Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrMember | Hacker News Reader

With data caps I don't see much use for it. I still think it's hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people's monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.

View on HN

It would blow through your allowance if you downloaded something at that speed, constantly. Maybe other people understand it differently but I’ve always understood those ads as like ads for a top speed on a car. You’ll never go that fast normally, but you can if you need to.

People will continue downloading < 1 MB per request, it will just be much faster

That's just it, though. If 99% of your mobile internet usage consists of <1MB requests it doesn't matter if you're on 3G,4G,or 5G.

4G at least in general has lower latency than 3G, but I don't know if that's the protocol or just deployment.

You'd still get kicked for high ping even if you sat right under the 4G tower.

In our rural area with poor 4g (Verizon) signal, the latency is still usually better than our CenturyLink adsl. Something like 40ms vs 60ms.

Speak for yourself. With my grandfathered unlimited data play from Verizon, I basically stream YouTube all day long.

Except if you hit the top speed of your car you can continue driving around at the normal speed the whole rest of the time. You don't have to drive around at half the speed you want for a month.

It won't be long before companies are making extra-high bandwidth auto-playing ads to eat your allowance, not to mention the improved location tracking due to smaller cells.

I think this is a great point. With fast internet, my fear is that websites will load more and more crapola, eating our bandwidth, so basically we will indeed be buying 3 minutes of internet per month.

You can be sure that content creators will expand their media density to fill the available capacity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com