Item — HN Reader

I had a “hit” post on bsky [0] (90 likes, big numbers for me) asking whether people would want an unlimited mobile plan throttled at 256kbps for $2/month. Seems like yes?

There’s lots to say about how useable it is (I often get throttled when traveling and it’s really not that bad + it helps curb any desire to scroll videos!)

But mainly I want to ask - I looked into it for a minute and it seems like you couldn’t start an mvno because carriers wouldn’t let you cannibalize them?

You can get very cheap IoT plans but if you tried reselling IoT as esims for consumers, the carriers would kill it?

So yeah - Starlink to mobile is actually the only viable way that routes around this problem?

(((email in profile if you’re cuckoo enough like me and want to start a self service’d throttled mvno)))

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/greg.technology/post/3mbmwsytnyc23

6 comments

Embeddedworks sells unlimited 750kbps service for $90/year. Its data only, no phone or SMS.

When I talked to them earlier this year they said there was potential to sell other data rates though nothing was as low as $2/month.

Unfortunately their plan is an IoT plan “Not Intended for Phones or Tablets” [0]

That’s exactly the issue - it’s a great plan, it’s just contractually stopped from being offered because a lot of people would potentially switch to that..! :)

To me, the fact that the restriction exists is a proof of the demand for this.

[0] https://embeddedworks.net/product/wsim0331-sub/

Is it a restriction or just a disclaimer? "Not intended" doesn't necessarily mean "prohibited".

There is something like this but twice the prive in Finland https://www.moi.fi/laitenetti . Can't make outgoing calls but there are pay as you internet call out services for that occaddional use case.

In Japan you have consumer (with voice) plans for

Unlimited 32kbps $1.60/mo (I guess this makes more sense for IoT?)

Unlimited 300kbps $4/mo

Unlimited 1.5Mbps $6/mo

https://mineo.jp/price/#mysoku

Those are dreamy! But also, Japan has incredible density.

I was imagining a no-support, pure esim play. I mean. Even calling it brainstorming is an exaggeration haha

Density has it's own costs, finding real estate and backhaul for towers in a city is much harder than picking up some farmland for cheap and slapping up microwave backhaul.

What Japan did was make it extremely easy to start an MVNO - the regulator essentially forced the telcos to allow it, so there are standard contracts with published rates.

The downside is the way the pricing was done is pretty dumb, MVNOs pay by the megabit for a fixed uplink capacity. So during the noon rush where everyone wants to watch YouTube while eating lunch all the MVNO performance, even somewhere the towers are idle, goes to crap, since they only bought uplink for the 98% case.

Not just you, that might be a overall record for bsky?

"unlimited", or basically ~80GB/month if you saturate it 24/7 as users are likely to.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the current advertisement being discussed.

Sorry yes - I think it does. Starlink sats can already offer 5G service directly to mobile phones (from the sky!!)

And there are other comments here talking about this specifically - how unlimited bandwidth throttled plans are actually useful and would be great to have.