AT&T Revamps Its Unlimited Data Plans, With Numerous Caveats → How do they do it?

How does at&t make signing up for cell phone/data service so darn easy to understand? All the rules, stipulations, caveats and offerings are just clear to discern without massive study.

Inquiring minds want to know.

P.S. The following statement is for the small number of folks who may not know that sarcasm is implied. Well, it is!

T-Mobile made this shit mainstream with "One." "One" is actually "Three," with different plans if you want features that used to be included with every Simple Choice plan. In the old days you picked your minutes/data and that was it. Now you have to pick HD video, speed, etc. It's all designed to separate you from your money while providing the illusion of "choice."

Verizon had it right when they brought back unlimited, they didn't cripple features (HD video) then charge you more money to remove the artificial limitation, it was just one unlimited plan, with tiered plans still available for light users. That lasted about six months, then they jumped on the bandwagon with "Beyond Unlimited" and a bunch of other plans. Glad I got mine when I did, sucks for new customers.....

TL;DR: Meet the old boss, same as the new.

T-Mobile's offerimgs are much easier to understand then at&t's.

The last time I looked they were about equal in complexity. The only simple one was Verizon, but they've since done away with the simple method and jumped on this feature bandwagon of "Go Unlimited" and "Beyond Unlimited."

Anyway, the point was that T-Mobile started this trend with One. It's actually kind of pathetic how AT&T and Verizon copy everything they do. They should be innovative enough to come up with their own offerings, not copy everything Magenta does.

AT&T and Verizon are copying what T-Mobile is doing... because its bringing AT&T and Verizon customers over to T-Mobile. Back when I had AT&T, T-Mobile's coverage was pretty weak - primarily urban. Its improved a lot, prices have gone up... but are still less than AT&T/Verizon. T-Mobile one for me is $35/line for 4 lines including tax/fees. - Sprint is cheaper... but has coverage and international issues (i.e. cost).

t-mobile's plans have plenty of caveats also.

The TMUS one plan is very easy to understand. the limitations are clearly stated and if you want enhanced options, you get them for a premium. The fact that I have a tonneau cover does not make a Tundra out of my Tacoma. So this is really bitching about nothing.
The only really justified criticism about One is that it is simply a too expensive plan for single account holders under 55 who do not need an unlimited plan. I think that TMUS will reconsider that one day once they figureout there that group goes.

I've been writing about this shit for twenty years of my adult life and it still takes me an hour to decode these plans half the time. Yokels just out shopping for plans have no chance of actually understanding what they're buying, quite by design.

Twenty years, and you still need help.

Yokels. Don't. Care.

They want a new (shiny!) phone, insurance, a case, and an "everything" (quotes) plan that they can show off. On payments.

It was indeed easier back in 1993 when I got my first cell phone. you had two companies here, with different sets of minutes and different overage charges per plan.Phone insurance was cheap and made sense, replacement phones came only from your provider at astronomical costs. the only thing you had to watch out were the contracts, while my Mccaw's Cellular One had one year plans, Bell south mobility tried to screw you into 3 years plans( and a worse service). Numbers were not portable so you better made an informed choice.
While all the plans are presented in a more or less misleading way, everyone with a bit of brain who is willing to spend a Sunday to do his research can make an informed decision. But an average consumer is a moron. That's why you have a multi billion $ advertisement industry.

The Unlimited Enhanced plan is a joke in 2018. I trialed it for a month - the 3Mbps speed cap makes even browsing Facebook on your phone a task.

I couldn't take it anymore and switched back to a GB based plan immediately - and now get usually at least 15/5 on LTE in Seattle.

They should be ashamed for offering that.

Fixed it for you. You had some extra words on there.

Yes like if you opt in for the unlimited 4G hotspot you could use 1 GB of phone data and 49 GB of hotspot and be perfectly fine. On the other hand you could use 25 GB of phone data and 26 GB of hotspot and be kicked off for excess hotspot use. Super easy to understand that. because 26 > 49 ? wait... what?

Unlimited plans like everyone wants are not possible now no matter what anyone thinks. Because thought are FACTS. it'll be at least 3 years before something even close to that is available. In the meantime you'll get some incremental increases in the limits and maybe not even that if T-Mobile doesn't bother. Still only offering 512 kbps hotspot on the base plan and only 10 GB of 4G hotspot and 512 kbps after on the $10 extra plan. At&t and Verizon already offer more. Jack up the base hotspot to 1.5 Mbps and the $10 plan to 25 GB of 4G hotspot and eventually you'll get at&t and Verizon to make some moves.

