Dear Duane,
Many, many thanks for your e-mail. It did indeed give me a faint spark of hope.
My guess is that “they” will have ALL of the loopholes sewn up within this calendar year. All of the carriers seem to be facing increased capacity needs (which means continued sizable investment in their infrastructure), as well as a slight flattening of earnings growth. Something has to give and my belief is that truly “unlimited” data plans will go the way of the dodo rapidly (and I mean rapidly!).
Comcast, Verizon, Sprint, ATT, et. al. have ALREADY made the changes but most notification to the consumer seems, to me, to be de-emphasized and basically hidden either on the back of your bill or buried in the “boilerplate” in small type. Very few people that I’ve talked to seem to be aware of how these changes might impact them (or all of us!). Again, my personal opinion is that we will all begin to be forced to pay huge monthly increases based on our data usage. We certainly had an unlimited plan that they changed. Beware of any carrier suggested changes to your account as ALL new accounts face data limits and any account change automatically puts you in a new customer or new account category.
We currently use a cellular modem card. At the beginning of this month Apple distributed a system software update. It was about 4GB in size. Based on our “unlimited” data plan (with a new limit of 2.5GB!!!) it cost us about $20.00 to get the remaining 1.5GB. It also put us over the data plan limit for the month. Our carrier either slows down transfer speeds to just above dial up speed and/or disconnects or interrupts the connection (data stream). How very nice this has been (said with withering sarcasm). In order to update my WEB site this month we must load everything on a laptop and drive into town to a WiFi hot spot, gain access and upload files from there. What a LARGE pain. Calling the situation a large pain is being charitable. Downloading one movie, or one 20 minute call using Skype now puts us over the data limit for the month.
I don’t have a Blackberry but my wife has an IPad. Daughter Nicole now works for Apple and has an IPhone. I, however, am still tethered to my desk. :-)
Again, my sincere thanks for your well thought out and kind response, Steve
All Categories
A discussion forum for daffodil enthusiasts around the world.