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Comment by kempbellt | Hacker News Reader

I hate this kind of advertising. It is bullshit and I am tired of it.

In GIANT BOLD: $50

In smaller font: "each"

In even smaller font: "$150/mo" is finally explained

"High-speed data up to 22 GB/person & slower after." is not unlimited data when the "slower after" speeds can barely load google's search page. It is, 'high-speed data up to 22 GB/person & slower after". Do we need to start throwing around a dictionary definition of the word unlimited? This is getting old...

Just because it's google, doesn't mean they get a pass on car-salesman type sleazy sales tactics.

Why not just advertise it plainly? This method of advertising makes someone like me less likely to buy this product.

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>In smaller font: "each"

>In even smaller font: "$150/mo" is finally explained

That is really, truly, unfair. The font size choice is quite reasonable, and makes it easily readable.

Here's what it would look like if the text was the same size:

https://i.imgur.com/fTFlgHj.png

https://i.imgur.com/DCWpN9J.png

>"High-speed data up to 22 GB/person & slower after." is not unlimited data when the "slower after" speeds can barely load google's search page. It is, 'high-speed data up to 22 GB/person & slower after". Do we need to start throwing around a dictionary definition of the word unlimited? This is getting old...

I use Freedom (previously known as Wind) in Canada, and their "slower speeds" on the unlimited plans are more than satisfactory. I don't even notice that I'm throttled until I check my text messages.

As a result, I reach 12GB+ on my 6GB plan almost every month.

So for me, their unlimited plan is very much unlimited.

I am bot really sure what you are defending here. Unlimited means without limits. 22gb is a limit. I am glad 12gb is enough for you but its not for many.

You might not notice 256kbps throttling, but most people will. Youtube stops working right, Bandcamp, Pandora & Spotify buffer, and browsing the web or navigating takes a bit to load.

The top couple percent of T-Mobile USA users use over 50GB of data a month, mostly on unlimited plans without hard throttles. An "unlimited" plan that hard throttles at 22GB of usage is decietful given this context, hence all other carriers not using hard throttles on Unlimited plans.

All 4 major US carriers would brand this plan as a 22GB plan with no overages.

>All 4 major US carriers would brand this plan as a 22GB plan with no overages.

What are you smoking? Every one of Verizon's plans that have caps identical to this are "unlimited"

https://www.verizonwireless.com/plans/unlimited/

Verizon claims to deprioritize on busy towers rather than hard throttle you after a certain number of gigs. Same thing happens for T-Mobile, AT&T & Sprint.

With a hard throttle there is no way a user could burn 200GB a month over LTE, but with deprioritization you still get full LTE speeds on most cell towers.

Does an MVNO like Fi have that kind of control though?

Does being unable to offer something justify mischaracterizing what they can offer as if it were that thing?

I have found my phone on Cricket (owned by AT&T) is surprisingly usable after data cap is reached and you are throttled.

Like, email and even google maps, no problem. Facebook perfectly usable although with some lag. I didn't bother trying to watch videos.

I have been curious if the usability of "throttled" speeds differs between carriers.

> surprisingly usable > I didn't bother trying to watch videos.

Uh-huh. Missing video means the service is unusable.

Oh, is that what people are complaining about? Fair enough, but not important to me. Are all the carriers "throttled" rates good enough to do most things but watch videos then?

During the California fires emergency services found that Verizon's "MAY throttle you, on BUSY towers, in periods of HIGH traffic"...

Actually meant "WILL unconditionally throttle you after 1 bit more than your quota, even in an evacuated area at 3am, to 128 or even 64kbps".

More Everything data pools get hard throttled to that speed after the data pool runs out, not deprioritized like newer plans. Still a shit thing for Verizon to do...

Verizon does not hard throttle at 22 gigs.

> You might not notice 256kbps throttling, but most people will. Youtube stops working right, Bandcamp, Pandora & Spotify buffer, and browsing the web or navigating takes a bit to load.

Yeah, quality gets awful at that speed. For reference, the 'unlimited 480p' type of feature is six times that fast, 1.5Mbps.

If my phone throttled to 2Mbps, it wouldn't affect me very much. 0.25Mbps is not acceptable.

Slow speeds? Like throttling after you exceed a data cap?? In 2019?!? Crazy.

> That is really, truly, unfair. The font size choice is quite reasonable, and makes it easily readable.

Yeah, but it's insulting. "Unlimited" is not unlimited with a fucking limit, doesn't matter how reasonable or unreasonable it is. Every time I look at an ad I gotta sit there and look for asterisks or numbers, and then find the fine print where the actual information is contained, not just the marketing wank.

