What is the difference between cellular data being used on my phone and cellular data being used on my notebook? Data is data.

    • wander1236@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      171·
      8 months ago

      When T-Mobile moved to unlimited with the ONE plans, they gave You “unlimited” tethering at “3G speeds”, which turned out to be 0.5Mbit/s, an unusably slow speed in 2018.

      The Magenta plans gave you 5GB-50GB of full-speed tethering before dropping you to “3G speeds”. The current Go5G plans are similar, with a limited amount of usable tethering data before you’re, for all practical uses, cut off.

      Before the ONE plans, there technically was no hotspot usage limit, but since you had a limited amount of high-speed data, your hotspot was effectively limited to whatever your plan gave you.

      All the US carriers limit hotspot usage, partly to prevent someone hooking up a computer to download 50TB of pirated movies while clogging up the bandwidth for everyone else on that tower, and (moreso) partly because they’re greedy.

      • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        151·
        8 months ago

        If it were just bandwidth issues, they’d only limit you during times of congestion.

        It’s pure greed.

      • tyler@programming.devEnglish
        11·
        8 months ago

        3g speeds are fine, no clue what you’re talking about. I literally tether all the time and when I hit the limit it’s still completely usable, even for YouTube. And getting to that limit is well above the 5gb from ATT. Like I said, att is shit, T-Mobile doesn’t do this and hasn’t for years.

        Literally every carrier on the planet limits hotspot data in some manner. This isn’t a US thing.