You might not notice 256kbps throttling, but most people will. Youtube stops working right, Bandcamp, Pandora & Spotify buffer, and browsing the web or navigating takes a bit to load.

The top couple percent of T-Mobile USA users use over 50GB of data a month, mostly on unlimited plans without hard throttles. An "unlimited" plan that hard throttles at 22GB of usage is decietful given this context, hence all other carriers not using hard throttles on Unlimited plans.

All 4 major US carriers would brand this plan as a 22GB plan with no overages.

>All 4 major US carriers would brand this plan as a 22GB plan with no overages.

What are you smoking? Every one of Verizon's plans that have caps identical to this are "unlimited"

https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/unlimited/

Verizon claims to deprioritize on busy towers rather than hard throttle you after a certain number of gigs. Same thing happens for T-Mobile, AT&T & Sprint.

With a hard throttle there is no way a user could burn 200GB a month over LTE, but with deprioritization you still get full LTE speeds on most cell towers.

During the California fires emergency services found that Verizon's "MAY throttle you, on BUSY towers, in periods of HIGH traffic"...

Actually meant "WILL unconditionally throttle you after 1 bit more than your quota, even in an evacuated area at 3am, to 128 or even 64kbps".

More Everything data pools get hard throttled to that speed after the data pool runs out, not deprioritized like newer plans. Still a shit thing for Verizon to do...

I have found my phone on Cricket (owned by AT&T) is surprisingly usable after data cap is reached and you are throttled.

Like, email and even google maps, no problem. Facebook perfectly usable although with some lag. I didn't bother trying to watch videos.

I have been curious if the usability of "throttled" speeds differs between carriers.

> surprisingly usable > I didn't bother trying to watch videos.

Uh-huh. Missing video means the service is unusable.

Oh, is that what people are complaining about? Fair enough, but not important to me. Are all the carriers "throttled" rates good enough to do most things but watch videos then?

Does an MVNO like Fi have that kind of control though?

Does being unable to offer something justify mischaracterizing what they can offer as if it were that thing?

Verizon does not hard throttle at 22 gigs.

> You might not notice 256kbps throttling, but most people will. Youtube stops working right, Bandcamp, Pandora & Spotify buffer, and browsing the web or navigating takes a bit to load.

Yeah, quality gets awful at that speed. For reference, the 'unlimited 480p' type of feature is six times that fast, 1.5Mbps.

If my phone throttled to 2Mbps, it wouldn't affect me very much. 0.25Mbps is not acceptable.

The unreasonable thing is putting the $50 number at the top when that's not what will be charged. I saw this and immediately compared $50 to my current bill. It's nice to include the per person number, but putting it giant at the top is confusing and deceptive.

Here's what it would look like if they weren't trying to obfuscate the total:

https://i.imgur.com/9E5ADcn.jpg

> I use Freedom (previously known as Wind) in Canada, and their "slower speeds" on the unlimited plans are more than satisfactory. I don't even notice that I'm throttled until I check my text messages.

Well, I do notice. Especially when I'm trying to operate telepresence robots or the like and the video streams crap out while you're trying to navigate. Or when I'm trying to work on my laptop outdoors far away from home and need to download lots of things over LTE.

Just because you only use 140-byte messages doesn't mean others who are trying to live the future don't notice.

>As a result, I reach 12GB+ on my 6GB plan almost every month. So for me, their unlimited plan is very much unlimited.

It isn't unlimited for me. I can easily hit 22GB. Unlimited means unlimited, and 22GB isn't unlimited.

I am bot really sure what you are defending here. Unlimited means without limits. 22gb is a limit. I am glad 12gb is enough for you but its not for many.

Still a little sleazy... Reminds me of something like:

"10 easy payments of 15 dollars!" Also, do you really want Google owning even more of the internet?

Everytime talking about this, I do think living in China is a more affordable option, I have a plan(coperation perk) which offer me 20GB data, but after that it will be throttled to 100KB/s, which cost me 10 rmb/mon.

Slow speeds? Like throttling after you exceed a data cap?? In 2019?!? Crazy.

> That is really, truly, unfair. The font size choice is quite reasonable, and makes it easily readable.

Yeah, but it's insulting. "Unlimited" is not unlimited with a fucking limit, doesn't matter how reasonable or unreasonable it is. Every time I look at an ad I gotta sit there and look for asterisks or numbers, and then find the fine print where the actual information is contained, not just the marketing wank.

How about just tell me how much your fucking thing costs in plain fucking English? Maybe I don't want to decipher your advert like it's a goddamn Captcha. $150 for Unlimited (assuming it was actually unlimited, which it's not) isn't even an unreasonable price, but when you lead with $50, and then oh by the way it's actually $150, oh and by the way it's limited, you've made what is logically a good deal now look tremendously worse for your effort of trying to "hook" me.

How about just tell me what it costs, you know, like you're an honest seller of a product and I'm a grown fucking man who you have an ounce of respect for?

I totally agree with this. 22GB is 22GB, not Unlimited. Just say it's 22GB.

There are lots of things I would do with something truly unlimited that I couldn't do with 22GB.

And I've paid a lot more than $150 a month for 8GB for a long time from Verizon. This is not a bad deal but is made to look like a bad deal, is my point, because the marketers just can't help themselves.

To be fair this is quite good actually in readability, it is not a captcha or an asterisk it is literally in the main box as one of the main points (the first of them)

A criticism is that it is not clear if the "may stream 480p video" refers to the slower after and whether it is a "guarantee" or not really a possibility.

But for the rest it also explicitly tells you the maximum amount you might end up paying each month. Honestly do not see what you are complaining about.