Your video buffered again and you’re ready to sue the tower.
Stop.
The tower did not break just because your unlimited plan got slow. The airwaves did not read the brochure.
Unlimited data means no fixed cutoff on how much you can use on your phone. It does not mean unlimited speed, unlimited priority, or unlimited magic. The fine print is where “unlimited” goes to acquire several conditions. Yes, really.
A busy cell site has finite capacity. When demand beats supply, the network has to allocate those radio resources somehow. Somebody gets slowed down first. That somebody is often the person whose plan says they can be deprioritized. That is not a network failure. That is the plan working as written.
Here is how to check if you are that somebody:
- See when deprioritization applies. It may start after a certain amount of use or it may start from day one.
- Look for video speed or quality limits. Some plans manage video traffic to about DVD quality whether the site is congested or not.
- Find the separate hotspot allowance. Phone data and hotspot data are often treated differently.
- Read what happens after any stated threshold. The word “unlimited” does not overrule the asterisk.
Congestion is real. So are plan terms. Two things can be true, apparently.
If your video looks fuzzy, the tower may be innocent for once. A marketing adjective is not a network design. The network can be humming along just fine while your stream Takes. Its. Time. because the plan capped video to 480p. Or because you hit your high-speed hotspot bucket and now it is throttled to a speed that makes dial-up look spunky.
Everybody wants unlimited data. Nobody wants to read the part about congestion. Read the terms before putting the tower on trial.
The tower has enough problems without taking the blame for your plan.