It’s a matter of physics and a matter of economics. Spectrum is a limited resource, which means there’s a limited amount of bandwidth. New technologies will push spectral efficiency, but we’re starting to bump up against a barrier called Shannon’s limit which will constrain any future bits/hertz increases in capacity. So what it comes down to is two intersecting lines based on average data consumption, when unlimited data prices fall below the cost of delivering that average consumption, then unlimited plans go bye bye. Either that or the operators start raising the price on unlimited plans.

Operators still have some headroom today, and Sprint is milking that cost curve for all it’s worth. Good for it. But eventually the usage will catch up with costs.

Obviously we disagree on this, but I’d rather be metered. Most people on unlimited plans would actually pay a lot less for data if they were on reasonable tiered per-GB plans (The stratified tiers out there today aren’t all that reasonable). Though there are heavy-volume users that get a deal out of unlimited data, most of us are just handing extra money to the operators.