Verizon and AT&T Are Slower After Adding Unlimited Plans | Hacker News Reader

Verizon and AT&T Are Slower After Adding Unlimited Plans

gizmodo.com

126 pointsourmandave79 comments

My regional carrier, US Cellular, recently started an unlimited plan. Right there in the small print it says it's capped at 1.5 Mbps from the beginning, and drops to 2G speeds after 22 GBs used. Unlimited plans are just a marketing move, with no real substance at all.

AT&T's unlimited plan is similar. You high speeds up to 22GB/month, then "speeds may slow" which in practice probably means 2G speeds.

As it happens, this is exactly like all their other plans, except for the size of the soft cap. And, get this, the "unlimited" plan isn't even the highest one. They have a 25GB plan with a soft cap that's actually cheaper than the "unlimited" 22GB plan.

I guess people really, really, really want "unlimited" plans and don't care to actually look at what they're getting.

The drop to 2g may be preferred by people that don't want unpredictable overage charges, and like that they can at least use email and light web browsing if they go over.

Oh sure, I have no problem with that as long as they explain what they're doing (and they do). It's just ridiculous that not only is their "unlimited" plan just as limited as all of their other plans, but it's not even the top tier.

I have an ancient unlimited plan with AT&T and honestly I don't care if they cap me so long as I can still stream music at high bit rates.

Ironically enough, my cellular carrier, actually got tricked themselves, when they let me buy an unlimited plan for Google Drive. Basically I get unlimited upload and download bandwidth with Google's Drive service, so I can for example SSH into my server on the road, download a YouTube video or a movie, upload to Drive, then watch on my laptop or phone with 4G speeds. Since I recently moved to a rural area with only a Wireless ISP (WiFi, not cellular) and the speeds are about 5/1 Mbps, I really appreciate the LTE 4G speed. (The only reason I have 4G at this place is because there is a huge power plant next to my house and they put a cell tower on a top mast of the plant. Neighboring areas only have 2G or No Service at all.) I even tested the service by downloading 100 GB and they didn't throttle me, so either they know something I don't, or they got scammed. The service costs 2.48 USD. Pretty good deal if you ask me, even if it lasts a short while, I'll at least get to upload my terabytes of backups from HDDs. Only problem is my phone gets scorching hot when transferring data at 50-70 Mbps.

That's because Verizon and AT&T knows with 4.5G / 4.9G or 5G ( What ever the decide to call it ) they will have much more capacity.

8x8 MIMO, More Spectrum Refarmed, Multiple CA, (Possible) LTE-LAA / WiFi Off loading, we are talking about 3x to 5x more capacity in the near 2 - 3 years time frame.

But Of course the more capacity, the faster your connection speed, and the more Data you consumed, and more addicted you will be to Data ( News / video etc ). The more likely you will pay more / same for Data. ( They would always want higher or at least flat ARPU rather then race to the bottom )

It really is like selling drugs without you noticing it.

So much hostility toward T-Mobile. Don't worry, if the Sprint merger goes through they'll go back to sucking just as much as... Sprint.

Yeah, it seemed as if the author was personally wronged by Legere and wants to exact revenge via the article. Strangely though, he doesn't make a big deal of T-Mobile throttling video while mentioning that Verizon is violating net neutrality by doing the same thing.

> Verizon will undoubtedly exclaim that it, too, needs to throttle video in order to keep up with T-Mobile. The latter carrier is at least violating the spirit of net neutrality at the moment.

They were talking about T-Mobile violating net-neutrality, not Verizon.

Oops, yeah I totally misread that.

I've been a happy Sprint customer for a long time. What do people dislike about it?

As a company, I actually like them better than Verizon or AT&T. However their network coverage and performance have always been subpar in my experience. Granted, these things are heavily dependent on your location. But I lived in a crowded suburb of a major city, and I had to go outside to make a phone call.

Their coverage has been improving dramatically this year, I went to visit my grandfather in rural Nezperce, ID - previously only Verizon had coverage there, now on the southern half of town I get (fairly flaky, but still there) T-Mobile coverage as of May. This dinky town is 60 minutes from the closest small city, and 30 minutes away from any of the large towns in the area!

