I’ve long thought this is an issue of changing definitions. To anyone who was buying cell phone data plans when it was charged by the byte (and later in tiers of bytes with insane overage charges), “unlimited data” was easily understood to mean no overage charges, no per byte fees.

But somewhere along the way (or perhaps as an unfortunate consequence of not seeing far enough ahead to always throttle unlimited plans) the definition in consumer minds also seemed to include no speed limits either.

Cell phone plans are purchased with the speed of service. Unlimited data at 50 mbps, for example, stops being unlimited when the speed is no longer 50 mbps.

Cell phones are never sold with a speed of service. How could they be? Your speed is determined by congestion, the proximity of the tower, etc.

Those are natural limits, though. If I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet but just had my wisdom teeth removed, it's not their fault that I'll cry in a corner while delicately nibbling a small bowl of pudding. They were willing to let me eat more, even if I wasn't capable of it.

If the same buffet made you wait 2 hours between plates, then it's no longer realistically an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Taking the analogy to an extreme, if you went to an all you can eat buffet, it would only be open 24 hours a day and there is only so many times you could go through the line and the kitchen can only cook so much food.

If the restaurant is crowded, you’re going to have to both wait longer to get through the line and the kitchen won’t be able to cook enough to satisfy all of the customers.

There is also a known limit of how much data can be transmitted over a certain frequency and only certain frequencies are amenable to data.

For instance, T-mobile was infamous for not working well in buildings because the spectrum they were using couldn’t travel through buildings.

>I’ve long thought this is an issue of changing definitions.

Yes, everyone understood that unlimited meant "not limited". And then telecoms started trying to change that definition to mean "limited".

An artificial speed limit is, be definition, a data limit. If you have X time and Y bytes per time (artificial limit), then you cannot get more then Y/X bytes. Now obviously it's limited by the technology to some amount of Y bytes/time, but that's accepted. When it's limited by policy to lower than that, it's no longer unlimited data.

I think this is a reduco ad absurdum.

If AT&T didn't throttle, I suppose "unlimited" would still be a lie because there is still a limit to how fast your phone will download it. If you remove that it's still a lie because there's a limit to medium bandwidth, and so on.

All of these things are artificial! Should AT&T upgrade all users to phones with the latest modems because otherwise they are "artificially limiting" their experience? The impact on AT&T would be the same as stopping traffic shaping: spending more per user.

> I suppose "unlimited" would still be a lie because there is still a limit to how fast your phone will download it.

I disagree. In my view, "unlimited" means that the service provider will not introduce artificial limits. Of course there are natural limits (the speed of the devices involved, network congestion and signal quality, etc.). None of those are the service provider imposing an artificial limit, though.

"Pro" means that only professionals will use it. Period.

Or wait a minute...