty sure they 'get it' just fine, but did the math and carefully worked out exactly how shitty service they can offer at what price without making too many people cancel.

not exactly, that's if you've got the sector to yourself. AFAIK one tower has at least 3-12 sectors.

That's why LTE can't replace all of our data connections (for now).

You can't objectively define what constitutes "royally fuck[ing]" their customers.

Just saying "this cost more than I think is reasonable as a wireless customer" means absolutely nothing in court.

We have a saying in my country, when a child exhibits some great talent, that we also use ironically when a child does or says something very dumb.

"How can you not send this kid to college?"

I think one of the two intentions applies perfectly to the quoted comment.