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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it was a mistake, but offering unlimited was a competitive advantage. Others working with the economies of storage had limits or priced based on usage; having unlimited would be a great way to draw in customers. I'm highly skeptical of tech companies effectively price dumping, harming competition, and then coming out and saying "Oops, that wasn't sustainable. Here are the new terms." I'm of the mindset that if you offered an unlimited plan you should have to grandfather in customers that bought into that plan.

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It's also naive to think a big tech company wouldn't be aware of power distributions (see Pareto) when offering anything unlimited. Which Google does continue to offer unlimited data on Google Fi, but throttles (even though they also discontinued the unlimited photo upload with Pixels and many times offers expansion of drive space but if you upgrade to a paid plan you don't get the additional storage, you just get get expanded to that size...)

I also very much agree that the monopolistic behavior you're mentioning is not a think we should just go accepting and even more, not be victim blaming. It feels really weird to me that people are blaming the reporter. You know, a 1.6 trillion dollar company vs well... nearly anyone else.

I don't feel at all bad about throttling mobile data.

For reference, the standard scam before was to offer $40/month for e.g. 1GB of data. At that point, you'd pay a crazy amount for each additional MB of data. This was horrible with very fast data, where you could accidentally burn through the whole quota with a misclick e.g. grabbing a large download.

Unlimited with throttle is super-friendly in comparison. I need data in case of an emergency -- enough to send and get emails and have GPS. I don't need 4k video streaming in an emergency. I don't want a $1000 bill for that. It keeps me in a sensible position, without requiring unlimited liability for the carrier.

Oh, I actually appreciate unlimited with throttle. They've always had data caps too but I wouldn't be surprised if the average user knew about them. But maybe the overage plan manager did because Fi is niche? And sorry, I was just bringing up Fi as an example of something being unlimited since so many people were acting like nothing is.

Well, no. Fi is not unlimited. This is how it works.

My cell network (not Fi) has crazy fast internet (I'd throttle it if I could, t avoid overusing it).

If I go over some amount, it goes to 3G speeds (probably 200kbps or similar).

If I were to run at 3G speeds -- continuously, peak speed -- for a month, I couldn't e.g. hit a terabit of data. Ergo, there is a cap, and it's short of 100GB. You cannot get to 100GB be because of the throttle.

I think this is very good behavior, but it is capped.

Wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of Google employees hang out here and try to deliberately influence comments. Same for the other companies.

I'm sure a bunch of Google employees hang out here. That's literally the draw of HN. But conspiracy? I'm not convinced.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38521408

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