T-Mobile's network is getting better every day, but it still has a long way to go in many aspects - but as someone on a grandfathered Simple Choice plan who is paying something like $160/mo for 7 lines with 2GB of high-speed data each I can't complain too much.

I would hope that Softbank would look at the performance of T-Mobile and put their execs in charge.

For a while, I had an old grandfathered-in unlimited Verizon plan, which was nice but kind of annoying since I knew it included a phone subsidy that I couldn't use (because getting a new phone would mean getting a new contract, which would mean loosing unlimited data). So I bought my phones off of swappa, but it always annoyed me that I was paying Verizon something like $300/year for a phone that I had long-since paid off.

I was a big fan of their new plans that separated the phone cost from the service cost. I dropped down to a 2GB/month plan and cut my bill by like $6-700/year. (Well, I occasionally go over 2GB, but not most months. The actual savings are probably more like $5-600 when factoring in the overage costs.)

The new unlimited plan seems a lot like the one that I was "stuck" with, except more honest.

No surprise that their average speed is dropping, though. I remember when LTE could hit 70+ mbps. That doesn't happen often these days. (Of course, it's not like you could actually use 70mbit for very long - that speed can burn through a 2GB plan in under 4 minutes.)

If you were only using ~2GB a month, why were you so persistent in hanging on to your grandfathered plan? Most of the people I knew who kept their grandfathered plan were pushing 50 - 100GB of data a month (without tethering as tethering was the #1 reason Verizon could kick you off the plan).

There were occasional months where I was traveling and I'd hit ~10GB, but mostly it was a combination of thinking I was using it more than I actually was, and thinking I might "need" the unlimited data (like if my home internet died or whatever).

Also, until they split things up, it wasn't really any cheaper. I could get a new phone at a discount, but my old phone worked and I could always replace it with another used one from swappa for similar or less money. There was no way to reduce the monthly bill, at least not significantly.

To me, in Europe, those prices sound ridiculous. I can buy 4GB of data from Vodafone for EUR29.

T-Mobile prepaid is $30USD/mo for 5GB LTE.

Yea, they are ridiculous. There are cheaper options, although they generally don't have good coverage in rural areas (where I and a lot of my family live).

"...it always annoyed me that I was paying Verizon something like $300/year for a phone that I had long-since paid off."

I went 6 years off contract after they gobbled & throttled Alltel customers. I was a previous VZW contracted refugee & refused to be yoked into minute/MB counting again and the very frequent overcharge disputes. I was paying that $300 for their superior national coverage, the 180° opposite of their norm customer service & freedom from stealthy "web access" fees. They knew we were f'ed under contract & it showed.

Tmo works well enough now that I don't travel as much. I am on a grandfathered plan here now, too. Meh, I can always pay more, right?

Verizon still has legacy unthrottled unlimited (kicked off after 200GB?) customers. I'm trying to figure out what I should do with 2 lines I don't want to afford anymore.

Sell them... (Though I'm not sure what it takes to do an assumption of liability for those unlimited accounts these days)

This. Take a look at the listings for them on ebay; they're worth at least a grand. A buddy of mine bought one a few months ago and he's super happy with it. I wish I hadn't been a cheap college student and canceled mine a few years back.

Don't feel bad. It's just a matter of time before regular plans get data caps that high.

2 [unlimited] lines I don't want to afford anymore.

My family was grandfathered in to the unlimited unthrottled Verizon plan, and while it still existed I was using a "dumb phone" without a data plan. After the unlimited plan was no longer on the market, I got a smartphone, and that somehow kicked the other 7 lines on my family plan off the unlimited plan that they were grandfathered into.

In short, hey, can I pay you to use one of those spare lines?

Had the same plan - moved to MetroPCS (T-Mobile's pre-paid network. Includes VoLTE/Wifi Calling/answering on other iOS devices) $60 unlimited. 30GB of data before speed throttling, and 8GB of hotspot data. Haven't hit the upper limit once of either metric in the time I've had it.

