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Comment by serpix | Hacker News Reader

We have unlimited, uncapped 4G plans in Finland and probably most of Europe does.

well, Germany at least doesn't as far as I know. 20GB Telekom LTE at ~80EUR/m, after that it is throttled. They do offer an unlimited, while network neutrality bending, youtube/netflix unlimited streaming option.

PS: I stand corrected. https://www.telekom.de/unterwegs/tarife-und-optionen/smartph...

They do offer them now

Same in the UK ... Three UK does an unlimited sim-only plan for £20 a month which includes overseas roaming, including the US (but not Canada), albeit you're limited to 12GB a month when overseas, which is still a great deal.

I don't listen to DAB radio anymore in my car as it's mono and sounds awful, I use the various radio station apps and have far fewer drop outs than with DAB to boot in addition to the far greater audio quality.

Looking at my usage for the last month I've used well over 50GB.

Home broadband tends to be unlimited as well, I'm on a 384Mbps down 37Mbps up cable connection and regularly transfer 2TB+ in a month when working from home, and nary a peep from my provider.

Given the capacity constraints of an LTE air medium, try torrenting multiple 85GB 2160p60 hevc copies of Blu-ray movies for a whole month, or just seeding debian dvd iso images, and see how long your unlimited plan remains live...

I'm doing that. Fewer torrents (still some), more large files (training data, databases, raw media) or large collections of small files (e.g. Backblaze backups). My monthly data usage for the SIM I used for my home connection is (this month) 809.26 GB, with 6.79 TB so far this year. If I get a drop in speed or network degradation, I can more or less rely on my provider to fix that within a week, if the issue is with the base stations I connect to. This is a fully supported use case for the plan I'm on.

At least in Germany there are practically no such plans. Maybe one or two, but it's with problematic provides and are very very expensive.

The three major providers (Telekom, Vodafone, O2) now have real unlimited plans. It's around 80€, which is expensive, but not excessively so. We generally have far more expensive plans in Germany than anywhere else in Europe, which really sucks. The unlimited plans were first introduced at the end of last year if I recall correctly.

telekom and vodafon cap at 100gig and O2 was just found to be cancelling contracts with "abusive use" ...

Ah, that really sucks. I don't understand why the mobile provider landscape is so fucking terrible in Germany.

At least Telekom doesn't. I have an unlimited plan and use the three SIM cards for my home internet, my phone, and my iPad. Combined, I have hundreds of GB per month of traffic I use. I have the Magenta Business XL plan (not actually a business plan). It's LTE Max, so I get about 250MBps down, 50 up in Berlin. The same unlimited LTE traffic is now available as an 80EUR plan. Although to get to the same feature level (multi-sim, free international calls), I'd end up paying >100 again anyway.

Just looked at my home internet stats, that connection alone had 115.42 GB of download traffic over the past 5 days.

For comparison, I have an unlimited plan from Telia (Finland) with network speeds up to 200Mbit/s on 4G, no data caps and 15GB of roaming "EU-data" for 23.90€/mo.

Man, I'd kill for that kind of plan. I spent a year in Austria ages ago, and even they have substantially cheaper plans that still had higher data caps than German ones.

Not with unlimited tethering though, right?

Lithuania here, unlimited from cellphone operator for around 29 eur/mo, I don't see anything forbidding tethering, I know you can ask for a data-only clone of your SIM to put in your car or laptop. You can get a better deal from the operator that specializes in 4g internet only if you are within coverage.

In some cases, yes. In fact, one of the Irish mobile operators currently has an all-you-can-eat prepay sim top-up promotion that gives you unlimited 4g data for €20 every 28 days.

They have a fair usage policy but don't enforce it (no idea why) and chatting with their pricing personnel it makes no economic sense (they lose money on it). It would appear it's a sacrifice they are currently willing to make to ensure market share increases.

Yep, I have this and often just teather up piles of people. Never have to think about usage. Now that I mention teathering, I don't think there are any Irish service providers who attempt to monitor or regulate teathering, which is nice.

Latvia: 20 eur/mo, very fast uncapped 4G, no limitations whatsoever.

A Finn here. Tethering is not limited either.

One example: https://tuki.dna.fi/org/dna-en/d/dna-rajaton-prepaid-support...

Uk here, yes, I have a truly unlimited plan including tethering. We used it as our main house connection for three months when we moved into our house, while the 250/20 main line was being fitted very slowly. I pay around £20 per month.

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