Its come, “Unlimited” mobile data in Australia. But after you use a certain amount/cap such as 40GB telstra you get throttled aka restricted to 1.5Mbps.

1.5Mbps means 1.5 Megabits per second or 1500 Kilobites per second we then can move that to 187.5 Kilobytes per second or 11.3 Megabites per minute or 675 Megabites per hour! Whilst in a sense its endless (unlimited) data it will come trickling once you have used up your soft cap.

With the technical stuff out-of-the-way, what can you actually do and stream at 1.5Mbps? To try I restricted the network on my PC to 1.5Mbps with Netlimiter

YouTube test

720p and anything under worked fine with no buffering. 1080p had some small buffering but once you let it sit and load for 20 seconds it was good to go.

Twitch

720p is ok, i say ok because its going to depend on what is being streamed the more detail on the stream the more you’re going to be buffering. 480 works fine with no buffering.

Web browsing

Websites with images are slower but you hardly notice it on forums/articles/Reddit. Just normal web browsing wouldn’t be the ire of needing unlimited data so this aspect is kind of mute.

Spotify & online radio

No issues, Spotify works fine on 1.5Mbps as does online radio streaming.

Netflix

SD works fine on 1.5Mbps but the higher definitions do not (1080p, 4k). SD Netflix is more suited to smaller screens (phones and tablets) otherwise it can be quite a throwback to the good old days.

Gaming

I can’t and wont test heaps of games but Open world games there was no issue (Arma 3) for the FPS CSGO it worked fine although it was pushing it to the limit. If you use Australian servers you 1.5Mbps in theory is fine for Multiplayer gaming.

From my experiences doing the tests 1.5Mbps is actually alright to do a wide range of online activities. Whilst you prefer more, 3 Mbps would be excellent the whole Unlimited (throttled) mobile data is an excellent step forward and exciting to see how it progresses in the next 6 months.