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When I saw EE was offering a starting data allowance of just 500MB a month for £36 per month, I have to admit, I had a little laugh on the inside. 500MB, that’s practically nothing when you’re sucking down data at 20Mbit. Now even EE admits its pretty much useless.
An interesting “superfast guide” to EE’s new price plans has a nice, simple table that tells you what you can expect from each of its tariffs. The funny thing is, despite having the balls to ask people to fork out £36 a month, EE freely admits that 500MB isn’t even enough for using maps, let alone streaming, downloading, tethering, or even Skype. Ouch.
Fair enough, starting your price plans at £36 a month — that’s not too outrageous — but at least give us 1GB of data with that. Hell, with 4G you’d expect a minimum of 3GB, really. [Twitter]
You guys might not think it enough, but I use about 600Mb a month on average. Often less. Just because content comes faster doesn’t mean I would suddenly have a desire to look at 3 times as much of it.
Depends what you use it for I guess, but I can see there being a market for a 500Mb package
That’s true, but the sort of people who are looking to get 4G network capability are highly likely to be seeking to use it for more than 500MB worth of data.
It’d be like buying a Porsche to drive to the your neighbour’s house.
Damn, you were 5 minutes faster with your sports car analogy
For what it’s worth, I think your analogy fits better.
Maybe, but not really. I would absolutely like faster speeds, and would definitely consider paying for it. But I wouldn’t use any more data. I’d still use my phone for email, maps and occasional tethering when out & about, but I’d still have wifi at home, most friends’ houses, and through The Cloud in a lot of places.
I don’t disagree that a lot of users will be up in the multiple gigabytes, but that doesn’t mean they all will
if your rich your neighbours house could be miles away depending how much land u own :p
+1
im not sure they understand that downloading a map at 20Mb isnt downloading any more information.
sure, if you want to setup a torrent this isnt the best usage but i have never gone over 500MB in a month as im at home (wifi), work (wifi) or in the car not using it much.
Content will become richer and larger, so right now lets say you download every month a picture that is 10mbs.. when 4g is more main stream that image will be developed for the bandwidth and will become 50mbs. you will still only use that 1 image but all of a sudden you are using more data for no real reason other than quality within the development of the image etc..
Not really. If you download a 10mb image now then whatever happens to other tech it’ll still be a 10mb image. It’ll be a few years yet before content becomes THAT much bigger.
Based on these figures (http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-why/) it looks like web pages are getting bigger at a rate of maybe 25% a year (and I’d be amazed if mobile sites are going that fast). After 2 years that implies a 56% increase, so a 10mb webpage would become a 15mb webpage, by which time you can get a new bigger, cheaper contract. Obviously that’s still a problem if you’re butting up against the 500mb already, but if that’s the case you’d be an idiot for choosing it and not the 1gb one
We’re already at the point with “retina” displays that resolutions won’t go any higher- that would be pointless, so even downloading a video at the maximum resolution your phone can display now is about as bad as it’s going to get.
Obviously this ignores sound quality improvements- but they tend to come via better compression rather than just making the files bigger.
all right, yours was more accurate but the point is valid. it was only to show the idea of growth in content. i bet mobile sites will grow just as fast really. instergram, facebook youtube will be the first to be content richer as well as games and app sizes.. but the point was it will grow and thus usage limits need to allow for that as well
500mb will only work if you don’t use any apps or only download them and update them over wifi, consume any online media or make use of cloud services. With careful management and 100% reliance on wifi access you could easily get by on 500MB. But in a way it defeats the purpose of a smartphone and the whole point of 4G. You would end up paying through the nose, just so you can get the odd facebook update and email a fraction of a second sooner. I purchased a smartphone so that I am not tied to wifi networks or limit my usage to minimize data consumption. A wifi tablet or laptop combined with a cheap “dumb” phone would do the job just as well, if not better. The whole point of owning a phone such as the Galaxy s3 or iphone 5 is to be able to do all that from one device anywhere you can get a signal.
Yes but the 4G speeds being touted are MUCH faster than any Wifi I have available to me. I also come in with data use in the hundreds of MBs, but that ignores the gigs of Wifi data I am consuming.
