@smp99 wrote:
But many people don't know what they need and look at 3G plans (3mbs) vs LTE plans (100mbs) and think I have to get LTE. The cost of increasing the speed of 3G plans has to cost nothing other than the initial coding changes. It's all marketing. Telus might make more money by increasing these plans to 10mbs as some may run out of data quicker and then move up in plans.
Now - the talk of Lucky giving an addition 750MB data bonus after 1 yr on the $15 plan - that is something and I need to investigate further
You are right, it's just marketing with the ultimate goal of attracting as many customers as possible and then push them up to higher tier/paid plans. I'm sure you have notice many post paid offerings have super low promo prices with double digit GB/month? They want bottom payers to move up, nor do they want tier 3 offerings performing better than their tier 1.
Yes, you are right in that 3Mbps is more than enough for a good chunk of the user base, but there is more than just speeds at play here. All the carriers are using throttling management and caching mechanism which in turn affect the overall performance you see/feel. I recently moved a device onto the "3G" tier and now I find that basic web browsing performance has just tanked, with some sites requiring 45+ seconds or more of doing nothing despite refreshing etc. Switching to WiFi instantly resolves this. This device never had these issues prior to this "3G" plan. What's interesting though is that speed tests (using the ookla app) consistently show in the 1.9 -2.9Mbps range up and downstream. I suspect that Telus' caching engines are the culprit here with http/https traffic.
I may testdrive Lucky for a month over the summer to see how their "3G" data speeds and traffic management/caching behave.
