There was a soft limit of 5GB that people generally understood they must stay under. Additionally, even though I *could* go up to 5GB, I couldn’t really, because the network was so slow.

Their 3G network has improved in NYC over the past few months. Now that it’s created 200MB and 2GB hard limit plans, doesn’t this soft limit go away? Can’t all us grandfathers throw away our WiFi Cablevision/RCN/FiOS Internet connections and just start relying on our iPhone?

Sounds like a good deal for me.

What the Oyster is good for is efficiency (it’s faster to move more people through, and probably 95% or more of people using TfL services use the cards), security (many buses don’t even accept money, having a ticket machine at the bus stop if you don’t have a card), monitoring the public (especially with registered cards), and of course it lets them charge absolutely criminal rates to the tourists who aren’t informed well enough to get their own card.

And of course TfL (as a whole) is not a private corporation, though it sub-contracts to some private companies (e.g. elbg.com runs most of the buses in east London).

i don’t get the hubbabaloo – all AT&T is doing is giving you the opportunity to save money by not paying extra for data which you don’t need.

Steve Jobs himself said as much when he stated that verizon or any other carrier would face the same problems AT&T does within 1 month of an iPhone rollout.

Felix, you said that in the last 2 months you use roughly 300 mega bites of data. Put that in prospective… the ONLY people getting adversly effected by AT&T’s move are using 7 times as much data as the internet’s best blogger. Think about that.

A friend of mine working in IT says that some users (the top 1/10 of 1% are pulling down terabites of data/month… that’s 1 million megabites compared to your 300. No network can allow that and still have room for everyone.

I would make the argument that AT&T was much more evil prior to the change because they forced everyone to pay for the top 1/10th of 1% of users with dropped calls and slower connection speeds.

Keep up the great writing!

Maybe I need to get my conspiracy-meter calibrated, or I give consumers too much credit, but I fail to see the evil.

AT&T has two goals:
1) maximize revenue (shareholders demand it)
2) maximize data service speed & availability to the majority of their customers (customers demand it)

I see your point, given your average data use. But the 200MB plan was not designed for you. It’s for folks like my mother who check their email 2x/day and may look up a restaurant listing once a month. The extra $15 for your second 200MB is to make sure you’re really like my mother and a genuine infrequent user. These people are irrelevant to network demand.

Since you’re not my mother, the 2GB plan is for you, so you never have to worry about exceeding your data allotment. The message is “you might as well get the 2GB plan unless you’re SURE you won’t go over” I admit it’s not ideal for you since 1) you will pay an extra $5/month and 2) you will probably never use more than 1/5th of your allotment. I’d suggest streaming some more videos. Check out TEDTalks on YouTube.

The $10/GB overage fees are for the punks who find ways to use their iphones to replace their home internet connection, or who spend hours per day watching videos and slow down the network for the rest of us.

The pure-utility model would make more sense for you and many other users, but it would dis-incent incremental data usage, which AT&T doesn’t want to do, since they make money from content and advertising deals.

(no I don’t work for AT&T or even like them. They have an abysmal network where I live, and the AT&T/Apple cabal infuriates me)

Hope I haven’t missed your point. Cheers.

I bet we see an iPhone app that looks at your usage, and figures out your optimum plan, with regular reminders to do so.

People in aggregate are rather predictable, and coping with uncertain usage is far easier for AT&T to do itself than for every end-user to do individually. Shoving this down the throats of consumers who will almost certainly make mistakes is obnoxious.

Former iphoner, new HTCer