Overage fees in real time.
I have watched many hours so far of these hearings, and there is something I have not yet seen addressed in relation to why caps are necessary. Especially with the new wave of LTE devices, data speeds have gotten faster, but caps have stayed a relatively the same level. I used to have a 30$ month 6GB 3G plan, and now have have a package plan that includes 5GB instead of 6GB, yet my speeds are on the order of 10 times faster. At work I have measured the actual performance of the LTE network at 2.6 megaBYTEs per second (20Mbits/s or 9.3 GB an hour). My provider charges an overage fee of 10$/GB. Now, if I set my phone to silent and walk into a business meeting while there happens to be an application dowloading at top speed on my phone(unknown to me), it is entirely possible that in 1 hour I will rack up 90$ of overages fees. This is one of the reasons a cap is absolutely necessary to prevent billshock, because the span of time it takes you to incur huge fees is getting shorter, and shorter. My provider only displays data usage on their website 'within 4 hours'. In 4 hours, I could conceivably use up 37 gigabytes of data, and this is not even considering the top speed of my device.
