Data-thirsty mobile owners burn through 5GB a month CK Hutchison’s Three network says each customer burns through 5GB of mobile data a month, on average, and around half of that is YouTube traffic*. Three carries 42 per cent of the UK’s mobile bits, and it has seen an increase of 1.7GB per customer per month from last year. The UK network disclosed its financial results today …
The answer is more, shorter ranged masts with their own backhaul. This lets you have more users of the same spectrum in a given area.
And much higher CAPEX and OPEX costs for the network....
Networks are complicated, expensive beasts. The operator will first deploy for coverage, and then hopefully monitor what capacity is doing in their network to do infill with extra sites/carriers to boost capacity at "hot" areas, all the while hopefully optimising for subscriber quality on core services - e.g. Voice MOS, and managing profit margins against deployment plans and subscriber churn.
Small cell densification of the networks is being touted as the answer - as a CAPEX they are much cheaper to buy, plus have fewer hurdles to planning permission. But there is still the problem of backhaul availability with LTE sites needing O(100mbps) to run at decent capacity.
I was on £15pcm tariff with unlimited data (no idea about calls and texts as I don't use them) and they have just sent me a letter saying they're going to put me on a £30pcm tariff based on my usage. There's a £20 tariff with unlimited data and less calls and texts (which I don't use anyway).
The old plan had unlimited tethering and the new one has tethering capped at 12Gb. Not happy about that either, even if I wasn't hitting anywhere near the cap. Personally I think this seems diametrically at odds with their current advertising campaign.
I suspect they are trying it on with the letters and the "recommended" new plan, give them a call and you'll probably find they've got something closer to what you use. All you can eat data is no more I think though.
Agree that the advertising is a joke, but I had a look round and only Giffgaff has a plan anywhere close in price to mine. Didn't check BT though, for obvious reasons.
All you can eat data is no more I think though.
No - AYCE data is still there, it's just the tethering that's capped, at 12GB as mentioned. I renewed my contract just before Christmas and got the standard unlimited data contract at £18/mo just before it went up to £20. As I get through 10-20GB a month Three still offers the best deal for me.
Don't really get this thing about data speeds being slow either - I get anywhere between 8-75 mbits download depending where I am, unless I'm somewhere with no signal at all.
We've got 3 of the Three SIM only deals, the first was only £12->13/m the other 2 were a couple of quid more. When we took them out we were warned that tethering was limited but they haven't complained about the usage. Number2 son burns through well over 100G each and every month these days,I think he took it as a great insult when I pointed out in the first month he'd missed the 100GB by a a couple of MB and has promised to use it more ever since. Compared with him my usage is trivial, but they've just texted me to say my recent trip to the US would have been £1500 more expensive if they charged for roaming (it wouldn't have been, I'd have turned off roaming and bought a local SIM).
They still seem to have parent friendly tariffs (ie you know what it's going to cost you - no shocks!)
"They still seem to have parent friendly tariffs (ie you know what it's going to cost you - no shocks!)"
Agree - up to a point!
I'm aware that you can cap the plan - disallow calls once the allowance has been burnt through, disallow calls to numbers not covered by the plan.
What I couldn't find was any easy way to configure a cap on data - I wonder if that's by design?
Cynical? Moi?
What I couldn't find was any easy way to configure a cap on data - I wonder if that's by design?
Just call them, I put a hard'ish cap on my data.
Basically, they will cap the data, but due to delays in the way charges are applied etc. you may find there are occassions you go 10~100MB over.
"They still seem to have parent friendly tariffs (ie you know what it's going to cost you - no shocks!)"
Agree - up to a point!
...
What I couldn't find was any easy way to configure a cap on data
Since it is an all you can eat service why would you want to put a cap on the data usage?
Except to limit the amount of time the little perisher spends gawping at YouTube
...but they've just texted me to say my recent trip to the US would have been £1500 more expensive if they charged for roaming
The government will be pleased that the telco was able to know you had gone to the US. As well as the fact they are able to record visits to Youtube, FB etc.
Big Sister will be very pleased with them.
Same experience. I use on average 3-4GB a month on the same plan. Just had it for the "luxury" of never needing to worry about limits.
Eventually got to discussing the 12GB plan with the bloke on the phone, but for £17. I said I wasn't really interested in paying more for a plan that offered a lot less. That's as far he was prepared to go and now my plan is £0 a month :)
Whether your roaming is free (or £5 a day in non home countries) Youtube is blocked totally, doesn't even play 240p videos. Same for Maps, Google Play and Spotify. None of the popular streaming services seem to work at all.
They blame the local networks but if you use a VPN suddenly it's OK but with reduced data rate.
Three need to come clean about their traffic shaping as it has never felt like home to me at all. They need to challenge themselves rather than the rest of the mobile industry.
£3 a day on Vodafone and it's wonderful.
