_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east.

Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me.

I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour.

I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.

Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.

I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.

Can confirm. Not sure where the actual caps were but it was basically free to use for me as a teenager

Now that you mention it, I actually seem to remember that most plans nowadays are limitless in the same sense: When you've spent you 4 or 10gb, you simply "run out" of 3/4g data and start using data speed limited to essentially 2g, which is unlimited.

In Sweden we had it around that period, I was a subscriber. With HSDPA rolling out but everyone carrying WAP-capable features phones, the operators had lots of capacity but couldn't figure out how to use all that bandwidth.

Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.

What Americans call "unlimited", I used as, the only way to get Internet at home between 2005 and 2008. It was an early offering reasonably priced - I had spotty reception though so telnet/ssh and later mosh were the name of the game. Used shell account on high school servers to run torrents etc. Made Sun's offer to send you NetBeans and Solaris DVDs for free way more interesting.

“because operators wanted the cash flow“

It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature.

I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).

Yes. People bemoaning the ad-supported free-at-point of use Internet should be aware that a lot of companies wanted a much worse nickel-and-dime walled garden. It has been a great positive feature of the Internet that it doesn't include a billing mechanism.