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What would you do if Sprint eliminated "unlimited" data? Poll thread.


Would you stay with sprint without unlimited ?  

173 members have voted

  1. 1. If you are currently a sprint unlimited customer, would you stay with sprint if forced to tiered data plans?

    • yes
      21
    • no
      47
    • depends on plan pricing
      88
    • don't know
      2
    • not currently a sprint customer but want to vote anyway
      2
    • I'm already not on unlimited
      13
  2. 2. If you are on a sprint shared data plan, why did you stick with sprint instead of ATT/VZ?

    • I got better deal on sprint's data plan
      21
    • I like sprint and hate the others
      1
    • sprint has better service in my location
      6
    • I didn't want to buy new phone(s)
      1
    • I don't use much data and/or don't care about unlimited and/or don't mind paying more if I happen to use more than my plan
      2
    • other?
      5
    • not currently a sprint customer but want to vote anyway
      4
    • I'm on unlimited
      133


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Posted

I would also like to have the option to make speed tests count for 2x data usage.

 

A completely different 2x, but people should start checking/posting how much data these 2x CA band 41 speed tests are consuming.  The results should be sobering.

 

AJ

Posted

A completely different 2x, but people should start checking/posting how much data these 2x CA band 41 speed tests are consuming. The results should be sobering.

 

AJ

100Mbps over the span of 8-10 seconds consumes at lot.

Posted

100Mbps over the span of 8-10 seconds consumes at lot.

I rarely run speed tests, let alone multiple speed tests. But in the interest of science, I ran two band 41 speed tests at an MLS match about six weeks ago. Band 41 appeared to have been added to the Sporting Park DAS, and the park Wi-Fi was either greatly congested or on the fritz. One band 41 speed test was 9/5 Mbps, the other 40/13 Mbps. Just those two tests alone consumed 150 MB. The speed tests were also solely responsible for pushing me over the Republic Wireless average cellular data usage figure that month. So, Republic probably hates me for running them.

 

AJ

  • Like 1
Posted

But after that 8-10 seconds what impact does it have on the towers?

 

We are quick to say that we shouldn't consume a lot of data, but if it were that detrimental, don't you think Sprint would have not kept unlimited? The reason the big 2 did it was to make more money since data is the "flavor of the month" just like texting was. Remember how we kept getting gouged on the price of a text message?

 

I think Sprint is also losing money because they had tens of millions of people leave, but their network costs didn't go down. Thus if 60 million people were paying for something and now you are down under 50 million, your income goes way down, but your network costs don't.

Posted

I don't think we can consider wireless a commodity until they are reliable. Think of this as a water company. Everyone pays for how much water they use. Great. But would you be happy if one day your water comes out of the faucet at a steady stream and the next day it just drips when you turn it on? Sure it still works, but will you be really happy if it takes you 5 minutes to fill up a pot to boil water?

 

People complain that the people who abuse the network causes it to not work right. What happens if they pay to use that much data? Can the wireless companies really make it so those people don't cause the network to crumble? There is only so much spectrum that can be used. So if someone is paying to use a lot of it and the companies are getting extra money, what can that money be used for? They can't buy more spectrum right? They can't have their towers pump more out if they don't have anymore right?

 

I think buckets cause more data to be used. I am on unlimited right now and with a family of 3 average 4.5 Gb a month. If I pay for a bucket of data, you better believe I would try and use that all up because I paid for that much and I would feel like I would be throwing money down the drain.

I'm not meaning to go offtopic here, and I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but in the town I live in there is a fee for a minimum amount of water use. While I don't think that fee is very high, the amount of water included is. There are people around here who don't even use half that included amount they are paying for.

 

While I disagree with many here on the unlimited data issue being a big problem currently, I do agree it could be one in the very near future, particularly with 4k video taking up so much wireless space. I also agree that a per gb system for all would be best, just at what cost is the issue.

 

Right now I'd say $3-$5 per gb, but ideally later $1-$2. Those rates could also implement maximum speed caps where less maximum speed means less cost. I definitely believe the better way of going about this though is not to have some sort of standardized bucket of data initially, which would be akin to the water situation I mentioned.

Posted

But after that 8-10 seconds what impact does it have on the towers?

 

Your conception of data usage here and in an earlier post is overly simplistic.

 

Say there were only one or two users in any market frequently running speed tests and consuming significantly greater than average "unlimited" data.  And those one or two users were not camping on one sector but moving around almost all of the time.  RootMetrics is a great example of this.  Then, yes, your argument would have weight.

 

But that is not even close to the real world.  With tens of millions of users nationwide broken down into thousands or millions of users per market broken down into hundreds or thousands of users per sector, think the law of large numbers.

