O2 Scraps Unlimited Data Usage For Smartphones 272
Jagjr writes with news that O2, a major UK wireless provider, appears to be following in AT&T's footsteps by scrapping its unlimited data plan for smartphone customers. New customers, or ones who upgrade, will be capped at either 500MB or 1GB per month. Reader Barence adds this excerpt from PC Pro:
In a blog post defending the new policy, O2's CEO claimed 0.1% of the network's users were consuming almost a third of the traffic, while the average O2 user consumes only 200MB of data. By PC Pro's calculations, that means those 26,000 heavy users are consuming an average of 65GB per month over a 3G connection. O2 had 26 million customer accounts at the start of 2010, so it has 26,000 heavy data users. 26 million x 200MB = 5,200,000,000 MB total data usage across the network per month. 5,200,000,000MB ÷ 3 = 1,733,333,333MB per month used by the 26,000 heavy data users. That means the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month."
Re:Why do I not trust their numbers? (Score:5, Funny)
10 cents per GIGABYTE?
I am very pleased with my data plan. I pay $5 for about 64 kilobytes of data, and then a very reasonable 20 cents per 160 bytes above that. Why, that's only about $1,342,177 per gig. That seems pretty reasonable, really.
I don't know why everyone gets so upset about this kind of thing. You can't expect companies to just give away their services because some bad apples want to use their video-capable, application-equipped smartphones for more than text messaging. After all, they're probably pirates, and they deserve what they get for stealing from honest people trying to make a living.