Russian operator awards guy who used 500 Gigabytes in one week

As operators around the world look to curb people data usage by rolling out confusing pricing plans or just simply raising their rates, things are going a little bit differently in Russia. MegaFon, the third largest operator in Russia, recently held a contest whereby the person who could use the most amount of data would be awarded with a 150,000 ruble ($5,000) vacation overseas, the winner was someone who managed to pull 419 GB in a single week.

With some calculations, that is a constant download rate of 5.7 megabits per second. Not bad for a network that uses 21 Mbps HSPA+ technology, which is arguably inferior to anything offered in America, but on par with what is available in most of Europe. Some countries have 42 Mbps HSPA+ networks, but that technology is not widely deployed yet.