The Myth Of Unlimited Mobile Data

Your ‘unlimited’ package may in fact have huge limitations.
If you go to any economy or space where internet and mobile phones are just emerging, you’ll find that many people try to limit their usage in a way that developed world consumers do not. For them, each text, WhatsApp message or Instagram refresh is seen as depleting their precious allotment of data, which they try and make last until the end of the month.
However, for consumers in the developed world – where mobile technology has been around for a bit longer – the intangible nature of the internet can make it feel like everything is limitless. When data, storage, gigabytes, terabytes and the like are something we can’t see or touch, it’s hard to imagine why they should be limited.
But when it comes to mobile data usage, the idea of unlimited data is actually a myth. Earlier on in the mobile boom, unlimited data plans were almost a given at every major mobile provider. This was seen as the brave new world of mobile where you could do anything and everything with your phone, and there was no reason to have a home internet connection in addition to a hefty mobile plan. People watched hi-def movies on a tiny screen, Skyped for hours on end, downloaded huge files, and stored photos and backed up files on devices that weren’t designed for such activities.
The problem came when mobile providers all of a sudden found themselves with users that went way beyond any model of usage they had anticipated.
Speaking to Wired magazine, telecommunications industry analyst Jan Dawson explained that: “Service providers often guess wrong and find themselves losing money either because they underestimated average usage or because a small number of people abuse the system and use way more than the provider anticipated.”
The same goes for data storage services like Dropbox, Microsoft and iCloud. Even though it seems like the intangible nature of tech means it doesn’t take up physical space, the reality is that no hard drive has infinite storage. These companies must host the servers for the amount of data customers want to store. This causes a problem for tech companies who try to market data storage plans as being close to unlimited. This was the case with Microsoft’s OneDrive, which was offered at $6.99 per month and marketed as a place for users to store all of their data in location. It subsequently had to nix the plan and add an alternative offer in its place of 1 TB for $9.99 a month. Customers were using the service in a way that Microsoft hadn’t anticipated; the company reported in a blog post, saying: “In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”
So what’s the alternative for companies who want to lure customers with promises of big storage and data capacities, but can’t afford to deal with the small percentage of over-users who ruin it for everyone else? Some, like AT&T, are reintroducing a kind of unlimited data plan—but with strings attached. The company announced in January that it would offer an unlimited data for a limited period for customers who also purchase DirecTV or AT&T’s home-TV service, U-verse. This is a way of persuading customers to buy into a product they’re trying to promote—DirecTV—with the provision that they can yank the offer at any time.
Some providers, like Sprint, have taken the step of decreasing internet speed for users who “hog” bandwidth and use more than 23GB of data in a given month. In a public announcement, the company referred to the move as “Protecting the 97%”.
Though the future of the internet is always a hard thing to predict, it’s pretty certain that the era of insatiable data and storage is over, thanks to a tiny minority who abuse it.