As operators around the world look to curb people’s data usage by rolling out confusing pricing plans or just simply raising their rates, things are going a little bit differently in Russia. MegaFon, the third largest operator in the country, recently held a contest whereby the person who could use the most amount of data would be awarded with a 150,000 ruble ($5,000) vacation overseas. With the way temperatures have plummeted across all of Europe, Thailand looks like the place to be right now. Anyway, the winner was someone who managed to pull 419 GB in the span of a single week. Doing some back of the envelope calculations, that’s a constant download rate of 5.7 megabits per second. Not bad for a network that uses 21 Mbps HSPA+ technology, which is arguably inferior to anything offered in America, but on par with what’s available in most of Europe. Some countries have 42 Mbps HSPA+ networks, but that technology isn’t as widely deployed yet.
The bigger story here is that MegaFon has managed to not only stick to their guns when they say they have “unlimited data”, but they also demonstrated that they have a network capable of handling a tremendous amount of load. Why can’t other operators be like this? Imagine if someone in Verizon’s or AT&T’s marketing department suggested running a competition to see who could use up the most amount of data, that person would get fired so fast that their head would explode.
We’re curious, how fairly does your operator treat you? This writer once lived in a temporary apartment for about a month and managed to consume over 300 GB of data using a prepaid SIM card. No one complained, no one sent an angry text message with a warning, absolutely nothing happened. That’s Elisa Finland for you.
[Via: The Next Web]