I don't agree unlimited should exist today. But with the massive price drop on plans in the mid 90s late 90s people began going cell only with no land line and they could not keep up with the demand. One of the first to offer unlimited texts and minutes was vircom it killed them as a cell phone carrier. Later revol came about and could not build out fast enough to keep up and they crumbled. I had revol for quite some time and had great service from them. The only issue was the instant you left their coverage area you had no service. Most carriers have some service outside the advertised coverage area revol did not. That gave customers the impression that revol as a carrier sucked if they happened to live near the edge of coverage and went to the store outside it. If unlimited was possible then it could be now if the mega carriers built out as fast as they offered new plans.

Time for them to stop making new plans up and start building out and roll the dice so in 2 or 3 years they can offer true unlimited with no throttling for the same price plus or minus.

Im n charge of a fairly complex little network lan we on spectrum here and at the modem get a solid 130MB down 20Mb up but it can and does choke when we have our peak number of people here during the day.

Think of my modem as the backbone of a cell carrier. And the internal lan as the cell carriers towers. At some point that back bone can just not keep up with the demand and it chokes. So some limitations are needed. Throttling lower plans to half speed or what have you and charging a premium for true unlimited. But they can be sensible about it and only cut the speed down when congested vs the current norm of you used your 2 5 10 or 15 high speed no more high speed for you.

If i am on say tmo and in a area where there just is no one on the towers and no one sucking the pipe dry why not let me have my full speed data after i use up my high speed allotment? Same for sprint at t vzw and any mvno. Lets face it if im in clinton ohio where they have a single tower and only 1300 people and it can support say 2500 people why not let me have full speed while im there if it is not a dry pipe?

All four national carriers currently offer it and deliver -- in the nationwide aggregate, YMMV in specific locations -- double digit Mbps speeds in independent testing. If you would have told me 20 years ago that I would have the rough equivalent of a T3 (45Mbps) in my pocket I would have called you insane, but that's exactly what we have, so why do you want to rain on that parade?You're a shitty network administrator if you can't make 130/20 survive without choking. Ever heard of QoS? I used to run a 50 station network off a bonded T-1, because that's all we could get. My current employer runs a 800 station network off a 200/200 connection. You're not doing your job if a connection of that class "chokes."De-prioritization != throttling.

Comcast is even worse. Their packages are specifically made to be impossible to comprehend. None of the tiers make any sense, at least two things change between every package, so it's virtually impossible to figure out how much you're paying for what in bundles.

Guess what i never stated how many devices are running on this network at one time at peak. Record so far is just over 150. Qos is in use but what that basically means is at peak if i give all equal share they might get 2 Mb down. There is only so much band width to go around.

As for this class of connection is is a basic cable connection not a t3 or any thing of the sort. We need a much bigger pipe than we got period

150 workstations on 130/20? I could make that work without breaking a sweat. Try 50 workstations on 3/3 and get back to me. We do 800+ workstations on 200/200. There's really no excuse for a connection of that class to "choke," unless every single employee's job requires sustained data transfer (most business Internet traffic is bursty), and if that's the case your employer is a cheapskate, unless of course you haven't given them better options.

When we did 3/3 it was because that was all we could get (rural bumfuck, T1s or satellite was it) and I made it work. I had classrooms streaming video alongside our finance department's cloud based database application, normal web browsing, even a few folks (me included) streaming Pandora at their desks, and no complaints from anyone. Ping times were constant all day long, whether the connection was loaded or idle.

150 machines aren't all going to be actually using bandwidth at once. That should work fine with even basic QoS in place. Not super fast, but fine for whatever office/professional type of environment is going to have that many machines on that slow of a connection. That being said, any business with that many machines/people probably should have a faster (fiber) connection for reliability purposes.

Not my point that i think you missed. Think of it this way lets say i had 1k machines on that slow a con (speed does not exactly equal band width but besides the point) they obviously could not all get high speed so qos would be used to slow some down while giving more to others as the band width is not unlimited coming in to the switches/towers. So those who spend more get more. But lets say i have 1k lans with the same speed con and some of those lans (towers in the case of cell phones) only have 1 person on at a given time say 9pm they are on the cheapest plan and have used up their allotment but the qos could see that they are the only one on and give them full speed even though technically they are well over their high speed limit. Then 999 other users jump on and the already at cap user gets well capped .

