In France it was actually the norm for cellular data, and the hellish nightmare of favoring one own service was even advertised ("with universal mobile, you get unlimited data for universal music service!!!").
We also had service tiering, such as pop/imap being priced differently than http, etc...
Free mobile then came in and used the same tactic they used on adsl, single pricing, large amount of data, no differentiation between websites / ports / data types (even including peer to peer) etc... And others had to follow.
So we're in a status quo right now, but just like our fixed line Internet, its quality depends on one of the providers not aligning with the others. If they change their mind, get bought or whatever, the game could change quickly.
>In France it was actually the norm for cellular data, and the hellish nightmare of favoring one own service was even advertised ("with universal mobile, you get unlimited data for universal music service!!!").
Took me a minute to parse, since I didn't realize that universal was the name of a content company, rather than a service plan's name and access to all music.
Kind of reminds me of the (also French) company Total, who seems like they were invented to make tabulation charts about the oil industry hard to read.
We also had service tiering, such as pop/imap being priced differently than http, etc...
Free mobile then came in and used the same tactic they used on adsl, single pricing, large amount of data, no differentiation between websites / ports / data types (even including peer to peer) etc... And others had to follow.
So we're in a status quo right now, but just like our fixed line Internet, its quality depends on one of the providers not aligning with the others. If they change their mind, get bought or whatever, the game could change quickly.