It think somebody hit the nail on the head earlier in one of these threads though. They are solving the problem of slow speeds by enforcing slow speeds.

Or another way, the fault is being rectified by making the slow speeds the accepted norm, therefore there is no longer a fault .

I think they call that "resetting the customer's expectations"!

Yep, quite true.

I wonder if this isn't a prelude to moving customers over to O2 proper in the medium term by making Giffgaff as unattractive as possible and then closing it down altogether.

The management there seem to be on a mission to kill the service by banning users that they deem to be high users and throttling those that remain to not much more than 2G EDGE speeds.

It seems a weird way to run a business by dragging it's name through the mud and pissing off all it's users.

There's no point being in business to lose money though and the financials are bad primarily because when a user uses 20 or 40GB it is costing the company much more in wholesale costs than they are getting from the customer.

I remember once on here giffgaff claimed an unlimited customer was being disconnected because the real cost of the data they used on their £12 plan was about £100.

I'm presuming the wholesale price must be less than £2.50 per GB (Tesco's retail price per GB add on). That's a whole lot of data to run through a slow connection like the one offered by giffgaff.

I like the claims by staff on their forum that all of their data appears to go through one "pipe". Is O2's famous lack of redundancy apparent in their subsidiaries too?

I can quite see how you could get through 20 gig in a month if you are using iPlayer most days.

EE said yesterday that data usage is up 60-odd percent. This is a network that claimed early on (when offering some pretty terrible data bundles for a lot of money on 4G) that faster speeds didn't mean more data usage.

It was perhaps technically correct if you accepted that Joe Bloggs wanted to download a 1MB file and so whether it was 2G, 3G or 4G, it was always going to be 1MB.

Now people have faster data, they can do more. They have more storage on their device, so can download more. They have access to streaming services, so want to watch more. They have a nice big screen, so they want the HD version when before SD would do.

Thus, all the operators know full well that the days of people averaging 1GB a month are soon going to be long gone. Some people will continue to use hardly any data, but more and more people will demand MORE data and 20GB in a month won't be anything special.

That's maybe 5 or 6 movies streamed in HD.

Back when 3G launched, it was more about downloading MP3s than video as people accepted that even though 3G was fast, it wasn't fast enough for good quality video and people were massively put off for years. The networks still offering slow speeds are probably going to see a massive surge in data usage once people get used to the speed.

Giffgaff, by the looks of it, can't afford to let people do that.

The average data provision that 3/4G networks in Europe can cope with is about 3GB per user per month. How each network ensures they remain within the delivery limit varies from pricing to traffic management, speed restrictions and now limiting known heavy users from renewing PAYG deals.

Giffgaff probably have a limit on what they are allowed to consume on the O2 network so it's not surprising they are stepping back and trying to spread what they have more evenly as the demand for data increases at such a pace. The same could be said for others who have blazed a trail with cleverly worded 'unlimited' offerings that now come with strings attached limiting download speeds, certain types of traffic and compressing video. It was inevitable with the introduction of 4G that some repositioning needed to take place to ensure as many users as possible (or as many paying customers as possible from the network's point of view) got a reasonable level of service most of the time. If that means losing a small number of data hungry users then it's probably a price worth paying to ensure capacity exists to capture more market share from 'average' users (i.e. Those consuming less than the 3GB a month that most major telecom equipment providers reckon is feasible using current mobile delivery systems).

The big networks have managed to distance themselves from congestion issues due to data pricing and that does not seem to have greatly harmed them commercially to date. The data offering appears a bit of a poker game, with some gambling to gain in the short term but as capacity is consumed the cards are being thrown in and a more conservative approach seems to be deployed to ensure data delivery is possible for those willing to commit to long term contracts with lucrative handset margin opportunities.

if you buy your mobile data in bulk, by the terabyte, or even the petabyte. it costs ~£8/GB. the only reason the capped tariffs are cheaper is because most people don't hit the cap.

It is going to be a long time before 20GB is the norm.

