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Is Myxer.com free if I have an unlimited data plan?

How can usage data from Sprint's unlimited data plan inform the net neutrality debate?

  • Assuming Sprint already has or would be willing to release this data in the first place, what can we learn from it to inform debates on net neutrality? They're the only mobile data firm that's still allowing unlimited use. The other carriers have switched to a tiered model based on their data which apparently reveals that a small minority abuse the unlimited plans, ruining it for everybody else. Is this actually true? With Sprint's data, we could find out.

  • Answer:

    I think you're confusing a couple of separate issues here - Net Neutrality is not directly linked to the instigation of tiered/capped data plans. That is 'neutral' unless there is blocking or other discrimination of specific websites, apps or services. Certainly, there's strong evidence to suggest that there are certain ultra-heavy users on 3G/4G networks without a cap. One operator (not Sprint) told me that they had one user generating over 2TB of traffic in a month. There are also various examples of specific apps that generate a lot of 'signalling' load on the network & cause congestion. It is more difficult to say exactly who causes the problems - is it the guy downloading a 3GB movie in a quiet cell at 3am, or the 10,000 people each doing 1MB of email in a busy city square? The answer is likely to be both, but the heavy users are easier to identify and manage. Sprint might be able to correlate some of their data with  observations if particular apps or services cause disproportionate problems - eg P2P running on laptops with 3G/4G modems, or YouTube or Facebook or whatever. Although even that is tricky because of mashups & actually collecting the real-world data on the specific causes of each incident of congestion.

Dean Bubley at Quora Visit the source

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One of the gotchas in mobile broadband systems like HSPA and LTE is that`user throughput (and hence backhaul link utilisation, unless you are heavily overprovisioned) are maximised during the quiet hour (as measured by subscribers per cell). If there is no contention, the codecs and spectrum sharing open out until the maximum throughput in view of the linkbudget is reached. As the maximum throughput in these systems can be high, a single user could in some cases be able to saturate the link....if no other users are present. Because there is some overhead, capacity sharing between contending users isn't quite perfect, so the busy hour is actually less throughput than the maximising quiet hour case. I.e. user throughput/users < Shannon limit data rate/users. This doesn't solve all your capacity planning problems, as of course signalling traffic does scale with the number of users and the kind of devices and applications they use rather than the throughput.

Alex Harrowell

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