I don't travel a great deal but I've found roaming flaky. On a recent trip to Switzerland it connected to a network called Salt and I go the welcome message etc and small batch of Facebook/Whatsapp notifications (over what I have no idea). However the phone was telling me there was no data available, further into the mountains Salt vanished and instead my phone could see Swisscomm or OrangeCH but it didn't think I was allowed to connect to them, until 3 days later at which point suddenly OrangeCH was an acceptable network but data only triggered after I toggled it on and off (phone reboot didn't have the desired effect).Youtube certainly didn't work but Facebook did and so did uploading my photos to the googly cloud.
I'm pretty certain I had a similar experience in Belgium a few years ago with the stubborness about joining certain networks and lack of data.
As to contracts, I have a fairly old 3Pay SIM, Three's website states they promise to never take this tariff away. That gets you the ability to add 2Gb of data for £5 of your credit. Now admittedly this is nowhere near the apparent usage they claim people are up to these days, but when you have WiFi at work, at home and quite possibly several places in between how are these people burning through so much and would they be doing so if the allowance was lower?
I tried it in the US - and it was perfect.
Tried it in Australia - and much less so. Maps was fine, but youtube and spotify were most definitely not. Admittedly I got the important stuff I actually needed, but became suddenly aware it was a very constrained service. TraceRTs seemed to show my data bouncing randomly around the planet, so wasn't sure if it was a glitch or 'functioning as it was supposed to'
Vodafone might be great on £3 a day, but certainly adds up over a couple of fortnights.
ID the carphone warehouse brand, seems to now have a roaming-friendly plan. You're paying for it, but has pretty good European/US coverage.
This ever-increasing mobile data use is partly because apps and the OS expect data all the time, unreasonably in my view.
I recently got a new Android phone (Moto X Style) and while it's very nice, why does it make it so hard to turn off mobile data? Click the control icon - That no longer simply toggles data, no, it takes you to the data usage page. Click to turn off data. Click YES I know my life will be meaningless without mobile data but I AM SURE. Click to get back to where I was.
4 or more clicks instead of one. Even if Wifi is already on and connected.
Anyway if the mobile companies are constrained by capacity, just price accordingly and people won't treat it like it's free.
It's quite common to view a website that is just stuffed to the gills of large CSS and JS files, as well as images that aren't optimised before uploading to the server. In another life I administered a platform that 300 clubs of the charity I worked for, and the people administering the separate websites would always upload their photos direct from mobile phones or digital cameras. Then they'd post them on to the page they'd resize them there, which wouldn't reduce the actual size of the file just the space on screen it'd take up. They would then moan at me that the photos were taking too long to load "even though they're only small".
Head? Meet Brick Wall - for 3 years.
But these new fancy websites we're seeing are the same. The emphasis isn't on the end user, it's on trying to out do the rival developers and designs to make a site look nice. A nice site doesn't mean shit if:
a) Takes too long to load
b) Uses up a tonne of data
Strip your sites back. Pretend we're back in the late 1990's and everyone had 56k dial up modems. Do more with less, and it's only then will you have a good website.
Ah, abuse of the height and width image attributes, I know it well.
i.e. It should not be used to scale your images, it's only there to pre-allocate the space needed to display the image on the page, so the browser doesn't need to keep re-sizing during load!
I remember being asked in the early 00s to check why a web page was taking ages to load over dial up. The remit to the developer was to create a page of thumbnails, that linked to some screen shots (about 20 of them).
Turned out all the developer had done was to upload the raw image files, then used the height and width attributes to create thumbnail sized images, rather than creating real thumbnails. So locally the page loaded okay, but over dial up this was painfully slow.
Websites are utterly foul to visit these days, many of them don't bother with backwards compatibility (LinkedIn is a bugger for this), have a horrible design for PC monitors and as soon as you hit them with a mobile browser spam you to install the app.
Most news sites are going down the Buzzfeed route for content as well, I'm watching the BBC site turn into a video infested shithole these days
"Websites are utterly foul to visit these days, many of them don't bother with backwards compatibility (LinkedIn is a bugger for this), have a horrible design for PC monitors and as soon as you hit them with a mobile browser spam you to install the app.
Most news sites are going down the Buzzfeed route for content as well, I'm watching the BBC site turn into a video infested shithole these days"
This. Just, this, everything wrong with the internet today. You know who the biggest culprit is? Web Design agencies themselves!
In Birmingham, if you type "Web Design Companies" in to Google and visit the first 3/4 companies on there, all their sites are near identical. Parallax scrolling, the "three bars" in the corner operate the menu. I know the three stacked bar icon indicates menus on mobiles, but on a desktop? No. You have space, stick a menu bar there so your site can be used. The irony is though that the top 3/4 companies who come up on the search are also all next to each other. It's more keeping up with the jones' rather than putting the customer first.
And totally agree with the BBC becoming BuzzFeed. Sites just want to make money, and they think "if we split the content up so you have to click to the next page we'll make more money from advertising". So what was half a page turns in to 5 pages where 3/4's of it are adverts.
> It's quite common to view a website that is just stuffed to the gills of large CSS and JS files, as well as images that aren't optimised before uploading to the server.
