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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty expensive though. I pay $10/GB (marginal) for Google Fi. That doesn't really scale to streaming HD video. I imagine a roomier higher-frequency spectrum would help get contention down and lower costs.

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Google Fi is the exception, not the rule. You can get "unlimited data" LTE for $60+ with other carriers. (e.g. T-Mobile One is $70 for a single line)

Google Fi is for people who mostly use wi-fi. (I use Google Fi)

Project Fi is a little more expensive but can be used as an unlimited plan at $80/mo for a single line, as they stop charging for data after 6GB.

"Unlimited" plans just hope that not too many people use a lot of data. But if you're really one of the people who doesn't use much data, you might as well use a plan which charges per gigabyte, and then you're exposed to the real per-gigabyte cost. Market forces therefore keep the cost of unlimited plans roughly in line, and the per-gigabyte cost is still relevant even for unlimited plans.

https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/mydatausage

T-Mobile is “unlimited data” until 50GB, then they limit your speed.

50GB is pretty generous. Not truly unlimited, but I could definitely live with that.

It's one blu-ray worth of data. Mobile data has really lowered people's expectations about internet connectivity a lot, relative to the improvement curve that we got used to last decade with wired connectivity.

The improvement curve for my mobile data is much steeper than my home broadband. Only recently and by installing an ugly looking microwave satellite on my home has my wired broadband exceeded my t-mobile LTE speeds. For a long time on DSL my phone battery would die trying to upload stuff to the cloud because DSL upload speeds are so bad. I’m a heavy mobile user and I’ve never hit my 50GB limit, it’s high enough that as long as I use WiFi when it’s available I don’t have to think about data caps which only exist to reduce congestion. And the data caps keep going up every year. My home broadband has a soft cap of 1.5TB which has grown much slower than my mobile soft cap. I expect 5G to finally bust the “unlimited data for everything but tethering” problem and at that point I can ditch the microwave satellite altogether.

Yes, but this is only because home broadband has essentially stalled. If you look at what's happening in areas where there is a market for wired net bandwidth, computers are connected at around 100G speeds. Yeah, server environments traditionally always had better networking, but you can chop off an order of magnitude or two to account for this, and still the comparison shows how consumer wired is stalled.

It is political problem. Currently using my unlimited 4g plan which cost about 15 euros and fast.com gives 49mb/s and I live literally middle of nowhere.

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