Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?

  • bluGill@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    It is a proxy for don’t use too much on the busy towers. In small towns it doesn’t matter, but if you are in a downtown the tower will have many people connecting to it and the radio frequencies are shared. By putting a limit on everyone they force better sharing of that limited bandwidth. The limit is very large - far more that than the large abusers will use alone, but in a dense areas it is less than the common person will use all at once.

    Tmoblie has (or had?) a binge on plan - if you used video (which we quickly figured out meant low quality - but probably good enough for a tiny phone screen) or audio you were using a lot of data, but it was consistent all day and so they didn’t have to count it - if the tower doesn’t have enough bandwidth for everyone on the first day of the month they have to fix that. That is the real worry: the tower running out of bandwidth on the first day of the month.