I must hang out with the wrong web developer crowd, because they regard unoptimised code (yes, they call it code, they "compile" it and all--run it through minifiers, optimisers, lint, the lot) as a form of heresy.
Maybe it is just a local aberration, but my perception is that these days the lads write much more efficient web content than we used to back in the day. An increasing number of those are usable, to a large extent, without any network connection at all after initial load, perhaps months earlier. A bandwidth requirement of zero can hardly be considered inefficient.
Quite obviously, I am not talking about El Reg, whose code is still stuck in the last decade.
Related, sent from my boss recently
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm - The Website Obesity Crisis.
We're intentionally trying to minimise the amount of data and complexity of it now, to [a] make sure it loads fast on mobile as well as desktops, and [b] stop websites eating phone batteries for fun.
It's shocking how much these frameworks that make life easier for the creative types eat CPU, therefore battery power, on mobile devices. Or sending huge pictures and letting the device resize them, nicely serving 500K instead of the 25K image that would do if it was resized server side, handily eating 0.5-1% of many people's data plans (it's surprising how many people have to get by with 500MB or 1GB now) in one fell swoop.
Also related: Advertising scripts that eat CPU/battery/data just by existing, hence so many people blocking the things on mobile.
(I'm also slightly bitter about 3 kicking me off the £15 One Plan - but like one of the posters above, I'm now on AYCE data, 12GB tether, 200 mins and AYCE texts for £20. Can't complain too much, was bound to happen in the end, I just hate bills going up. At least we know exactly what we're paying for, and it's quite reasonable for what it is with the AYCE mobile data. I rarely used over 12GB of tethering in a month, but it was just nice to know it was there if I needed it.)
Really the frameworks are supposed to be for prototyping, then when you're done working out what you need you start cutting out the bits you don't. jQuery introduced subcomponents so you can load individual parts rather than the whole thing and, according to them at least, the full version will drop to 11kb when minified and gzipped during transfer if you use the minified version. jQuery UI lets you do custom builds which only include the features you want. Twitter Bootstrap you can just remove the js entirely if you aren't using it, and I'm sure other libraries like this let you pick and choose what parts you actually want
Problem is this requires people to keep it in mind when they're building it, and plan time into the project for doing clean up work. There's also the issue of third party services, like the Twitter API or ad networks (mentioned in the article), where your page load time is impacted by the response time of third party servers which you have no control over. Not to mention if you have a lot of files to download rather than a small number of combined ones the overheads from the http requests will slow things down
So yeah, all in all there are ways to improve it, but they depend on better planning of projects and getting clients to understand that more shiny doesn't necessarily mean more sales
I have wireless at home and at work. I am not a mindless facebook pavement drone, shuffling forward zombie-like as I injest the latest utter drivel. My monthly data usage is never more than 200Mb, even with 4G activated.
I want the lower limit, it gives me a nice cheap monthly tariff.
So go prepaid instead and plan a little. Long term it is quite hard to get true value from a phone contract,few of us have usage patterns that fixed and repeatable so we buy data and minutes we might need for those rare occasions. Buying your own phone and going prepay allows you to shop around for the handset you want unlocked meaning you can switch it out abroad, change providers when you please and sell it easily when you trade up. That said at the cheaper end of the scale prepay is less appealing than it used to be.
"I'd feel more sympathy if I wasn't just shunted to a new tariff. I was on the old £6.90 a month (200mins, 5000txts, 500mb"
Lucky!!!! In the US carriers focus on big, costly bundles, and part of that is pricing unbundled plans so high they are "almost as much as that bundled plan anyway."
Minimum tarriff on Verizon Wireless last I checked was like $30 a month for 300 minutes (and I think *zero* texts, 10 cents apiece) -- this plan is unadvertisd, normal minimum is $40 for 450 minutes; and another $15 for like 500MB data (although you can get 2GB for $30). No, you cannot just get the data with no voice minutes. Oh and another $10 or so for texts. But I'm not sure, they're pushing these shared plans hard now where you have a high base price but $10 per additional phone; if that's all that's available now you might be out like $70 a month.
IWireless (a regional proivder) has a lot better deal overall ($50 for unlimited everything), but again, it doesn't cut down like it "should"; it's like $30 for the lowest plan (which is something like 500MB, 500 minutes, 500 texts.)
How much of this data is due to the ad networks, not only on web pages, but also on add-supported apps? How much more of the data is squandered on loading muscle-bound libraries designed to crack a walnut with a pile driver? And, of course, poor so-called responsive design which serves up oversized images and videos just in case?
I’ve recently switched to Vodafone (in Australia) allowing me to share data allowances on all devices. Until last week I had 19Gb available!
What would be even more interesting is a geographical map of where the data was being used and the number of connections. This is going to be concentrated in all the usual city centre, southern areas that actually have a usable 4G service.
The lunacy is that the regulator permits claims of 97% or 98% coverage just because there is a microscopic signal that almost works on voice and GPRS that falls over just negotiating the connection.
We now have the rush to roll out 5G, in all the places where there is currently acceptable 4G.
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