How about just tell me how much your fucking thing costs in plain fucking English? Maybe I don't want to decipher your advert like it's a goddamn Captcha. $150 for Unlimited (assuming it was actually unlimited, which it's not) isn't even an unreasonable price, but when you lead with $50, and then oh by the way it's actually $150, oh and by the way it's limited, you've made what is logically a good deal now look tremendously worse for your effort of trying to "hook" me.

How about just tell me what it costs, you know, like you're an honest seller of a product and I'm a grown fucking man who you have an ounce of respect for?

I totally agree with this. 22GB is 22GB, not Unlimited. Just say it's 22GB.

There are lots of things I would do with something truly unlimited that I couldn't do with 22GB.

And I've paid a lot more than $150 a month for 8GB for a long time from Verizon. This is not a bad deal but is made to look like a bad deal, is my point, because the marketers just can't help themselves.

To be fair this is quite good actually in readability, it is not a captcha or an asterisk it is literally in the main box as one of the main points (the first of them)

A criticism is that it is not clear if the "may stream 480p video" refers to the slower after and whether it is a "guarantee" or not really a possibility.

But for the rest it also explicitly tells you the maximum amount you might end up paying each month. Honestly do not see what you are complaining about.

Still a little sleazy... Reminds me of something like:

"10 easy payments of 15 dollars!" Also, do you really want Google owning even more of the internet?

> I use Freedom (previously known as Wind) in Canada, and their "slower speeds" on the unlimited plans are more than satisfactory. I don't even notice that I'm throttled until I check my text messages.

Well, I do notice. Especially when I'm trying to operate telepresence robots or the like and the video streams crap out while you're trying to navigate. Or when I'm trying to work on my laptop outdoors far away from home and need to download lots of things over LTE.

Just because you only use 140-byte messages doesn't mean others who are trying to live the future don't notice.

>As a result, I reach 12GB+ on my 6GB plan almost every month. So for me, their unlimited plan is very much unlimited.

It isn't unlimited for me. I can easily hit 22GB. Unlimited means unlimited, and 22GB isn't unlimited.

The unreasonable thing is putting the $50 number at the top when that's not what will be charged. I saw this and immediately compared $50 to my current bill. It's nice to include the per person number, but putting it giant at the top is confusing and deceptive.

Here's what it would look like if they weren't trying to obfuscate the total:

https://i.imgur.com/9E5ADcn.jpg

Everytime talking about this, I do think living in China is a more affordable option, I have a plan(coperation perk) which offer me 20GB data, but after that it will be throttled to 100KB/s, which cost me 10 rmb/mon.

Yep. Looks like garbage to me. Someday "unlimited" will mean it, but right now it's just code for "actually quite limited but written in small print." I'll pass.

Unlimited used to mean unlimited.

Now it means “caveat emptor.”

That's true and practically every statement made in an ad aimed at the general public should be taken with just as many buckets full of salt grains.

If an ad for a lab oscilloscope were made that way, nobody would ever buy it.

In a marketing context it never meant that, same as "satisfaction guaranteed" doesn't mean what you expect. It really means "product has a fixed price with vendor defined service level" vs "defined service level and variable price according to usage". "Unmetered" might be a reasonable shorthand.

Oh, it's totally metered.

This isn't as bad as the recent campaign by Rogers in Canada for their "infinite" package.

https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/06/13/rogers-unlimited-infinite...

Taking a page from Freedom Mobile, the new plans offer ‘unlimited’ data in that they don’t include data overage fees. Instead, once subscribers go over their monthly data allotment, Rogers caps their data speeds at 256Kbps until the start of their next billing cycle.

10GB full speed.

I was trying to find how slow the throttled speed was in their FAQ and came across this gorgeous piece of language: "Note that speeds may be optimized once an individual surpasses 15 GB of data usage on the Fi Flexible plan and 22 GB of data usage on the Fi Unlimited plan"

"speeds may be optimized"??? Optimized for who?

If the Chinese government were to ask that question they would probably get an answer. Mere mortals don't get answers from Google.

You forgot the + taxes & gov't fees part, which will make the final bill somewhere between $165 and $180.

That's another dark pattern. It's not like they don't know what the taxes and the fees are. They have the system that has exact amount of fees for every zip code in the US. Otherwise they couldn't bill you. Just ask for the zip code and give proper price. But no, that would make that nice $50 into ugly $180. TMobile gets it right - their price is final, what you see is what you pay.

That's a very US specific thing. There are different interest groups for or against taxes across different states that I doubt it would change any time soon. I would love for all advertised prices to be the final price (or very close based on reasonable estimates), but such a law would never get broad support. Taxes are such a taboo in the US that the government can't even offer free income tax returns.

Not so much a taboo for the public as a taboo for special interest group money. But it just needs a campaign to show that advertizing without tax makes taxes invisible, because you just pay it and gripe after, vs tax included and you change your purchase decision because it is too much money.

