I hate to defend this practice but isn't wireless a slightly different animal than wired connections? My understanding is that spectrum limitations come into play in much the same manner as a cable company with an overloaded node -- except that it isn't as easy to buy more spectrum as it is to split an overloaded coax node.
Now that doesn't mean that 5GB is a fair or justifiable cap or that the amounts they are charging for overages are anything but a ripoff. But is it actually feasible to offer truly limitless connections on a wireless service and still guarantee a reasonable level of service to your customers?
I hate to defend this practice but isn't wireless a slightly different animal than wired connections? My understanding is that spectrum limitations come into play in much the same manner as a cable company with an overloaded node -- except that it isn't as easy to buy more spectrum as it is to split an overloaded coax node.
Instead of buying spectrum the answer is to split the cell.
I'm not an RF engineer but isn't there a limit to how many times they can do that before the neighboring cells and phones start to interfere with each other? I know with CDMA that transmissions not intended for you show up as background noise. Reach a certain threshold and the S/N ratio will be too low for your phone/data card to work properly.
I'd imagine there's also a cost issue to that, particularly in rural areas where they don't have the luxury of slapping cell sites on existing structures and need to build or lease towers.
reply to Crookshanks CDMA controls handset's transmit power in a real time loop, the mathematics requires to know the signal loss from the handset to the base station to figure out what the original signal coming out of the handset was. From what I just googled about GSM, it has power control, but only 8 levels, .8 watts is the lowest, then 2 watts. 99% of GSM handsets have a max transmit power of 2 watts anyways.
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