DISQUS

Andrew · 2 years ago

That is just incredible - our 'cozy little wireless oligopoly' is actually making wireless telco's devolve. Someone should write a paper on this. Reverse Darwinism in Canadian Wireless.

Alex Beamish · 2 years ago

I can almost imagine the meeting where the marketers and the engineers are arguing about this one. It turns into something from This Hour Has 22 Minutes pretty fast.

Marketker: We can call the new plan 'unlimited!'
Engineer: But it's not. Our subscribers will blow up our network if they try to do that.
Marketer: Oh, that's OK, we'll put in a footnote forbidding them from doing lumpy stuff like VoIP, media streaming and stuff like that.
Engineer: So then it's really a limited plan.
Marketer: Yeah, but you can't sell that.
Engineer: So you're going to sell an unlimited plan that's really a limited plan.
Marketer: Only for people who want to use VoIP, do file sharing, media streaming, that kind of stuff.
Engineer: But isn't that what the Internet's all about?
Marketer: I think we're finished here.

Unlimited plans made sense when we were limited to 56K dialup modems. Now with broadband and wireless, not so much. It's particularly galling when service providers cut off customers because they were using too much bandwidth -- but remain maddeningly vague about how much is 'too much'.

You can probably guess that I'm an Engineer.

Aydin Mirzaee · 2 years ago

good post. I'm with Telus and for the about 100 bucks a month that I spend, I get a measly 4 mb of data... ouch. I have friends who get unlimited data for 20 bucks / month in the US. boohoo.