this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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OK, good point. Are people using mobile data for that? Yes you're right I'm not on social media etc. Also I'm on a super cheap mobile plan with enough monthly data to check email and look at some occasional web pages, but if I want to watch a video I almost always use home internet for that. I guess if this super high bandwidth mobile stuff kills Comcast though, some good will have come out of it. The Register article talks mostly about IoT and "AI/ML" rather than social media though.
Is 5g mobile data cheaper for the end user than 4g in practice? The sticker prices and advertised data caps for monthly plans look to me to be about the same as before, but maybe more of the data cap is usable in practice.
Unlimited data. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
I haven't seen any carriers charging extra for 5g but I don't see why it would be more expensive since the quicker you're done using the data the quicker the tower can serve someone else.
That's what I mean, it seems to cost as much as before. I was hoping to hear that it had gotten a lot cheaper, not stayed the same. Ideally, it should be pervasive and free, but I don't mind in that case if it is relatively slow.
Every "unlimited" mobile plan I've heard of has fine print that says it slows to a crawl after some amount. I don't know if the real limits are different in practice, so I was asking about that.
These days you just get “deprioritized” instead of a hard throttle on most unlimited plans after reaching the amount. Deprioritized means the network treats your data as less important so if the tower gets congested it’ll slow down otherwise it’s still full speed.
At work we have phones that are web crawlers and they each use 50+ gigs of data per month so they're well within the deprioritized zone. But even then they still get really good speeds unless the network is super congested for some reason.