[jbearamus]

Originally Posted by gbm85

Actually all these limits are a way of hiding the truth from the public.

Most people think that it actually costs the carrier money when you make a call or use the Internet. It doesn't.

The carrier pays for maintenance of the towers, and for connections to the Internet and the phone system. Their infrastructure costs are pretty much static, no matter how many or how few people use it. So why do they charge by-the-minute or by-the-megabyte? They are managing their resources.

Their towers have a fixed Internet connection. Assuming it's 50Mbps, they can support 50-100 cell phones per tower no problem. But what if I have a mobile broadband card and I want the full 2Mbps I'm paying for? Then they can only support 25 of us.

Therefore, they introduce the "data cap" and "overage charges" to make people think twice about getting on 3G and slowing everyone else down.

They don't have a cap on phones because they use so little bandwidth (or are supposed to, anyway, when they haven't been hacked for tethering).

A similar situation for minutes. A voice tower can only support so many users at once. (With CDMA, it's even trickier than other standards because there is no set limit on how many. It will allow tons of phones to connect, but once you put "one too many" on there, the entire tower becomes unusable.) That's why you pay for minutes... to keep people from chatting on the phone all day and possibly crashing their towers.

So there it is. It has nothing to do with direct cost, and everything to do with managing resources.

I kinda figured that was the case but that was just the excuse my Rep gave me but I still think its a contradiction to sign people up with the 5GB cap, soft or hard, and then turn around and provide people with a way of burning through their "allotment" much much faster