Good job the average usage on most unlimited plans is only around 1-2GB. Can you show your calculation for the first line of the post please taking into account 3G and 4G spectrum.

It is a bold statement to put capacity limit on what networks can 'cope with' in GB when capacity is measured in gigabits per second throughput, and things like TrafficSense can space out the time it takes certain users to use the certain amount of data, and therefore alleviating capacity and still allowing users unlimited data, just not full speeds for all tasks i.e tethering at peak times.

I thought he said before it was 5GB, now it's 3GB?

And I'd love to know where this is documented and how it's the same on every network. Otherwise I might just assume it's made up.

Wavejock is always right.

Always.

True. My apologies.

Nice to know that even my wife is now able to exceed what the network can technically cope with. She'll probably not sleep tonight.

It is purely a figure made up off the top of his head, that's why I asked for the calculations. It depends on the size of the user base, number of cells, spectrum frequency, amount of spectrum acquired, if policies for traffic management are in place, if you include 3G and 4G spectrum,.

All the things listed above give you a certain amount of throughput at any one moment of time. I don't think you can wildly make a statement that every network can only 'cope' with a fixed amount of data per calendar of 3GB.

There's a whitepaper out there somewhere from a while back which has a theoretical usage level for each user on a theoretical 3G network.

Which is ok for a guesstimate, but we have 4G now, also there's no such thing as a standard 3G network, some networks have a bigger spectrum to user base ratio and use things like TrafficSense to restrict Tethering data, which has the effect of spacing out throughput more efficiently for some services.

We can't just take a figure from a whitepaper and say that 3GB figure is all a network can 'cope' with, for a start we now have 4G, and as I say networks vary wildly.

According to Nokia Siemens the average available on HSPA+ / LTE hybrid networks is now about 5GB per customer per month. That is what is technically possible and can return a profit for the network.

"With 10,000 sites, the radio network can support up to 5 million data subscribers with HSPA and up to 22 million data subscribers with HSPA and LTE. With 20,000 sites, the capacities would be 10 million HSPA subscribers and 45 million with HSPA and LTE. Typically, existing networks with 10,000 sites have of the order of 20 million voice subscribers, while networks with 20,000 sites have 40 million subscribers. These calculations indicate that HSPA and LTE radio networks with typical spectrum allocation can provide 5 GB of data for all existing voice subscribers."


http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct...Bj_g-d7BV4V1xw (PDF Download)

The white paper was published in 2010 and there have been some developments since but it provides a reasonable benchmark relating to the mobile technologies currently being deployed.

So lets look at this again now that Wavejock has increased the figure by 66% from 3GB to 5GB in the space of a few posts.

* The figure posted is based on 10,000 sites, Three has or is working toward 18,000, which is 80% extra!
* The subscriber numbers for the 10,000 site figure is 22 million users. Three has 10 million users, 54% fewer than in the template calculation
* The figures were calculated using typical spectrum allocation, but spectrum allocation between UK networks varies quite a lot

Given the number of cells, spectrum and customers on the Three network the average figure is likely to be around 18GB based on the information in the 4 year old whitepaper, and excluding any additional benefits that TrafficSense has in smoothing out the peaks by letting tethering users take the strain before phone users.

The average unlimited data plan user on Three uses around 2GB a month last time I checked.

In generalising across companies, has anyone else noticed that the term 'fair use policy' and 'unlimited' are mutually exclusive?

Any use of logic in order to to describe that seems to result in the word 'fraud'.

I like to ensure information is accurate and post links to reliable sources like the one above. No issue in correcting and confirming the correction of any information posted when checked and found to be inaccurate.

What is being described in the white paper linked above are averages and those don't accurately represent the situation in many built-up areas where there are dense numbers of users consuming data especially at peak periods. Unlimited tethering where used as a primary Internet connection is more than a big issue! The plain fact is that 3/4G cannot support vast numbers of customers consuming 50GB a month let alone 1000GB!

