Give It A Rest
02 Jun 2010 3 Comments
If you haven’t heard already, AT&T is doing away with their unlimited data plans. In case you weren’t aware, the “unlimited” plan isn’t unlimited; it’s capped at 5gb. Checking my data usage since I’ve owned my phone (March, 2009), I have never gone over 170mb in a month. According to the new pricing chart, I can save $15 a month on my wireless bill by docking down to the 200mb/mo plan. Or, hell, I even save $5 a month by switching to their 2gb plan. I’m a fairly moderate 3G user, most of my heavy data usage is done at home when my iPhone automatically connects to my WiFi network and just uses that instead (it’s faster too). Not to mention, if you’re already on AT&T’s unlimited plan for $30/mo, you can keep it… for now, at least.
But seriously, this has been met with such ferocity. People are so incredibly angry about losing their “unlimited” plans. Give it a rest. Seriously. I’d really like to see what the huge deal is. So far the only two arguments I’ve gotten are “I stream all my podcasts live” and “I use it for tethering to my laptop”. In regards to the podcasts, just have your computer download them and sync them to your device. With hard drive space being ~$1 for 10gb, there’s no real excuse to that unless you’re using one of those silly 16gb solid state drives as a primary drive for some unknown reason. I don’t have much on the tethering issue (mostly because I don’t do it myself) other than “learn to be patient” or look up whatever you wanted to know with your phone. Remember when going on vacation usually meant no phone or computer usage? Would that really kill you? Besides, it’s nice to “go off the grid” every now and then and get a chance to relax. But really, people make way too big of a deal about tethering (most people don’t even use it) or any change whatsoever.
TLDR: People whine about the most trivial things that most of them don’t even come close to taking full advantage of and it wouldn’t affect them in any negative way. In most cases, it would reduce their monthly bill by up to $15 a month.
3 Comments (+add yours?)
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Jun 04, 2010 @ 08:57:27
I still remain adamant that new smartphones are going to start pushing the data limit as more and more things take advantage of live streaming. My bet is that the 200MB plan becomes obsolete in less than a year. That being said, I’m sure AT&T will scale as necessary to respond to the market.
Jun 04, 2010 @ 11:47:28
I’ll have to look up some more crap later when I feel like it but seriously, even with the “HD” phone generations you’re not going to come close to 2gb. Voice and video chat both won’t use your data allocation so you can throw that out the window. 3mp pictures aren’t that big (not even pushing 2mb) and there’s the whole data compression and encryption over GSM thing. Nothing is being sent uncompressed and raw. That would just be stupid.
I’ve intentionally turned off the wifi on my phone this month to see how much data I use without it.
Jun 05, 2010 @ 15:15:28
Yea, for the most part I’m really ok with it. I know I won’t use more than 2GB a month, and I get to keep my unlimited plan anyway. It’s more just a future-tech thing. This seems like a great deal now…I just wonder how much ATT is going to take advantage of it a year or two down the road.