Without unlimited data, this is useless to me. If T-Mobile and Sprint can pull off unlimited data plans, then so should Google (especially if Google Fi uses - you guessed it - both Sprint and T-Mobile as its partner carriers). The least they can do is offer a "you get so-and-so gigabytes of 4G data before we throttle you down to 2G, and we won't charge you anything extra" like what T-Mobile does for its non-unlimited plans.
I'm pretty sure the accountants and engineers at Google got together and figured out that "unlimited data" plans are going to go bye-bye. For everyone. All providers.
As people use more and more data, it just won't make economic sense to offer your customers unlimited data.
If Google had offered unlimited data, and then later canceled it, everyone would be bitching about them killing the competition, anti-competitive behavior, etc.
> As people use more and more data, it just won't make economic sense to offer your customers unlimited data.
It makes perfect economic sense. Users who expect to need a lot of data (e.g. anyone who watches or wants to watch HD videos over a cellular connection, which is a lot of people) would be better served by T-Mobile's or Sprint's unlimited (non-throttled) data plans (which run for somewhere between $70 and $90 per month, IIRC), and everyone else would be better served by T-Mobile's throttled data plans, since you'll never be charged overages.
At least AT&T and Verizon can claim that they have a stronger network with better coverage than T-Mobile or Sprint (which is why a lot of people go with them and are willing to be screwed over by them). Google Fi can't even offer that if it's going to be using Sprint and T-Mobile as its backends; combine this with the lack of unlimited data plans and only supporting the Nexus 6 with zero indication of when other phones will be supported (if ever), Google Fi's dead in the water.
In other words:
> I'm pretty sure the accountants and engineers at Google got together and figured out that "unlimited data" plans are going to go bye-bye. For everyone. All providers.
Then I'm pretty sure all the accountants and engineers at Google are incompetent.
I'm not sure you're getting me. I'm saying that eventually T-Mobile and Sprint will not be able to offer $70 or $90 a month for unlimited data. Or if they do, it will be so throttled as to be completely meaningless.
I'm predicting that as more people use more of their data, the network will not grow fast enough to support the total bandwidth. The fact that they can currently offer "unlimited" is a temporary condition, based on the distribution of network users' bandwidth. As consumption grows, it gets to the point where they can't actually offer it any more.
That's my prediction, and I bet Google made the same prediction.
Instead, you're acting like I don't understand that people WANT unlimited data, especially at the prices it's being offered at today.
And I'm saying that getting rid of unlimited data doesn't solve the problem of network congestion. Actually putting work into the network does solve the problem of network congestion.
Don't punish users because you're too lazy to provide them with a network that's actually designed to handle current/future data demand.
And I'm predicting that it will be economically impossible to handle future data demand, if you allow "unlimited data."
Even with the best intentions. You would need to be subsidized by the government to provide it.
Since so few people TODAY currently make use of their unlimited data, the network can afford to offer those terms. And they found that by offering those terms, they attracted a disproportionate number of customers. In short, it was popular and profitable.
But at some point, the aggregate network demand will exceed even the THEORETICAL network capacity, if you offer your customers unlimited data, and demand goes up the way I think it will.
Or in essence, you will need to limit bandwidth to the point that calling it "unlimited" is just ridiculous.
> But at some point, the aggregate network demand will exceed even the THEORETICAL network capacity, if you offer your customers unlimited data, and demand goes up the way I think it will.
At which point you build out the network so that it can handle the increased demand. The problem of congestion doesn't magically go away if you ditch unlimited plans for pay-per-gigabyte plans.
Even barring that, the wired broadband world already addresses this by making speed the useful commodity instead of quantity, and there's very little reason why the wireless world couldn't do the same. "Our networks are getting congested, so we're going to switch to a new model where you can pay cheap rates for 2G speed or pay more for 4G speed or pay something in between for 3G speed or pay top-dollar for our newfangled 5G" is a much better answer than "our networks are getting congested, so we're going to just cap users' usage of it and hope the problem goes away".
That, in short, is what Google Fi should be doing. That would be an actually-compelling reason to switch to it instead of T-Mobile.
Until then, T-Mobile will continue to get my business, and T-Mobile will therefore be at least that much more incentivized to provide unlimited data plans.