If I’ve got 20Mbit data at my fingertips, I’m not going to want to crawl around on a paltry 2Mbit Wifi connection.
Oh the 1st world problems I have, it really is awful.
Yeah I agree. Plus just because you don’t download loads of stuff – it doesn’t mean you don’t want it to be fast. I hardly download anything but when I do I want it to be quick! eg i’m lost in the arse end of nowhere and waiting 5 minutes for a map to load = not good
I’m finding this seriously underwhelming. In my opinion, unless you live in a poorly served rural area, the stuff you can realistically do on the 500Mb tariff, can be done just as well on 3G, and save yourself some money. At the very least, wait till other providers are up and running to see what that does to pricing
true, half the time i need to use mobile internet there isnt even a 3g signal on O2.
I thought the whole point of 4G was getting rid of those silly little limits.
It’s like replacing your Opel Corsa with a Ferrari without increasing your fuel budget…
I like number 2 on the guide: “No nasty surprises on your bill.”
That’s because the whole bill will be nasty from the get go.
Oh and while we’re at it, do shove your “unlimited calls and texts” in the place you got your tariff ideas from. Seriously, that stopped being a selling point at least five years ago.
thing is, when bandwidth opens up, content becomes richer and thus more sizeable as developers make use of the larger bandwidth.. so pretty much soon enough you will see people who are slim users say 500mb, will still be slim users but swallowing 2gb simple cos of the change in content construction. Using Data limits from 3g on a 4g service is stupid.. it needs to match the service more and not be such a money grabbing sales pitch.. but it will be..
not only that, the myth that the majority of people use less than 500MB is both outdated and heavily influenced by tarif restrictions placed upon them. Remove data restriuctions and you will see mobile data consumption skyrocket as Three are finding out. Their studies show “95 per cent of smartphone customers use data on daily basis, with iPhone and Android smartphone deploying customers now gobbling nearly 1.5GB a month” ( http://www.itproportal.com/2012/07/24/android-iphone-data-usage-doubles-to-nearly-15gb-a-month-in-2012/#ixzz2A8O4sR65 )
500MB on a 4G data stream of 20Mbits/s would give you a whopping 3.3 minutes of use. Yay!
Good find this.
Looks like there was a reason why EE got 4G first, They must’ve paid a whole lot of money to certain individuals. Now they want that money back and their making us people pay for it. The 4G phones are cheaper to buy sim-free then to be on a contract with EE, and the fact that 4G just came out means the service may not perform as well as expected. Let’s see what O2 and the others pull out of the bag.
I’m going to have to explain this to my Mum and brother, both technophobes, so I’ll need two analogies…
Mum – Here’s a spoon and bottle of wine, enjoy your glass!
Bro – Put on blindfold and visit a static stripper…
In otherwords, what’s the point of it????
Who the hell is going to move from their already expensive contracts to these EVEN more expensive EE 24 mth contracts to SIMPLY be able to email or surf the web? The telecons must think/hope they’re iDiots out there with more money than IQ points!
So. I’m part of an EE/Orange ‘live chat’ focus group thing tomorrow and they want to discuss the new 4G tariffs
Now what should I say …hmmm!
So you get a 500mb 4G allowance. Do you get a 3G allowance on top of a 4G allowance? Or does your 3G allowance come out of your 4G allowance?
You just have one data allowance for any cellular data.
Think I’ll stick to my O2 £20 a month simplicity with unlimited data
Likewise, I pay £15 pcm on Three and get unlimited data at decent speeds (approx 2-4 Meg) where I live.
Unlimited free minutes – now all someone has to do is invent a system to ‘dial up’ to an adsl connection or our own modem and we are unhindered by limits…
Blazing fast dial-up
ha ha
What a RIP! They really think anyone’s going to be stupid enough to think they’re getting a better deal here. The reason we’re told unlimited data was scrapped was due to the amount of users over the 3G network… so surly, there won’t be anything near the same numbers over 4G… it’s a con!
My Plan:
1. Buy Galaxy Note 2 LTE (model #n7105) sim-free online – may have to wait till it’s around £450 range
2. Purchase Three sim-only wiith unlimited internet – £13 monthly
3. Switch plan to 4G when contract cost comes down