[Nexus One General] flarbear:
Keep in mind that even their "unlimited" plans have a cap of 5GB - though that is enforced through "cease or unsubscribe" requests rather than charging you more for the next GB. The equivalent 5GB under the new Pro plan would cost $55 and not get you any warning letters.

Unlimited plans are essentially a marketing gamble (or could we call them a lie?). They can't support arbitrarily unlimited amounts of data for every customer no matter how much they invest in the network. For those who keep saying that the carriers should just buck up and spend more on their infrastructure - what data do you have about how much bandwidth they can theoretically provide and for what investment costs?

Instead they simply gauge how much a customer is likely to use and then build out for that. As we see more and more ways to use more and more wireless data we're going to expose this fallacy more and more.

And one of the things that makes it so hard to deal with is that it isn't really the "amount" data that is the problem - it is the amount of data being streamed at any given time. If you were constantly sending small amounts of data then it would take a lot of customers doing that to tax the system and the amount of data could easily add up to much more than 5GB without ever causing a problem. Or, you could download all 2GB of your data in one day during the peak hours and the system would essentially be inaccessible to anyone during that time and you'd wreak major havoc without going over their limit.

Unfortunately I think that "total data" is the only measure they have that they can apply easily. The tools that I believe they have at their disposal are along the lines of:

- what kind of phone you have and how that correlates statistically to the amount of data such a device tends to use

- how much total data you've used since your billing cycle started

- they can shut off your data if they need to

- they might be able to refuse 3G data to you if they need to

They could simply let everyone go unlimited and just let the disappointments lie where the disappointments lie, but someone who runs a tethered torrent or who constantly streams video from a source that can buffer enough to deal with several seconds of unresponsive data doesn't feel the same pain as someone who is trying to interactively use a web site to get work done - even though they are using much less bandwidth than the first 2 customers.

With the right equipment they could potentially prioritize your data on the fly by comparing how much bandwidth you've used recently compared to others who are trying to access the network. Someone who picks up their phone a couple of times a day and does one google search and reads one web page would get priority over someone who has tethered their laptop and has been running torrents 24/7 for the past week. Perhaps they might be able to offer plans based on "amount of priority data" where you could get 2GB of priority service and after that you would be relegated to a second class citizen and your data packets would only go during idle periods on the network. (Perhaps MB/day or MB/hour would be a more useful way to buy priority bandwidth than GB/month - with discounts or different quotas during non-peak times.) But, that's probably all in some fantasy world somewhere along with the world where there was infinite bandwidth.