The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?"
I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.
Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)
At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.
Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.
So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.
Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.
It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.
Because they were basically OEM'd PCs with an Apple logo at one point, and used it as a selling point, but I don't think it was a particularly popular feature among the general userbase. I've personally seen more Hackintosh laptops than Macs running Windows.
High-density NAND flash also needs "whitening", i.e. scrambling the data to be stored so that the number of 1s and 0s is even and randomly distributed, to avoid wearing some cells (the ones that are storing 0s) more than others, as well as reduce pattern-dependent disturb errors.
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