This is sort of how i have this place set up. And the thing is often times there are in fact that many users all on at once all competing for limited bandwidth. Some machines the office area the sec office my office area get full speed avail regardless. But i have seen my speed dip as low as 10 Mb from the normal 85 (100 mbit switches and i really need Gbit switches) But it is a homeless charity that is run entirely on donations with out any grants etc.

I am actually working on building up my own small computer shop here some success but not as much as i would want. At the point i am soooo going to dump some cash in to brand new ubiquity or ruckus gear as well as seeing about getting a min 300/300 con if spectrum don't already offer it by then. We are in a lower class hoodish area so not allot of users on the nodes here.

At that point i will probably have a much more cell network looking qos throttling system in place if needed. And i will say it is needed should any single computer or device drop to sub 25Mb for any period of time. If they do then the public comp lab and cell phones etc will get cut down to that point and that should make every thing 25Mb plus

edit to add you can see my most recent speed test so im pretty much as good as you can get on a 100mbit switch. I have seen 86 and 87Mb fairly often and even 89 once or twice so pretty close to the 10 to 15 % over head. If i conect to the main line feeding the first switch i can hit 130Mb as it comes out gigabit and my laptop is Gb equiped. Upload is max as i am full duplex on all switches etc. Basically with out about 5 grandish this network is as good as it can get.

What are the users doing with all that bandwidth? 130/20 should be plenty for basic use for 150 devices. If people are streaming a ton of video and stuff, then yeah, it's going to slow way down. What are you getting coming in? Is it rock solid at 130, or does it dip down? That would tell you if you have congestion issues on your LAN, or if Charter has issues farther up. A well managed cable system will virtually never go below the advertised speeds.

Do you have a gigabit router and gigabit link to the main switch? If not, you're just throttling yourself to ~93mbps, which is a total waste. Unmanaged gigabit switches are literally like $25, so you should be able to get gigabit at least through the router and to a main switch, and if everything else is 100mbps downstream of that, at least you have multiple segments each capable of carrying 93mbps of traffic each.

I'm not sure what router/QoS systems there are out there for larger networks, but I'd imagine that there are systems out there that can throttle down video streaming, which would likely chew up the largest chunk of bandwidth the quickest.

In a homeless shelter, I'd imagine you'd want web pages to load fast so people can get useful information about the community, job applications, communicate with employers, etc, and keep the streaming video from taking things over.

Well with this thing we have people gaming watching lots of youtube vids on face book etc. I forgot to screen shot it but my wireless/lan mon software showed around 150 active about 20 mins ago and then it dropped down to around 40 or so. 32 on it right now and i can not see ones on the upstairs subnet with out connecting to the ap there that i don't have access to to change to this subnet etc. But i would say add 10 more from that for about 42 or 43 right now.
But as this is a homeless shelter and is open to the public during the day the network can get pretty crowded pretty fast.

As for un managed switches i want at least 1 smart switch 24 port gigbit pref all 3. Currently running a ncie little linksys smart switch for the public computers and that also feeds the wifi aps my office and from my office area i have a 8 port switch that feeds the security office. The first switch is a un managed 16 port net gear unit that feeds the front office and the smart switch. Which is fine as the front office always gets full speed. Right now im not to worried about not getting the full 130 to the public comps etc prob will leave those to 100mb any ways regardless of what service we end up with in the future. Simply put they do not need more than that hell i might drop them to 50 and the aps to 50Mb Honestly it is a much faster connection than most of them have access to any how. Id have done it already but the linksys smart switch don't offer that much fine grain control.

Right now there are higher priority things to deal with. In no specific order
Getting more aps and their wiring all tucked away to keep the fire inspector happy
Getting filtering set up
Getting time management software up and running (our official limit is 2 hours per day between 9 and 5 for any but staff be they homless working here to keep the place running or other volunteers.
Once the 24/7 common room is done i need to get all the wires for all the network put in to conduit of some sort be that pvp pipe or purpose specific.
Also getting all the network gear in enclosures.

Thing is with wifi this building really sucks for wifi reception It is well over 130 years old with hollow hard clay glazed tile partition walls that are very radio opaque. In some places if i put my cheapo cell phone against the wall exactly opposite the ap the signal str drops to near zero and the speed plummets. Really fun stuff rofl. Im only have joking about it being fun i tend to enjoy this sort of problem solving stuff.

Eventually ill get it all beat in to shape. For most places the expense of a few grand would not be a big deal but when this place lit runs 100% on public to shelter donations mostly hard goods food etc getting what is needed for the network is not all that easy.

