You Just Reveived • Hacker News Board

Re: You Just Reveived

#21

Post by chrismorgan » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #6

The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?" I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)

At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.

Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.

So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.

Re: You Just Reveived

#22

Post by ThrowawayTestr » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #5

It said "for five days". So I'd assume those minutes/data will only last for that period of time. So I'd imagine this is like when I go to Amazon every X+n months and it tries to reel me back in with a free month of prime. They're giving you freebies to use, to establish habits which they can then profit from later down the line.

I rely on those free months of prime. I don't order from Amazon often but when I do next day shipping is great. Just gotta set a reminder to cancel.

Re: You Just Reveived

#23

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

luxuryballs wrote: post #13

larodi wrote: post #12

For more than six months now, s.o. is (perhaps accidentally) paying my mobile bill. I have two sim cards, one is data, almost unused. Called the operator twice, concerned that a granny is messing the user ID, or that s.o. is trying to impersonate me by paying the bills and then claiming ownership. Two times reps. assure me that they have no clue who does the payment as it arrives from a partner network taking cash pa…

any chance someone who knows you is simply paying your bill out of kindness?

[deleted]

Re: You Just Reveived

#24

Post by Barbing » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:28 AM UTC

saghm wrote: post #14

Quarrelsome wrote: post #5

It said "for five days". So I'd assume those minutes/data will only last for that period of time. So I'd imagine this is like when I go to Amazon every X+n months and it tries to reel me back in with a free month of prime. They're giving you freebies to use, to establish habits which they can then profit from later down the line.

The article was pretty clear about this: > Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

& the closer:

>For five days I had a million minutes and I was possibly the first and only Vodafone minute millionaire

Re: You Just Reveived

#25

Post by luz666 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

Sebguer wrote: post #20

fwipsy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"someone?"

this makes the most sense but i have never in my life seen someone abbreviate someone as SO, haha.

xkcd 10000 :)

Re: You Just Reveived

#26

Post by Barbing » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #21

userbinator wrote: post #6

The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?" I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudu…

Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.

Re: You Just Reveived

#27

Post by Barbing » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #17

> My family and I share a single mobile phone. To be more precise, we share two sim cards which move between a nearly 10 year old Samsung smartphone and a dumb flip phone depending on the present circumstances. This seems like some sort of punishment those monks that stand in one place and pray until their feet wear holes in the floor would use. Mint Mobile is like $15 a month.

OK, Ryan Reynolds

No, you're right.

If my choice were to worry about first-tier direct customers kicking me off cell towers at stadiums and public events, or worry about whether wife-husband-son SIM card would make it home in time for my work trip, it would be a pretty easy one.

Re: You Just Reveived

#28

Post by Barbing » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:37 AM UTC

Ewww to this idea, tell me it wasn't the same engagement hacking that leads YouTubers to mispronouncing common words.

“Hey, give people a billion dollars of credits for the next 17 seconds. Oh!, make it look like a mistake too!”

Re: You Just Reveived

#29

Post by ThePowerOfFuet » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:41 AM UTC

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #22

Quarrelsome wrote: post #5

It said "for five days". So I'd assume those minutes/data will only last for that period of time. So I'd imagine this is like when I go to Amazon every X+n months and it tries to reel me back in with a free month of prime. They're giving you freebies to use, to establish habits which they can then profit from later down the line.

I rely on those free months of prime. I don't order from Amazon often but when I do next day shipping is great. Just gotta set a reminder to cancel.

You can cancel immediately after subscribing. You will keep access until the end of the trial period and will not be billed.

Re: You Just Reveived

#30

Post by firefoxd » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:42 AM UTC

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development.

I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while testing.