I was paying $140ish a month with Verizon (included hot spot, which was an extra $30 a month), now I pay $60.

That sounds like a great deal! I'm looking at Google Fi for two phones: one-time ~$1000 for two phones + $20+$15/month for unlimited voice/text + $10/GB which I plan to WiFi apart from maps.

I'm surprised Verizon hasn't "transitioned" these legacy accounts to a "newer, better and faster" (cough) accounts..

I presume there are some legal reason why they haven't done so yet?

The amount of hell they would receive for doing so, T-Mobile got a large amount of flak for transitioning legacy customers to Simple Choice plans. Instead of incurring the PR nightmare that would be, Verizon is just making these plans unappealing with soft caps (they did this to force people off unlimited mobile broadband plans, the number of customers I had yell at me when I worked for a VZW call center because their internet connection was severly throttled was mind-boggling) and by refusing to give subsidized upgrades without changing to a newer plan.

They try super-hard to do so every time there's a change on the account (probably 90%+ were lost when the "free phone" came with a new contract), and they've raised prices (+$20/line). They also instituted the 200GB (maybe 100GB) limit.

http://www.droid-life.com/2015/10/08/verizons-20-unlimited-p...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/11...

http://www.droid-life.com/2016/07/26/fyi-verizon-unlimited-d...

Is that really a logical assumption?

Could it just be that they have more customers and they haven't upgraded infrastructure to keep up with demand?

What does "upgraded infrastructure" mean in this context? Most cell carriers use a shared infrastructure IIRC.

This isn't exactly true (EDIT: Although I suppose its an accurate statement if you're talking about MVNOs [+] riding on top of a carrier's infrastructure).

Yes, they share the tower. Yes, tower position (higher is better) is dictated by agreements and dollars spent. Yes, on rare occasions backhaul is shared (remote cells via microwave). But that's where it ends. Each carrier's RF and networking gear is dedicated, and usually their backhauls are copper or fiber dedicated to themselves.

The problem is people want to treat mobile data like it's not a shared RF medium with 1Gbps backhaul to each tower. This is not how it works. If you think it's hard to get fiber to your home, consider trying to get fiber to every cell site. These problems take years to solve, with construction crews trenching or using a ditch witch to run new physical cable to each tower from nearby termination nodes.

[+] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...

Getting fiber to every cell site sounds orders of magnitude easier than getting fiber to every house.

Infrastructure is hard, just ask Google Fiber.

I'd never call either one easy. But running fiber to one cell tower sounds a lot easier than running fiber to each of the thousand buildings that tower would cover.

Yes, but you're still constrained by the RF that cell site covers. 1Gb cell tower backhaul? (and only 1Gb to cover all of those buildings) Or 1Gb to each building? Tradeoffs.

I thought Verizon and AT&T market share is shrinking if T-Mobile is gaining ground as the total number of customers is fairly steady. AKA annual growth is going to be under 2% and the bandwidth drop is significantly larger than that.

Are you positing it could be "we added (X*Y) number of subscribers this quarter, and for every Y subscribers we need to add 1 tower, but we only added (less than X) towers"? Reportedly, Verizon has some of the slowest[1] subscriber growth among the smartphone carriers, so that doesn't pass the smell test unless Verizon simply decided that hoarding money was higher priority than providing the good customer experience that drives growth.

For months (years?) there have been swirlings that Verizon can't handle "unlimited", accusations they've denied[2], OpenSignal's conclusion seems the most likely.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/even-sprint-topped-at-t-verizon-in... [2] http://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/verizon-execs-dismiss...

I'd posit it's an increase in per-sub utilization vs total sub count. Users aren't motivated to limit their LTE usage with these plans, and in some cases eschew Wi-Fi entirely.

Unlikely in most areas. You really cannot make that judgement anymore as the carriers have added speed tiering.

Just to remind everyone how bad the USA is, I pay £17/mo for unlimited data & text, and a couple hundred minutes on Three UK.

The price for unlimited data on new contracts has gone up since i got it, but they haven't attempted to force me to renew or raise the price on me.