The limits are real and all of the networks are finite. Attracting significant numbers of large data consumers may not be a good strategy as average customers place higher demands on their mobile network. The white paper assumes 35Mbps throughput for LTE in it's calculations and that is around the top end of what 3 of the four networks currently provide. EE's double speed offers higher throughput but they don't have any concerns about congestion as they strictly limit usage by pricing.

One can perm the calculations any way one likes but the bottom line is that significant numbers of high data users in populated areas results in a poorer user experience for the majority of 'average' users and traffic management is being noticed by more users than ever. It's becoming an issue in some city areas where the choice is managed performance with the theoretical 'no limit', or a capped allowance that is not performance restricted.

There might be hotspots of high data users, they will usually be tethering users or P2P file sharing, which is what TrafficSense is there for. Tethering users in busy areas will be subject to restrictions as detailed in the terms and documents on the website. They are ring-fenced to a set percentage of capacity and have their own pool so that they do not affect the service for phone users, only for other tethering users.

In the future it is possible a heavy user pool may be created to separate very heavy tethering users from the rest of the tethering users. This is something they have been evaluating, the idea was that if you're in the top 5% heaviest users, you get restricted to 5% of the pool. They don't do this currently, but they could do, which is the beauty of TrafficSense.

Generally Three is in a good position as detailed in the figures in my previous post, and as such are able to offer some things other networks can't. giffgaff are in a different position as they are a MVNO that sits on top of a network it must pay wholesale rates to, and the network it sits on has a capacity ratio that is probably at or below the calculations in white paper referenced earlier.

The word ‘Unlimited’

‘if it says unlimited it should be unlimited’ – comes up all the time. And I think it’s over simplistic.

Your Mum doesn’t know what a Gigabyte is. Neither do 90% of mobile customers. This is different from minutes and texts. You could tell them their plan included 1 Kilobyte or 1 Petabyte and it wouldn’t mean anything to most people. This is not just some users, it’s the majority. What they want to know is that they can, generally surf, Youtube etc and not run up a bill. That is why they go for an Unlimited plan. The ASA understands this and that is why they repeatedly make the rulings that they do.

The people demanding ‘if it says unlimited it should be unlimited’ are generally people who have good knowledge and use a lot of data, 100GB, some people have mentioned 350GB. The realistic cost of this data, if you were say running a tv station and wanted to upload video in the field is around £8/GB, if you’re buying a Petabyte at a time. The only reason you are able to use £800 -£2800 worth of data is because you are sat in the loophole of ‘Unlimited.’ They have to let you so that they can sell an Unlimited tariff to your mum.

If we insist that ‘if it says unlimited it should be unlimited’ you don’t get ‘Unlimited’ data, the word ‘Unlimited’ disappears. If you want a limit of 10GB you’ll have to pay an extra £40 a month for it, every month. And if you use nearly all of it come renewal time they’ll not be interested in giving you a good deal. And your mum, who no longer has the comfort of knowing she can’t use the internet indefinitely without fear of running up a bill and has no idea what her 1GB limit actually means uses the internet a lot less. Nobody wins.

What is needed is a compromise. An ‘Unlimited - *’

* - if your usage exceeds the 95th percentile of our customer base, currently around 3GB per month your connection speed may be reduced. You will not be charged any extra.

The cognoscenti can read it and not buy it if they don’t want to and your mum is happy too. Data is not free.

Unlimited is used when clearly the offering is not unlimited!

What about 'All You Can Eat'? - that depends on how much is being provided. You can only eat 2 sausage rolls each if 20 are laid out in front of 10 people! And 'The Full Monty' that is sort of unlimited but with a speed restriction of around 4Mbps.

There are other examples I am sure but the fact is that mobile technology simply can't deliver truly unlimited wireless data especially in areas of major population. It's not rocket science but it is quite unfair to market services with terms that do not accurately describe what it is possible to deliver.

The old saying is as true of mobile data as it is of anything else..... "If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is". Fill your boots if/while you can though!