It seems that files sharers are the cause of mobile phones losing their ability to have unlimited access to the the internet.



Taken from here

So file sharers have screwed everyone else over by breaking their terms and conditions.

I used to think file sharing had a valid place in the world. Now I am less sure.

File-sharing mentioned in the article title but not in the article itself.

Reading the article, it seems all the networks stopped offering 'unlimited' services at pretty much the same time ie they had seen that one of their number had gotten away with it. And according to The Guardian at least, this was partly because Apple didn't wanna be associated with any backlash over the definition...

I suspect file-sharers, even the notion of them, are nothing but a smokescreen for something the networks had intended to do anyway, rather than invest in what they're offering.

All this seems familiar... Oh, that's right, the ISPs tried it as well! Then they started offering 40-50 Mbps for, er, remind me again?

Oh come on CC dont be so naive, file sharing has nothing to do with the removal of the truly unlimited data access. O2s terms and conditions have always had "fair use" in there definitions and could/can easily limit those 0.1% but no they want to limit everyone. Why.. simple revenue they can now charge more money.

One of the biggest users of mobile bandwidth is Google Maps. You can use hundreds of megabytes if you use it for navigating, and quite a few people I know do just that.

Next comes streaming media. It's becoming more popular to stream media from your home computer to your mobile device, and it is a ravenous consumer of data. I know KW does this on his iPhone, and I imagine it's not just him.

I can't imagine there are many people who use file sharing networks through a mobile connection. Does anyone here? I certainly don't

But 0.1% using 36% of data is a bit damming is it not?

You'll find figures like that in many areas. No big deal really.

I have an Android phone, so effectively powered by Google. This means I use the Google Navigation map from time to time. Of course I'm going to go over the new 500Mb maximum (funny to have a maximum data limit on an unlimited contract, eh?) from time to time. Happily, I signed the contract before they changed it.

what information are we given about those statistics? youll probably find that they include non-internet users in the totals, and that most people will only use their phones for checking facebook, emails, ebay whatever, so to be in that 0.1% probably only requires you to visit a few youtube videos per day or something.

Well also from the linked to article

23MB is about 4 minutes of Youtube.

is that figure of 690MB per month for the whole 0.1%? or for an individual within that 0.1%?



if it refers to the former, it is a tiny volume of traffic. especially given JJW's figure of 23MB = 4 minutes of Youtube. the article is rather vague about exactly what the data encompasses, so its probably trying to mislead readers and make a mountain out of a molehill.

even if it is the latter, and the article is just badly worded, its still nothing to complain about.

Push email on a busy account with a lot of email, app stores (I know some ipod games i have bought such as final fantasy are pushing 100mb!), youtube, spotify, sat nav software]

It's easy to use a lot, just wish my phone would tell me how much I use!

Actually that makes me a very bad man.

I've just had a look (for the first time) at the terms and conditions for my "unlimited" O2 web bolt on:



Looking at my data usage since I last reset it at the beginning of November, I've sent 171MB and received 3.3GB - which is very close to their new iPhone 4 500MB a month limit.

It's interesting that it specifically bars "continuous streaming of any audio / video". I wonder what "continuous" means? I mean I know what it means, but in this case it is meaningless. The very definition of a stream is a continuous flow. Perhaps they mean "unlimited internet for no more than a few seconds per day", thus outlawing any meaningful use of your iPhone for on-line media including Youtube and the BBC, or indeed video messaging be that via Skype or hotcamgirls.grr

At least you're not torrenting. I'm not sure exactly how many MB I've downloaded in the last few days alone, but it's over 9000. Obviously not on my mobile. That would be ridiculous.