I don't actually know what I am talking about, but I would assume that the price differences are at least partially due to the fact that US telecom has to provide service to a country with way less population density than most of Europe or Asia.

Which I think is really weird. I would pay $20/mo for unlimited data in my metropolitan area and be metered everywhere else.

Those of us that don't live in metropolitan areas are happy to distribute the costs.

So you're grandfathered into some plan? What's the price now? It looks like the unlimited plans are now £28 - £32 a month. That's not much different than US budget carrier plans.

I was a happy T-Mobile customer for a few years, and until I recently moved I was reliably getting speeds in the neighborhood of 40mbps down and 10+mbps up over 4G in my bedroom - consistently faster than our expensive home DSL, and unlimited*. I ended up using it for things like Twitch streaming.

Unfortunately, when I moved to San Jose my 4G reliability went into the toilet - inconsistent signal and average down/up speeds of <1mbps. Even getting a cell booster didn't fix it, so I had to switch carriers. :( It makes me wonder how much of T-mobile's speed is lack of congestion and how much is just better investment in hardware. The towers near my new apartment seemed to be in bad shape and customer service often told me they were shut off for repairs.

It's interesting that t-mobile offers free unlimited roaming in some other countries (like Canada) but the performance there definitely suffers. One reason for that is all traffic getting routed back to the states, but it's interesting to consider what all the behind-the-scenes business deals are like to make that possible.

> It makes me wonder how much of T-mobile's speed is lack of congestion and how much is just better investment in hardware.

TMO poisoned pill a couple of take over bids and used the money on infrastructure [1]. Their network has greatly expanded in the last couple of years in both coverage and speed.

> The towers near my new apartment seemed to be in bad shape

Many (most?) towers are no longer owned by the providers. Separate companies now deal in 'vertical real estate', and sell space on the towers. It's possible this was a legacy TMO owned tower though.

> It's interesting that t-mobile offers free unlimited roaming in some other countries (like Canada) but the performance there definitely suffers. One reason for that is all traffic getting routed back to the states

Are you talking about data or voice? TMO offers international as part of their normal plans, and they are one of the main reasons I use/like TMO. The free tier is 2-3g speed, but the pay for/regular tier is the same thing you would have anywhere else.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/12/att-admits-defea...

> It's interesting that t-mobile offers free unlimited roaming in some other countries (like Canada) but the performance there definitely suffers

Mostly that they throttle this to 128kbps.

Cell service in the South Bay just generally sucks, and has for years -- lots of NIMBYism preventing construction of towers, coupled with some of the highest population density in the country, coupled with very high smartphone ownership and mobile usage.

Also, TMO offers unlimited data roaming, and $.20/minute calling, pretty much world-wide. The data is capped at 2G speeds (that's the main reason it's slow), so it's painful for interactive web apps but more than fast enough to pull down emails or grab a public transit timetable from Google Maps, if you're patient. For anyone who travels overseas more than once or twice a year, this is a godsend.

Having recently moved from T-Mobile to Verizon, I'm much happier with the service I get from Verizon. The speed I get from having a better connection sometime has made a massive difference. I don't think I was anywhere near the max speed on T-Mobile because I was lucky to have 3 bars most of the time.

Bars don't really correlate to speed. Cell site congestion is much more important (and harder to figure out).

I'd have thought that fewer bars == more attenuation == more packet loss?

Only when the signal gets really bad.

Yes. LTE can hang on at crazy low levels. Like -130dB on L800

Is there any plan that offers truly unlimited "3G" equivalent speeds? "Up to 2G speed" is an unusable scam. I used to tether to my phone on a truly unlimited 3G connection and that was what I used for home internet. Netflix, YouTube, etc worked great. Online games did not due to latency.

It seems that most carriers are trying to implement this in a roundabout way by letting services send video at reduced data rates in exchange for the data not counting against the user's data plan. What a complicated mess, and very scary with regards to net neutrality.