Every jurisdiction I've been in that charges a consumption tax requires it be shown on the receipt, regardless of whether it was advertised as inc or ex tax.

>without tax makes taxes invisible

Right, and that is the argument used against free tax returns in the US. They want taxes to be painful enough so that filing your taxes makes you think about them (and hence you would support the party that lowers taxes etc.)

Overall, this dubious logic will never go away.

Yes, so I can see how it can be hard for a small shop owner or a family restaurant to update their menus every time. But telecom vendor has these all implemented in their billing system anyway, and if there's a company that wouldn't have problem with either technical aspects nor budget to make their site show true price, that company is Google. They totally could do it if they wanted, they just prefer to post misleading prices because people allow them to get away with it.

Most of them aren’t even real taxes and government fees, yet the telecoms have been allowed to keep pretending for decades that their fake government taxes aren’t just hidden fees

> Do we need to start throwing around a dictionary definition of the word unlimited?

A colleague of mine was told by a Swiss mobile phone provider that "unlimited" was a technical term meaning 5GB.

Ha ha, must have been swisscom? The salt unlimited, IME, was pretty unlimited. CHF45 (~USD45) per month unlimited.

It was years ago when Salt was still Orange.

I've had months where I used over 100 gigs on Salt's unlimited plan. I also have a co-worker who does the same with their Sunrise subscription, all without a problem.

Within Switzerland all major carriers (Swisscom, Sunrise & Salt) have no data cap on their unlimited subscriptions.

On their Unlimited Europe subscriptions both Swisscom & Sunrise are capped at 40gb/month (while still being advertised as "unlimited"). Only Salt is truely unlimited there.

What’s up with magic number of 22? NZ has that year ago when these plans started to appear, but has been bumped to over 30gb now.

Still rip off compared to European prices/offers (€25 for actually unlimited).

My plan (in Oz): $45 (AUD)/mo 50GB. So that works out as $30 USD/mo for 50GB.

It looks like Google Fi needs to work harder to be able to break into the Oz market (if it had any inclination to).

They wouldn't be able to use the term unlimited in Australia if there are limitations. Executives that approve misleading advertisements can be personally fined. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/telcos-on-notice-about...

The advertising rule should be that all font size should be the same, including the terms and conditions and small-text.

Assuming you use the bandwidth all the time, you have 256kbps speed, which effectively means at most 82GB transfer (and that's assuming the connection is used all the time, 24 hours in a day, which isn't gonna happen).

So, I guess unlimited means 100GB, and that's the best-case scenario. Okay then?

I think it's funny actually. It's probably a good parallel to human nature. We want to see big attractive signs and believe there are no fine prints and even if they're here most won't really read them.

Vendors of telecommunication services seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to “creative” interpretations of common terms.

The bigger the font the more skeptical you should be. Always read the fine print.

Does anyone believe the "talk to a human anytime" part? As you said ... It's Google!

Because they don't specify what would be the network speed after 22Gb limit reached, I suspect their "slower after" means they simply give traffic priority to those who haven't consumed their 22Gb.

So it will be equally fast if only a few people use the service (e. g. outside of populous areas), and much slower otherwise.

So it's not like they are going to have their network underloaded just to squeeze more money from customers.

If that hypothesis is true, it does not sound that bad.

For their original plan, the "slower after" was capped at 256 kb/s, it's not clear if the same applies to the unlimited plan.

> So it's not like they are going to have their network underloaded just to squeeze more money from customers.

Of course they are, why wouldn't they? It's not like it's any worse than any other "unlimited" plan you can get and giving out 10x more usage at 0x more cost isn't helping their margins while trying to get heavy users to pay per gig is.

> So it will be equally fast if only a few people use the service (e. g. outside of populous areas), and much slower otherwise.

Since Google isn't actually deploying the cell networks and they actually use a mixed set of providers, I am not sure if this assumption makes sense.

If the mobile network T-Mobile is overloaded with T-Mobile customers and has a small fraction of Google ones, then Google will tell T-Mobile to throttle the customers that exceeded their contract limit?

from their FAQ:

If you use more than 15 GB of data in a cycle on the Fi Flexible plan or more than 22 GB in a cycle on the Fi Unlimited plan (less than 1% of individual Fi users as of Jan. 2018), you'll experience slower speeds (256 kbps) above those respective data thresholds until your next billing cycle begins.

If you need significant amounts of high speed data, you can opt to pay $10/GB for the data you use past the data threshold for your plan in a given cycle (15GB for Flexible or 22GB for Unlimited).

These data thresholds are based on individual data usage, not group data usage.

I was wrong then. Thank you for the pointer!

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