Your home will be repossessed.
Your children will be taken from you.
You will never even be allowed to use The Internet again in your lifetime.
Of course, none of this is true, but for many thousands of people, they really do believe that using 4G will use up their data allowance so quickly that just watching a 30 second YouTube video will leave them massively out of pocket.
This urban myth does need to be dispelled, as I hear it time after time and it now appears to be self-perpetuating.
Firstly, being able to use a 4G connection does mean that yes, data allowances can be used up more quickly.
However - it still only consumes/sends the same quantity of data that a 3G connection would.
If you are one of those Luddites staring at this article in pure disbelief, then don't worry: Downloading a 10MB mp3 music file will happen much more quickly over a 4G connection, but like it's 3G connection counterpart - it's still a 10MB file.
Of course, there will be some customers who discover that it is quick and easy to download/upload all sorts of stuff from/to the internet using their smartphones, and those customers may be shocked at the speed in which this can now happen (depending upon how good or bad your network is).
It's easy to sit there and download a few dozen tracks in quick succession, without realising that you've used 400MB of your data allowance.
To be honest, I firmly believe that many of these 4Gphobes have been using a substandard mobile data connection for years, which is why this new 4G witchery is laden with so many nasty surprises.
For anyone who has experienced Three's 3G data speeds, you possibly will have been very satisfied with them.
I was on Three's The One Plan for years, and with the unlimited data that was supplied with this plan, I could never be bothered to turn on WiFi on my phone because the data speeds were so good - and that was only on 3G.
Given that Three now offer 4G at no additional cost, it seems ludicrous that anyone would really need faster data speeds than those already offered by Three's 3G service.
So, Three have unlimited, very fast 3G - But if you are stuck with a slow data connection the use of EE's "buffer face" will be an expression that you will already be familiar with.
#BufferFace
For those customers of Network X who have, until the advent of 4G, been hamstrung by slow internet speeds, these new data speeds must feel like "office broadband for the home".
At this point, I will mention about being charged extra for less, as those who have already jumped on the 4G data bandwagon will probably already have realised that they have had to modify their data usage - Not because they are using more, but the fact that they can use up their (now smaller than 3G) data allocation, faster.
- Maybe this is where the urban myth originated from; a 1GB of 4G data allocation can quickly be used up by streaming an hour of video, but the data use remains the same as over a 3G data connection.
It makes me wonder how frivolous the Vodafone 4G customer is on their current TV advert with his 4G data allocation on the Vodafone network. He keeps a crying child happy, pleasing everyone on the bus, which is lovely - but he must really want some peace and quiet on that bus trip.
Vodafone 4G "A Happy Bus Journey"
For the best value deals on PAYG for unlimited data, take a look at my website http://mobile-networks-uk.weebly.com/
These packages are getting rarer and more expensive these days, so if you realistically only use a maximum of 5GB of data on your mobile, then head on down to the "Heavy Users" section of the Bundles page of my website.
