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Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by johndoylecape on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @09:37PM (#47146598)
It's not. We chose this baseline sort of by default based on the practices of some other major carriers. Your question is a good one, and we'll take it as feedback.
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by altairprime on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @01:40AM (#47148132)
I would be a lot less worried about signing up for that plan if I could soft-cap myself at 10GB until I login to the app and push a button that says "yeah for real I'm going to use another 10GB of mobile data", so that if iOS goes bonkers and tries to download my entire 90GB iTunes library over cellular, it doesn't fuck me over for a month. I haven't exceeded 7GB/mo intentionally for years, but it's happened twice so far against my express wishes, and carriers are uniformly awful at that.
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by bsstoner on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @05:51AM (#47149910)
This is good feedback. We don’t want caps and throttling to be a blocker for signing up and using us. Since we’re at a premium price point we should economically be able to be a lot more generous than existing carriers.
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by bombcar on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @07:32AM (#47150686)
Charge $5 more for everyone, and then rebate $5 against your next bill if you don't go over X GB or whatever.

It ends up being the same as charging $5 if you go over, but it'll feel much more premium.

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by quietsegfault on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @06:41PM (#47159668)
This is what my carrier does for me, except the limit is like 2GB or something.
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by chirau on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @06:07AM (#47150023)
I would like to try Cape. How do guys deal with IMEI tracking from folks like Google when i search or use their email? Or that one is beyond your control?
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by throawayonthe on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @07:48AM (#47150833)
Can you elaborate?
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by ThePowerOfFuet on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @11:07AM (#47153422)
What makes you think Google has access to your IMEI through using their search engine?
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by bdangubic on Thursday February 26, 2026 @02:10PM (#47170604)
Friends at Google :)
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by ThePowerOfFuet on Friday February 27, 2026 @11:26AM (#47182395)
Chrome may well have access to persistent identifiers on Android, but websites do not.

The search engine has nothing to do with it.

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by alek-cape on Friday February 27, 2026 @01:24PM (#47183736)
I thought access to IMEI and IMSI was pretty heavily restricted starting with Android 10. Graphene [1] makes a few extra restrictions beyond AOSP [2], but it's been around for a while now.

To get access to IMEI and IMSI, you need to either be a carrier app, allowlisted, or grant the `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE` permission.

Unless Chrome is running at a system level in AOSP or some OEM specific firmware, I wouldn't expect it to have `READ_PRIVILEGED_PHONE_STATE`

[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#hardware-identifiers

[2] - https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/device-identifi...

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by altairprime on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @02:12PM (#47156296)
Yeah. As a olde ex-carrier type person, I want burst mode unlimited, I expressly do not want continuous saturated unlimited, if that makes any sense. So if you tune the service to warn me “you’ve used 10% of your cap in five minutes so we’ve slowed your service down temporarily, respond with YES if this is intentional and we should speed it back up, otherwise it’ll reset in the morning”, that would be an example of best in category service that’s on my side rather than the carrier’s overage fees profit line item.

I don’t mind that you have caps, I consider caps to be a marketable form of 90th percentile billing to consumers, so please don’t take this as “remove all caps” — but definitely find an in-between that’s more nuanced than “you reach arbitrary threshold 50G at 1gbps 5G and so it only took 8 minutes and 40% battery, too bad so sad now your entire month of data is at DSL speeds”. (This sarcastic tone is not a critique of you! but of the general carrier practices that leave me worried about you.)

In a dream world my usage percentile for the past 30 days would be inversely proportional to my bandwidth speed so that momentary usage to download a software update had no meaningful impact, but running nonstop continuous data for four hours straight caused a measurable drop in bandwidth (which protects my battery and the network health). It’s not fiber-optic or fixed-installation wireless and I do respect the shared base antenna capacity problems!

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by quietsegfault on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @06:40PM (#47159662)
I don’t think keeping the status quo of throttling caps will stop anyone from signing up. As long as it’s not any worse, I don’t think it would deter me due to the other features you offer. The main reason why I don’t change is my spouse and kids don’t care about privacy and I can get them service for cheaper!

I don’t really think about caps all that much except in theory. I would love speed tests to be excepted from caps, but I get why that isn’t always workable.

Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by quietsegfault on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @06:37PM (#47159633)
That’s a great idea. I rarely use more than 10-15 GB except if I’m tethering and something decided to slurp up all my data.
Re:Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid by phantom784 on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @09:50AM (#47152282)
A few Mbps would be nice - fast enough to make the modern web mostly usable. 256 Kbps is almost the same as not working at all.