Giving AT&T's recent announcements, I'm sure you've heard a bit about how they're changing the data plans to a metered method rather than "Unlimited". There's been a significant amount of backlash regarding the plan and that the loss of the "unlimited" plans will stifle future usage. Guess what - there's never been a truly "unlimited" plan - it's all basically a marketing trick. The providers decide what is a typical usage for their service, calculate some added amount on top of the actual cost (you know - profit - what businesses exist to do) and then deal with the people that go way above that.

A little background...

I worked for an ISP in 1999 / 2000 - not a large one by far, but we had 55k users, almost entirely dial-up and a few ISDN (ugh, I just threw up a little typing that) customers. On the dial-up side, we offered two plans - one with limited access (for some amount I don't remember - which no one used) and an "unlimited" plan for $21.95 monthly. "Unlimited" in those days translated to something like 1GB/month. Anything beyond that, and we would either throttle their connection, or just cut them off for the rest of the month. There were probably about 100 people that ever hit those limits (Napster...) but when they were running strong, it negatively affected the situation for our other users.

And here's the thing - if you take the literal definition of "unlimited", you can immediately tell it can't be true. Inherently, the limit, the absolute theoretical max of a full on 56k connection is about 18GB/monthly. There is a limit - but most people (not to mention equipment) wouldn't even come close to it (our average user then was maybe 100MB/mo) so it seems unlimited. It's a marketing term. It's there for convenience. It's so that 99% of the time, you overpay. It's not reality. It can't be. Get over it...

Now compare this to any other usage based system - ie, all the other utilities. You pay for what you use (more about this in a later post) at an agreed to rate (per gallon, per kilowatt hour, per ton of garbage, etc.) There are of course leases that include utilities so it may seem "unlimited." It's not - it's built into the price of your rent and if you go over expectations you can be guaranteed that there's an adjustment clause in your lease. And chances are, you're actually paying for more than you actually use. Does "unlimited" still sound like a great idea?

More about this later on...