Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaapipo | Hacker News Reader

That's archaic!

My current mobile data plan is 15€/month with 150 mbps symmetrical and no any limits (Finland)

This product is designed as a fixed broadband solution delivered wirelessly. It’s available to about 30 million households in the United States.

What makes this interesting is that it is designed to replace existing cable data solutions - which typically have an order of magnitude more data transfer than mobile. The price point is hyper competitive - and usually cheaper than cable (I pay $75/mo for Charter/Spectrum and they give me 100mbit down/12mbit up). In other words, for 30 million households, they now have options other than their cable company or DSL.

Even at my home, my phone often gets more than 100mbit over LTE (I just used Speedtest and got 147/52), but that traffic may get throttled when I go over 75gb/mo and tethering almost certainly will.

This is for home usage. Would your carrier really be okay if their entire user base began using 1 TB per month for home usage?

The total amount downloaded or uploaded really isn’t the right thing to care about. They just need to manage capacity on their network on a per cell basis and then wherever they aggregate to. I think if every user in a given region was completley saturating their 100Mbit/s link all at the same time, yes they would melt. Fortunatly as they onboard new users they can monitor capacity and daily activity and make sure they cap the number of users in an area before they have capacity issues. As usage patterns change over time (and WFH becomes more prevalent due to covid) they will also have to keep up with the demands for more bandwidth.

SpaceX is similarly doing this with Starlink providing a 100MBit/s+ home internet link.

I do realize that. I’m honestly wondering if a carrier in the US or overseas is okay with users consistently using 1-3TB a month on one normal cellular/wireless line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com