IPhone enthusiasts obsessed with the Verizon iPhone have been paying attention to one big difference that the Verizon iPhone has over the AT&T iPhone. At Verizon, you get unlimited internet for cell phones. Generally, unlimited data plans at Verizon cost around $ 30 a month. AT&T had enough of the unlimited cell phone internet system last year and phased it out entirely. You have to pay as you go at AT&T now. The 2GB download will cost $ 25. Everyone had something really hurtful to say about AT&T at the time; Now it seems that almost every network, including Verizon, is looking to follow AT & T’s lead. It doesn’t seem like any unlimited plan is going to last much longer. Is that unfortunate? Not quite.
Bandwidth costs money. Giving it away at all-you-can-eat buffets can be quite unfair to most internet users who only use the internet on their smartphones for limited purposes. With iPhone users watching YouTube hogging the bandwidth of cell phone internet service, people using the internet on their smartphones for legitimate purposes find themselves slowed to crawl speeds. So that’s great for the YouTube-watching crowd, right? Not even there. On the one hand, when an operator decides how to price its unlimited cell phone plans, it tries to cover its worst case scenarios: that everyone who subscribes to the plan will use their Internet connections all the time. That makes these plans unnecessarily expensive for most people. Two-thirds of all mobile phone Internet users download less than 250MB per month. And 99% of all users use less than 2GB. Who exactly is the unlimited plan for then, the top 1%? What about the 99% who could perfectly pay less and not feel like nothing is different? An important consideration here is that an unlimited plan greatly impairs the Internet service of a cell phone.
Consider what would happen if we had an all-you-can-eat electricity system. Everyone pays a flat fee and uses what they want. They would all be as hot as they could be in the winter and as cool as they could be in the summer; They would keep their homes and pools heated no matter if someone was around and no one would think of replacing an appliance. The power company just couldn’t keep up and you would have brownouts all the time. That is what will happen if everyone also has unlimited internet. You will have frequent problems related to speed. Even when carriers keep adding capacity all the time. The more people have unlimited access to a resource, the more carelessly they will use it. It does not improve anything by adding capacity. People use it much more carelessly than ever.
People simply worry that if they have to pay as they go, they will end up paying more. That is simply not true. AT&T has very reasonable charges once you go over their limit. For a future that’s compatible with internet for cell phones, unlimited plans just have to go.
