It’s becoming more common for carriers to offer additional data at 2G speeds after subscribers use up all of the regular-speed data that they’ve been allotted. In most cases, this means subscribers who’ve run out of regular data are throttled to a maximum speed of 128Kbps. It’s a great perk. Imagine you’ve run out of regular data, but really need to use the internet for a moment to pull up a boarding pass, look up directions, or view an email. At 2G speeds, it will probably be frustratingly slow to do any of those things, but that’s a much better scenario than being unable to use data at all.
Most consumers have little clue what 2G speeds amount to in practice. Let me be clear: 2G speeds are really slow for most things people want to do. Music streaming probably won’t work well. Video streaming at low, 240p resolution won’t be possible. Most websites will take a long time to load.
Carriers vary in how they present the perk of extra data at 2G speeds. In my opinion, Mint Mobile and Verizon handle the perk in a commendable way. Both carriers generally describe their plans and data allotments based on the amount of regular data allotted. In contrast, Total Wireless and Tello offer “unlimited” plans. These plans have caps on regular data use. After the cap is reached, subscribers continue to have data at 2G speeds. I think it’s misleading, bordering on outright lying, to call these unlimited plans. It’s just not possible to use data in a normal manner once speeds are throttled to 128Kbps.
In fact, imposing a throttle creates a limit on how much data can be used in a month. If a subscriber manages to transmit 128 kilobits of data every second for an entire month, they’ll use about 40GB of data.1 While almost no subscribers will come close to reaching it, there is a theoretical limit on these supposedly unlimited plans. It’s roughly: amount of regular data + 40GB.
Disclosure: I have financial relationships with Verizon, Mint Mobile, Tello, and Total Wireless (more details).
Absolutely. And that 40GB is being generous with the 128 kilobits being actually useful. Many pages just refuse to load if the speeds aren’t what are expected. TTLs can’t be forever!
It’s also difficult to explain to your average everyday consumer that their unlimited plan isn’t actually unlimited. It’s just that their average usage threshold falls below what their high-speed allotment is. They hear “$25 unlimited” and anything priced thereabove isn’t worth discussing, despite any other benefit for the money.
This weird threshold exists for data but not for any other service. You can offer 5000 minutes and call it unlimited and even CHARGE for overages on an unlimited plan and still get away with using it in marketing (see: https://www.readymobile.com/plans — certificate expired). Once overage charges exist on an unlimited plan, the word loses its meaning.
That’s not to say that the concept of the thresholds aren’t without merit. They exist to push you into a higher-margin plan with probably a larger data bucket and/or more breakage. It makes no sense to collect less money from you per month than they pay their provider to have you. MVNOs are, after all, in it to make money.
So, they slow you down to basically unusable speeds to either get you to (1) upgrade next month to pay more or (2) keep your total usage under what they consider profitable.
Disclosure: I work for Ting, a Sprint and T-Mobile MVNO.
Soooo… It’s not literally unlimited!
Sorry, I had to.
This is a great point that I didn’t mention:
Many pages just refuse to load if the speeds aren’t what are expected
I’m worried that the cell phone industry is starting to see the same silly movement towards “unlimited” plans as a marketing necessity that the shared web hosting industry went through several years ago.
In my view, I’m ok with unlimited plans preventing outrageous types of use from being possible, but I don’t like plans having the “unlimited” label if pretty reasonable use can cause people to hit limits.
Maybe restaurants offering unlimited trips to a salad bar is an appropriate analogy. I’m ok with a restaurant cutting off someone who fills a plate, dumps all the food in a trash can, then fills another plate over and over. I wouldn’t be ok with the restaurant cutting someone off or imposing weird restrictions after three trips to the salad bar.
This makes me want to test the real-world limits of Olive Garden’s “Unlimited Salad and Breadsticks” and really test what a spokesperson told The Daily Meal: “We love seeing our guests’ passion for our unlimited menu items and don’t have a limit to the number of refills our guests can request,”
Source: https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/olive-garden-unlimited-bread-sticks
Litigations will ensue…..just pop some popcorn
A very important thing to note: Technically, several plans say they’ll give you unlimited internet at *up to* 2G speeds (at least that’s what my AT&T through Red Pocket says).
I intentionally hit the limit a fee days before my plan renewed last month, and they dumped me to speeds that were only 10% of that advertised 128Kbps max. It was completely unusable for even the most basic functions.
“Up to 2G” really means “2G or less”.
If I were in charge of the FTC I would enforce replacing “up to” with “or less”.
Imagine how much less deceptive it would make advertising.
Instead up “SAVE up to 25%” (which could be a 1% discount) they would have to write “SAVE 25% OR LESS!”
**************** THIS *********************
Only an imbecile would promise “equal to 2G”, because there’s no way they can guarantee that. In the real world, mobile service is sometimes so bad that the carrier can’t give you that speed even if they wanted to, because Physics.
We will simply use cable for our data…..hit em in their pocketbooks, where it counts. Cable is now cheap for truly unlimited data
This is simply greed attacking the vulnerable. Especially when T-Mobile bought out Sprint in order to manopolize. Then use 2G minimum in an attempt to increase profits by pushing a data package of $5 more per month extra for 1 more GIGABYTE & or trying to get their customers to restart their plan before the end of the month usually 1/2 way through the month; what ever ones plan calls for to double the payment through munipulation. For instance 35GB with unlimited min of voice & unlimited text for $50 – $60 – $85 etc. No matter what plan one has they’ll still cap 35GB per pay period no matter what plan one has. I don’t use much texting (if any) or voice (if any) So you’re pretty much at their greedy mercy which they have no mercy.
P.S. Making money is one thing but being GREEDY is a complete selfish way of doing business. So sense everyone is doing the same thing it must be OK right?
I use straight talk and I believe they are a AT&T subsidiary. I typically use 100gb+ data a month bc I watch a lot of videos and movies in HD 1080p. Straight Talk tells me in the terms with the 55$ unlimited plan for a month that they “reserve the right to monitor usage, if usage exceeds 60gb”
Now given this is 4GLTE speeds I never noticed any throttling after I exceeded the 60gb threshold. Last month I used roughly 150gb of data between downloading music, games, watching movies and youtube videos, streaming Twitch and using Facebook and Instagram Video Calling (I guess a typical video call can use quite a bit of data) (Oh I also do a lot of file sharing to a VPS for a friend sending large files to said server), and I not once hit a limit.