I don’t see many “unlimited” plans on the market (if any) – but I do see some suitably big bundles. 3UK offers 15 GB for £15 a month now. That’s a killer deal, although in my ad hoc experience actual performance on 3 is not always what it should be.

Perhaps one business model would be to let people use lots of bandwidth so long as they pay for it. In this way you’d turn P2P movie downloads and video streaming into a money spinner.

You need some way to apply user/app policies during busy hour, or when a cell gets congested, to make this work.

Since I am posting, I might as well pump my Twitter account: @Gabeuk (I only tweet about the weather and stuff)

Millomar, fair point. I also use Skype on a laptop over HSPA. It works well much of the time. Video calling is also OK.

I should have been clearer. What I meant was the use case on a mobile handset is all wrong.

Any “presence app” that has to regularly poll for updates over HSPA sucks battery on a mobile device. This is true of Skype, Truphone, push email apps, IM, even some Twitter clients. This is a deal breaker. You can’t leave these apps running and still expect to have battery to, say, call your kid’s school in an emergency later in the day.  The use case is broken for the *mass-market*.

(Hopefully the CPC enhancements in HSPA+ will help with this, but it will be a while before we get that technology in our hands).

It’s the same for streaming video and audio. For example, I can’t risk streaming Last.fm to a Mobbler client on my phone because I’ll have no battery left when I really to need to make/receive a call.

Fwiw, I use all of the above, that’s how I know.