 

On a given sector, user A runs a speed test.  It affects the sector for those 10 seconds.  Odds are good that shortly after or even before those 10 seconds have elapsed, user B initiates a speed test.  And the pattern continues with other speed tests ad infinitum.

 

To put it in simple terms, if you are performing a certain data activity, chances are that someone else is doing so around the same time.

 

That is with an emphasis on temporal distribution.  The same holds true for spatial distribution.  User X is a significantly above average consumer of data.  He enters a given sector and increases its loading for a few minutes but then leaves.  Ah, but user Y, who is also a significantly above average consumer of data, has already entered the sector before user X left -- or she enters five minutes later.  And the pattern continues with other significantly above average users ad infinitum.

 

Again, to put it in simple terms, if you are performing a certain data activity, chances are that someone else is doing so in the same area.

 

All of the above reduce average speeds for all users on the network.

 

AJ

  • Like 1
Posted

Would I be barking up the wrong tree by suggesting using the ISP approach and limiting speed but keeping unlimited data or high soft caps. Something like 15 mbps max speed and limit of 50 GBs usage with either decreased speeds or pay extra for buckets beyond the 50 GBs. Would something like this make much of difference on congestion? My belief is that if you can't do what you want to do on a cell phone with a bandwidth of 15 mbps then you might just be an abuser.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I really like your idea, which I suggested something similar a few months ago, but I had quite a bit of opposition to it. As people claim unlimited usage bogs down the network, I figured why not just lessen the speed for those people down to 9mbps, which I'm now thinking a better range would be around 15mbps. However at the time, I was told here thatspeed caps wouldn't help manage congestion, even though elsewhere I had been told speed caps would help.

 

So, all I'm basing speed caps on is for pricing. I can see something occurring where the price is set at $1 per gb at 10mbps, $2 per gb at 20mbps, $3 per gb at 30mbps, and so on.

Posted

I really like your idea, which I suggested something similar a few months ago, but I had quite a bit of opposition to it. As people claim unlimited usage bogs down the network, I figured why not just lessen the speed for those people down to 9mbps, which I'm now thinking a better range would be around 15mbps. However at the time, I was told here thatspeed caps wouldn't help manage congestion, even though elsewhere I had been told speed caps would help.

 

So, all I'm basing speed caps on is for pricing. I can see something occurring where the price is set at $1 per gb at 10mbps, $2 per gb at 20mbps, $3 per gb at 30mbps, and so on.

 

Speed tiers will not fly with the networks nor the public.  Wireless network speeds in the real world are always variable.  People will run too many speed tests "to ensure that they are getting what they paid for."  When poor signal and/or network congestion gives them slower speeds than their contracted tiers, they will not understand and will complain.

 

And your made up prices -- in this thread and others -- seemingly have no foundation in reality.  Instead, Arysyn, they are what you think is fair or what you wish to pay.

 

Well, what if I wish to pay only $1 per gallon for gas.  That seems fair to me.  But maybe it does not cover the costs of drilling and refining nor distribution and retail.  Plus, maybe it discourages moderation and encourages overconsumption that leads to supply depletion.

 

AJ

  • Like 4
Posted

Speed tiers will not fly with the networks nor the public. Wireless network speeds in the real world are always variable. People will run too many speed tests "to ensure that they are getting what they paid for." When poor signal and/or network congestion gives them slower speeds than their contracted tiers, they will not understand and will complain.

 

And your made up prices -- in this thread and others -- seemingly have no foundation in reality. Instead, Arysyn, they are what you think is fair or what you wish to pay.

 

Well, what if I wish to pay only $1 per gallon for gas. That seems fair to me. But maybe it does not cover the costs of drilling and refining nor distribution and retail. Plus, maybe it discourages moderation and encourages overconsumption that leads to supply depletion.

 

AJ

I've never said my ideas are a realistic certainty, AJ. I've also said that much of my posts are opinionary, as I've never claimed to be an expert, nor that I could ever be one. This is a reason I brought up my health in the past, to let people know if they ever tried to suggest I was even pretending to be an expert, or to tell me things like "Why don't you try getting a job and learn reality in the wireless marketplace." then they'd know why I couldn't.

 

However, it doesn't take an expert to calculate how much per gb is being charged in these current data buckets. For instance, Verizon charges around $6 per gb for data in their 20gb data only package with one tablet line. Their 15gb promo plan with a line, is around $7.50.

 

We all know Verizon and AT&T are the most expensive providers, so it doesn't seem unreasonable Sprint and T-Mobile might charge around $5 per gb to start as a replacement for unlimited. If these carriers were to do speed cap pricing, which I'm not saying they will, only giving a scenario here, my idea presented in the last post is a possible concept.