As i am actually building a buis here i my self don't have the money to invest or i would. I looked in to some smart switches etc and it is lit a few measly grand. I could do it all for sub 10k with ease if i go sub 6k it gets a little harder but not by very dang much.

What is most interesting to me in this entire venture is this. Homeless are often seen as lazy inept drug addicted no good for nothing people. Yet what i see here is this. Highly qualified electricians machinists even a computer tech with his ms cert and a couple other certs and many other skilled workes. Some got in to things they should not did some time some got in to drugs some are to old to be hire-able in their field.

For example a comp tech just out of school in their early 20s can find work fairly easy in low paying jobs eg best buy but one with 25 + years can not because of their age. Places like best buy want that young face.

So basically i got plenty of talented people wo help with all this just lack the money/gear to get it all perfect

Dude, I appreciate the budget constraints of a non-profit, I was "the" IT guy for one for 8 years, a non-profit home for troubled youth, but some of what you say has me scratching my head.

Smart switches are nice, but unnecessary for workstations. Get one smart switch for your core, where your VLANs all come together, and then a bunch of unmanaged switches for everything else.

Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter line would handle your class of connection and give you QoS (a necessity for you, with what you describe of that public WiFi) for a few hundred bucks, tops, maybe even less than $100. If that's too much, build a Linux box with the spare parts you've got lying around. For the longest time, my "router" at the children's home was an old PC, retired from workstation duty, running Linux, with a second NIC installed for the WAN, and the internal NIC speaking 802.1Q for VLAN tagging.

QoS means you can "best effort" the public workstations while providing a guaranteed level of service to your corporate stuff. You can further subdivide the guaranteed service if necessary, to prioritize VoIP or any other interactive application(s).

As for everything else, just peck away at it year by year. When I came to the children's home they were running consumer grade Linksys garbage, with a single white box Windows NT server. When I left it was a Cisco shop for the network gear and a enterprise virtual environment for the servers. I couldn't replace all the gear on a three year rotation, like a major enterprise, but I was able to buy quality gear over the years and keep it reasonably current.

You've got one edge, if they're an incorporated non-profit, your software licensing expenses will be pennies on the dollar. So just peck away at the hardware with whatever money they can find for you. You might also step outside IT a bit and start looking for grants. It will round you out professionally, allow you to buy more than you otherwise would, and they'll love you for it.

Well the reason i want smart switches is so i can essentially turn things on and off on the public side when we get those who refuse to leave stop etc. I found some good deals on smart switches etc that seem to be pretty much a always avail type deal for used ones. I like what ruckus and ubiquity offer in features for dang sure and they are bot around the same price. And my sofware lic is one thing i need to get taken care of the building owner and 501c3 owner or what ever you want to call him has his hands full and is slow to react to some things lmao basically i have to keep pestering him (his suggestion) to get him to get it done.

I may just end up building a linux box for filtering and firewall needs for the network at the very least.

In the 2 years this place has been around it has had like 4 people installing net work gear and im still finding routers and aps in service hiding in the dark corners of the building and they can be pains to track down and take out of service.

I just found one such heap sitting in a dark corner under a shelf behind some boxes that was trying to assign ips and was not actually even hooked up in a way that it could provide a connection to the modem least it was not doing it right. So i would watch as the entire public access computer area would go down i searched for that damn wrt54g router/ap for 2 weeks. Got rid of it now the network stays up properly with out a single issue. Got every computer downstairs on static lan ips all renamed so i know what one is what. Got the public comps on the smart switch set up so they start at 1 end of the one side as ip *.*.*.101 to 109 and on ports 2 (1 is the port for the up link to it)to 9 etc ports 12 to 24 provide c connections to my small switch front aps and ip cams my switch provide the connection for the back aps security office and its switch.

At some point im just going to gut the entire mess and re run all the cables more cleanly through conduit of some time and all that good stuff. One thing i do not lack is cat 6 cable i lit have 4 or 5k feet of the stuff.

You can do that from your router, if push comes to shove.

There must be firewalls out there that can actively throttle YouTube and Netflix and the like. That's a situation, where given the resources available, 480p is probably adequate for most people. Video sucks down a lot of bandwidth, gaming doesn't.

So do you have gigabit for the core of the network so that you're not bottlenecking yourself on 100mbps? 100mbps is fine for each part of the network, as they're all sharing the bandwidth in the first place anyway.

Yeah, very interesting about the clientele of your shelter. It seems very much regional/localized as to who is having a hard time. Most people aren't lazy do-nothings, many people in bad situations work as hard to harder than most white-collar folks with houses in the 'burbs.