As is becoming painfully apparent, mobile data use has increased to the point where strains are being placed on every network, though EE and Three seem to be coping better than Vodafone and certainly O2.
The reason that EE seems able to be provide a consistent data service is down to their investment in network infrastructure, especially 4G. They also charge royally for using their services, and can afford to sell off their spare capacity to a multitude of MVNOs.
Three, on the other hand have built their entire network around being able to provide data services (though some customers may find that this is at the expense of calls and texts!).
Mobile data use continues to rise, and as more devices become connected, the networks must be able to provide a usable service. If the Internet of Things (IoT) ever takes off, then certain devices and items such as cars will need robust data connections, and this will add to the burden.
It doesn't help now that streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix are so popular on mobile devices now - A full length HD film can easily romp through 2GB of data. Less than ten years ago that amount of data use on a mobile device was inconceivable.
In a recent post in the giffgaff "community", a teenager was asking why couldn't "young people" buy monthly bundles which catered for their needs - i.e. instead of 500 minutes, substitute these for another few gigabytes of data - because she stated that teenagers don't need minutes or texts, but use lots of data.
This discriminatory statement rattled my cage a little: Why should "young" people get exactly what they want? (This is a product of the "want it now and pay nothing for it" society that exists in the UK.).
I couldn't afford a mobile until I was in my twenties (the Nokia 3310 had only just appeared on the scene, changing the world forever), and I certainly couldn't afford a contract back then.
Only a few years ago, most teenagers were using lots of text messages, now that there are so many IM clients such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc, this need for decent SMS allocations has dropped considerably.
Over the years, contracts, phones and their tariffs have become lower in price, but now that smartphone use is booming, customers are having to pay more for less data.
In a way, we've had it too good for too long.
All of the networks are either capping data (not many unlimited data tariffs exist now), and/or they are charging more and more for data.
What will happen over time is that data use will continue to rise, and the networks will be forced to invest more and more in providing additional network infrastructure to accommodate this relentless increase. There is only one way that this will happen: Data will become ever more expensive.
When I had an unlimited data contract with Three, I used about 1GB a month. If I pushed it, I'd use 2-3GB in a month, but that needed me to stream a lot of music from my Amazon Music app!
Many people now require around 1-5GB of data per month, which isn't unreasonable. Anyone needing unlimited data really needs to think about just how much time they are actually spending looking at a screen which is a fraction of the size of most laptops!
This increasing data consumption will only end when public WiFi becomes widely available and is properly secure, but this is a long way off. Until then, we will all have to swallow the increasing cost of mobile data to keep the networks investing - Though I wish that they would also erect more masts in rural areas, most of which you still can't make a call in.
Of course, mobile data could become so massively expensive that we learn to use it frugally and stop mindlessly wasting it like so many other resources.
I moved my main mobile number to giffgaff and can't get a data connection in most places that I go to, and as a result I'm spending less time peering at my screen. I can't do much work on this blog, my website or even my Twitter account, which is annoying, but I've learned to live with it.
The days of unlimited, all you can eat data are numbered, and I hope that we don't find ourselves in a situation where 500MB of data is prohibitively expensive.
