On: New York is installing its promised public gigabit...

[Nullabillity]

> But most phones have no way to mark a specific 4G network as "good roaming", cheaper than normal.

Actually, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. When I went to Denmark a couple of months ago my phone didn't consider it roaming, since I have a contract where I have the same prices there and at home.

[kuschku → Nullabillity]

Yes, so the network is marked as "equal to normal". Like O2 and eplus do.

But there’s no way to mark a network as better than normal.

For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue.

If you are on "NYC 4G", and go back to your own 4G network, there’s no way for Android to stop streaming that FLAC song, because it doesn’t know a way to tell that one 4G network is equivalent to WiFi, but another is not.

[mattlutze → kuschku]

> For example, if you connect to WiFi, Android will recognize it as a non-mobile network, and start doing updates, etc. If you start listening to a song via Play Music on WiFi, and then go out of range, it will automatically downgrade the quality, or stop playing and ask you if you want to continue.

Since the wi-fi radio is different from the cellular data radio in the phone, it's trivial to set different policies depending on which radio the phone is using. The settings to allow differentiation exist because we know implicitly that a wi-fi connection won't be draining your expensive data plan. The phone doesn't actually look at a connection's bandwidth/signal quality/etc to do this.

[kuschku → mattlutze]

Of course. And you can even use the software to tell it that a specific WiFi network is metered.

But you can’t tell it that a 4G network is unmetered.