That's a fair point, we should change that verbiage.

Several years ago in the UK, giffgaff had a similar plan (throttled to 384 kbps after 80 GB throughput) which they called “always on”. I thought that was a good linguistic compromise.

Why can’t it throttle to something slightly higher? Even 100-200 KBps? Is that a requirement from the “upstream” network provider?

It's not. We chose this baseline sort of by default based on the practices of some other major carriers. Your question is a good one, and we'll take it as feedback.

I would be a lot less worried about signing up for that plan if I could soft-cap myself at 10GB until I login to the app and push a button that says "yeah for real I'm going to use another 10GB of mobile data", so that if iOS goes bonkers and tries to download my entire 90GB iTunes library over cellular, it doesn't fuck me over for a month. I haven't exceeded 7GB/mo intentionally for years, but it's happened twice so far against my express wishes, and carriers are uniformly awful at that.

This is good feedback. We don’t want caps and throttling to be a blocker for signing up and using us. Since we’re at a premium price point we should economically be able to be a lot more generous than existing carriers.

Yeah. As a olde ex-carrier type person, I want burst mode unlimited, I expressly do not want continuous saturated unlimited, if that makes any sense. So if you tune the service to warn me “you’ve used 10% of your cap in five minutes so we’ve slowed your service down temporarily, respond with YES if this is intentional and we should speed it back up, otherwise it’ll reset in the morning”, that would be an example of best in category service that’s on my side rather than the carrier’s overage fees profit line item.

I don’t mind that you have caps, I consider caps to be a marketable form of 90th percentile billing to consumers, so please don’t take this as “remove all caps” — but definitely find an in-between that’s more nuanced than “you reach arbitrary threshold 50G at 1gbps 5G and so it only took 8 minutes and 40% battery, too bad so sad now your entire month of data is at DSL speeds”. (This sarcastic tone is not a critique of you! but of the general carrier practices that leave me worried about you.)

In a dream world my usage percentile for the past 30 days would be inversely proportional to my bandwidth speed so that momentary usage to download a software update had no meaningful impact, but running nonstop continuous data for four hours straight caused a measurable drop in bandwidth (which protects my battery and the network health). It’s not fiber-optic or fixed-installation wireless and I do respect the shared base antenna capacity problems!

Charge $5 more for everyone, and then rebate $5 against your next bill if you don't go over X GB or whatever.

It ends up being the same as charging $5 if you go over, but it'll feel much more premium.

This is what my carrier does for me, except the limit is like 2GB or something.

I would like to try Cape. How do guys deal with IMEI tracking from folks like Google when i search or use their email? Or that one is beyond your control?

What makes you think Google has access to your IMEI through using their search engine?

Friends at Google :)

Can you elaborate?

I don’t think keeping the status quo of throttling caps will stop anyone from signing up. As long as it’s not any worse, I don’t think it would deter me due to the other features you offer. The main reason why I don’t change is my spouse and kids don’t care about privacy and I can get them service for cheaper!

I don’t really think about caps all that much except in theory. I would love speed tests to be excepted from caps, but I get why that isn’t always workable.

That’s a great idea. I rarely use more than 10-15 GB except if I’m tethering and something decided to slurp up all my data.

A few Mbps would be nice - fast enough to make the modern web mostly usable. 256 Kbps is almost the same as not working at all.

Google Fi has been 256k after the soft cap since they launched. Majorly embarrassing, took me tears to sign up because of this.

Comcast I think is the best? Haven't checked in a while but their mobile plan I think soft caps to 1Mbps.

A slightly different definition of “best” is Verizon’s Visible division. NO caps. Just slightly deprioritized speeds 100% of the time. Their website says 5Mbps speed cap at all times but I’ve tested 180Mbps and that was after using like 30GB on my hotspot. Basically all-you-can-eat (including the hotspot) with a risk that sometimes it’ll slow a little compared to others on the network, for $25/mo.

There's a real big difference between "one byte over the line and you're on a 56k modem" and "if you exceed your cap, you're deprioritized to last on the cell pole". The latter is how it should be implemented.