The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?"

I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

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chrismorgan 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)

At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.

Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.

So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.

	▲	Barbing 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.

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lxgr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.

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Nition 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From the screenshot it looks like he actually received "only" around 2TB of free mobile data.