posted on Mar, 3 2012 @ 10:36 AM
If you are using metro or cricket, they are a tier 3, which means they lease tower space off of another carrier. The data throttling has more to do
with their business plan, and their company meeting profitability guidelines, while still offering you a service that is lower cost than a traditional
tier 2 or 1 (tier 1 = verizon in your area).
With tier 3 carriers, you share bandwidth and the service is usually limited - and the service is NAT (network address translation) more like when you
are behind a router at home sharing service with others, but if you have a tier 1 provider, its more like you have the same service at home (directly
connected to the internet/cloud)
But the bandwidth throttling makes sense. I know the company I worked for before we were bought out, would give customers uncapped DSL, and in
delaware if you were close to the central office, that would be 20mbps down and 1-2mbps up, which is pretty sweet for dsl, but after we were acquired
they started throttling data to 768k and 1mb, whatever the customer was actually paying for.
Im sure the service is fine for what you need, if that browsing the web, getting email, maybe watching the occasional youtube video, just be mindful
of the bandwidth. I used sprint 3g for wireless data, I think my plan was around 29.99 for 2gb, which was fine for me.
If you are out and about, try and jump on wifi networks, like starbucks, mcdonalds, some dunkin doughnuts i think have wifi too.