Re:AT&T to pay $60M over U.S. allegations it lied in 'unlimi...
by cannonedhamster on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @08:04PM
(#21458729)
Amazingly you can get cheaper cell plans including more data than these unlimited plans in the socialist bastion of Europe. I don't think the bandwidth is the problem it's the company and the regulatory capture. It's only this bad in the US and Canada.
The problem is that mobile operators are incredibly underprovisioned. If your plan offers 1 GB of LTE data, at 35 Mbps, you can burn through a monthly allocation in 3.8 minutes. That's an average utilization of 0.0087%, or an underprovisioning by a factor of 11,500.
They sell it as if you're buying 35 Mbps access to the network all month long, when really, you can't use that for more than a few hours even on 'unlimited' plans.
I don't expect 1:1 access so that everyone can use their full bandwidth full time; I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for that. But I'd pay a tenth of that for 1:10 underprovisioned access, and I'm sure that plenty would pay a few cents for the current 1:10,000 underprovisioned service...