Posted

A brief addition I neglected to mention earlier, there are many people who seem content with the speed caps on Cricket, in exchange for extra data, though that was more to do when Cricket was offering the 20gb for $55 monthly deal. Not so great now though, considering competitors such as Sprint offering unlimited non-capped data for $60 monthly, which is a better deal than what Cricket currently is offering, other than the extra coverage.

  • Like 1
Posted

In the interest of science, I posted a speed test on Big Dead, I mean Big Red on HoFo and then how much data that test consumed.

 

b1a8048f0711fe0689fe74b3d83b0435.jpg

 

147d21ae11398f04467a5884a9c72783.jpg

 

And that's for an average Verizon LTE speed test. 41.9 MB. Yikes.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  • Like 1
Posted

I'm curious about this, perhaps someone here knows, why does a speed test consume so much data?

Because Ookla has to transmit that amount of data to fully test the capacity of the network. If it was a smaller amount of data that would defeat the purpose of the test.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Posted

Because Ookla has to transmit that amount of data to fully test the capacity of the network. If it was a smaller amount of data that would defeat the purpose of the test.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hmm... While that sounds quite reasonable, I'm surprised it doesn't take even more data than that. The other thought I had was for compression to be used possibly to make this work with less data.

 

I had some sort of network app not too long ago that tested speeds using less data, but it only tested around 5 seconds of speed, not as thorough as speedtest and some of the others. I imagine it'll get more efficient in time though.

 

One thing is for certain, I won't be doing speed tests if I go on Verizon, other than a once in a great while situation.

Posted

We all know Verizon and AT&T are the most expensive providers, so it doesn't seem unreasonable Sprint and T-Mobile might charge around $5 per gb to start as a replacement for unlimited. If these carriers were to do speed cap pricing, which I'm not saying they will, only giving a scenario here, my idea presented in the last post is a possible concept.

 

Sprint already charges $5 per GB at their $100 20GB family share pack level and the price continues to drop down to $3.75 per GB at their $225 60GB plan. What I would like to see is lower pricing on the lower data packs, it does not make sense for light users to pay far more ($20 per GB at the lowest end) than heavy users. I would also like to see the line access fee's simplified, say $15 for phone at any data pack size and $10 for any data device (tablets, mobile broadband, wearable's, IoT etc). If Sprint removed overage fee's similar to T-Mobile with throttled speeds after a data use threshold I can see a lot more willing to switch to metered plans. How many users stay on an unlimited plan or keep their kids on unlimited lines to just prevent bill shock? I like the peace of mind knowing I will pay the same amount every month.

  • Like 1
Posted

I think Sprint is also losing money because they had tens of millions of people leave, but their network costs didn't go down. Thus if 60 million people were paying for something and now you are down under 50 million, your income goes way down, but your network costs don't.

Were there network cost savings from the shutdown of iDEN and Wimax?

Posted

Sprint already charges $5 per GB at their $100 20GB family share pack level and the price continues to drop down to $3.75 per GB at their $225 60GB plan. What I would like to see is lower pricing on the lower data packs, it does not make sense for light users to pay far more ($20 per GB at the lowest end) than heavy users. I would also like to see the line access fee's simplified, say $15 for phone at any data pack size and $10 for any data device (tablets, mobile broadband, wearable's, IoT etc). If Sprint removed overage fee's similar to T-Mobile with throttled speeds after a data use threshold I can see a lot more willing to switch to metered plans. How many users stay on an unlimited plan or keep their kids on unlimited lines to just prevent bill shock? I like the peace of mind knowing I will pay the same amount every month.

I agree people who use less data are paying far too much for it at an unfair contrast to the per gb rate of higher data users pay for their data. Sprint is the most fair about this, though like the other carriers, there still is room for improvement. Although, there is a huge difference between Sprint and Verizon in this regard.

 

I just did a rate check on a Verizon single-line plan with 2gb, which looks a bit less expensive than it was a few months ago, but still not even near the value of Sprint. 2gb with one line on Verizon is $60 monthly, same cost as the peace of mind Sprint offers with no overages. Go over that 2gb on Verizon, $15 per gb.

 

Now for the contrast to Verizon's heavier data use. One line on their 15gb promotion plan, is $115 monthly. Breaking that down per gb, comes to around $7.66 per gb. The 2gb plan is $30 per gb, costing $20 more per month than Google Fi for that same amount, besides the added benefit of getting a credit if you don't use all of that 2gb of data.

 

There definitely needs to be more fairness given to lighter users of data.

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