I really wish other governments would take a leaf out of the book of the Australian government (the ACCC specifically) on this one.
Some years ago the ACCC clamped down on the use of the word "unlimited" in advertising ADSL services. They said it was misrepresentation to use the term unless you really could download all you want, there was no traffic shaping, no soft quota and no excess usage fees.
Basically, the "unlimited" moniker all but died overnight. But this is a Good Thing [tm]. It means you don't get shady practices where, for example, AT&T shapes traffic beyond 3GB/month for "unlimited" users.
Basically, in Australia you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. I think this is an infinitely better system. With current bandwidth limits and technology in the US, mass availability of cheap (truly) unlimited cellular Internet access is simply not economically viable.
Data point: the UK IIRC defines "unlimited" as anything that covers 95% of the population. This led to, for example, a friend of mine getting his parents on Tiscali ADSL, downloading a couple of Ubuntu distros, getting classified as a "downloader" by the ISP and put on their shitty network. Those already on it had figured out the only way to download through BitTorrent and the like was to use port 80/443. So the Web had become unusable at peak times. And this qualified as "unlimited".
Unlimited plans are marketing tools in the US to retain customers. Both AT&T introduced them, removed them and grandfathered existing users. The whole point is to put up a barrier to customers leaving (as they'll lose their grandfathered plans). The sooner we end the charade the better.
Comments
I really wish other governments would take a leaf out of the book of the Australian government (the ACCC specifically) on this one.
Some years ago the ACCC clamped down on the use of the word "unlimited" in advertising ADSL services. They said it was misrepresentation to use the term unless you really could download all you want, there was no traffic shaping, no soft quota and no excess usage fees.
Basically, the "unlimited" moniker all but died overnight. But this is a Good Thing [tm]. It means you don't get shady practices where, for example, AT&T shapes traffic beyond 3GB/month for "unlimited" users.
Basically, in Australia you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. I think this is an infinitely better system. With current bandwidth limits and technology in the US, mass availability of cheap (truly) unlimited cellular Internet access is simply not economically viable.
Data point: the UK IIRC defines "unlimited" as anything that covers 95% of the population. This led to, for example, a friend of mine getting his parents on Tiscali ADSL, downloading a couple of Ubuntu distros, getting classified as a "downloader" by the ISP and put on their shitty network. Those already on it had figured out the only way to download through BitTorrent and the like was to use port 80/443. So the Web had become unusable at peak times. And this qualified as "unlimited".
Unlimited plans are marketing tools in the US to retain customers. Both AT&T introduced them, removed them and grandfathered existing users. The whole point is to put up a barrier to customers leaving (as they'll lose their grandfathered plans). The sooner we end the charade the better.
I wrote to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority regarding misuse of the word "unlimited" as relating to broadband and mobile internet.
Their response was that "as most people wont hit the limits, they can call it unlimited".