Using 3G for home internet is an extremely poor allocation of resources. You have a less constrained alternative (wired infrastructure to your home), and your use deprives mobile users (who have no alternative) of bandwidth. The market is doing exactly the right thing by waving people off of this behavior through prices.

Bandwidth is limited and has to be allocated somehow. Prices aren't the worst idea.

LTE at home however is pretty great and quite good use of resources. In countries it is available it quickly replaces wired internet for casual users.

When he says "good use of resources" he doesn't mean "good value for the money" like you do. He meant that we can't all use wireless signals for all of our internet needs because it will literally run out. Just like there can only be so many radio stations on your dial.

If people who are at home, can be persuaded to use wired connections, it frees up the wireless signal for people who don't have access to a wired connection.

That's not really an issue in practice though. Austria and Finnland already push a lot more traffic and users per base station and there is ample room to grow even before opening up more frequencies or changing the underlyong technology. LTE is an incredibly efficient use of spectrum.

> He meant that we can't all use wireless signals for all of our internet needs because it will literally run out.

We have the wireless infrastructure in place, but it's just not open. He probably has at least 5 WiFi APs in range with 20mbps connections sitting idle. It seems that Comcast is in a good position to pull off some sort of carrier deal with their WiFi hotspots.

Calyx Institute is a non-profit ISP that provides Sprint-backed hotspots with 'unlimited' data at full speeds. It's $500/yr the first year, and tax deductible as a charitable donation.

https://calyxinstitute.org/

Every time there's a thread about American ISPs it's like a self-help group meeting in the comments. I imagine a group of citizens of some kind of Orwellian state would sound roughly the same - abundant horror stories and what seems like a complete lack of a reasonable alternative or escape. Occasionally a lucky guy jumps in and tells everyone how he had avoided the giant cogs of the system and actually gets a decent service for his money.

It would be quite funny if it wasn't also in equal measure disheartening.

People don't go into the comments of an article to say how great everything went, they go on to complain. I see a similar trend on car enthusiast forums or phone hardware forums. For most of us, the Internet works fine. It's not that there's not lots of room to fix things that are broken, but part of the reason those things aren't getting fixed is because for most people it's good enough and therefore the political pressure isn't there.

If you go to any news site or section, what do you see? What are the top head-lines? Is it "Friendly neighborhood teenager helps old lady across the street with groceries"?

Americans don't travel much, so many don't realize how screwed up our country is. America is inferior in so many ways to other develop countries. Trump is only making this worse by appointing crooks to the FCC.

Americans don't want to know what's going on. Americans think the people in power are trying to do good, even though they're not. Americans think the system can be fixed where it's broken, it cannot as it stands.

AT&T is a lot slower because the cheap ($60) unlimited plan is speed capped to 3Mb.

My good old AT&T unlimited data plan regularly gets 100 Mb.

$60/mo is not a cheap plan by any stretch. $20/mo for metered and $30/mo for unlimited is cheap.

Where in the US do you find a single line unlimited plan for $30/mo?

I'm not emigrating to save money on my phone bill.

Does anyone know why carriers charge based on volume (total gigabits downloaded) and not congestion (gigabits downloaded during peak hours)?

It seems like if the issue was contention, it would be helpful to encourage people to, for example, download podcasts and videos on wifi or overnight.

Because it's hard for the end user to know that in the moment, and often hard to time the download. That unpredictability would drive people away.

It's like the Uber surge pricing which passes people off, no matter how much it matches Classical economic theory

Phone carriers used to do "night and weekends" plans and people weren't confused about that.

No, but they resented it horribly, and the first companies to abolish those plans taunted the others mercilessly in their ads -- think guys refusing to call their mom back until Friday night to save on minutes ...

Also, given how much people live on their phones these days, I doubt that congestion varies as much by time of day, as much as it just moves around from office district to suburban neighborhoods.

Average speed on Verizon dropped from 16.9 to 14.9, AT&T went from 13.9 to 12.9. I'd hardly call that "a lot slower".

But if the trend continues...

I use 100gb+ a month on tmobile and see no slow down. Hmm. Although, they do slow down HD video. VPN bypasses that for now.

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