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.works
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      7 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.world
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        7 months ago

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

        It’s pure greed.

      • tyler@programming.dev
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        7 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.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      Lol. They totally do. Their best plan without going arm and a leg for unlimited gives you 50GB a month before dropping to near nothing. Up to a year ago it was 40GB.

      • tyler@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        50gb is not even close to 5gb and 3g speeds are not even close to 128kbs so no, T-Mobile doesn’t do this.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          7 months ago

          T mobile has low GB plans that are far less than 40 or 50 GB and 3g is capable of over 3Mbps, so I don’t know what dumbassery you’re talking about.

          • tyler@programming.dev
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            7 months ago

            128kbps is referring to the ATT limitation so you’re just proving my point. T-Mobile doesn’t do what att does.