As someone who comes from a country where monthly data caps for home internet are completely unheard of and it's standard to have internet with download speeds between 5 and 10 MB/s for roughly $20/month since circa 2006, I find it both puzzling and worrying that capped home broadband can still exist in any developed country, especially with such tiny limits and ridiculous prices that some of the posters here have mentioned.
A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single person household.
Comcast, and effectively all US broadband providers, are massively underprovisioned for the quantity of service they've sold, because that was a good way to make a lot of money and because, until very recently, it was quite difficult for residential customers to actually use enough bandwidth for the underprovisioning to pose an issue. Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made.
> Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made.
This sounds like a cynical take on their motives but is actually just buying into the narrative the ISPs have pushed that these caps are because the bits are limited and caps introduce fairness.
In actuality Comcast has outright said it's a business decision, not a technological one, and at&t said uverse had no need for caps unlike their old dsl network and then added them anyways.
It's rent seeking, plain and simple. The exact same way that the extra cable fees go up multiple times a year outside the advertised contract price and uncorrelated with inflation, government requirements or broadcast carriage fees.
And then they spin it as fairness for the heaviest users to pay more and justify it as only 1 in 20 people have to pay it anyways, so, hey, don't worry about it.
Notably, Comcast does not have bandwidth caps in markets where FIOS or other high speed providers have coverage. These caps are purely a way to capitalize on a monopoly position.
Unfortunately, there's still a time lag for this to take effect. I recently moved across town from somewhere where Comcast was my only option (and I had gigabit) to a neighborhood where I had the option between Comcast gigabit and another gigabit fiber provider. The latter had no data cap, free install, free gifted equipment, symmetric gigabit (as opposed to Comcast's 80 Mb/s upload), no contract, and was $25/month cheaper (with a lifetime price lock).
I called Comcast to complain and try and avoid paying the ETF (it was at $180 because I signed a 2 year contract) with some kind of benefit: remove my data cap, drop my rate, something. They wouldn't budge an inch. Told me I was already getting a promotional price from them and that the data cap (which I'd already hit 2 out of their 3 grace overages) was non-negotiable.
Switched to the alternative provider, and I can't be happier. Looking forward to Comcast dropping their rates and/or data cap, but I'm hoping that I never have to be their customer ever again.
Have you checked AT&T? I live in Santa Cruz (a small city) and was surprised to find that they wired my neighborhood for fiber last year. Price is competitive with Comcast and it’s been solid since I signed up a few months ago.
Just checked. Sadly, not available. I can have Comcast, Century Link (Century Link's maximum offering in my area is 1.5 Mbps), or satellite. I live 20 minutes outside of Minneapolis in the suburbs... If I lived 10 miles closer to the city I could have fiber. It's just a matter of time, but I hate having one choice.
Some years ago I used to drive regularly on new Hwy 10 to and from 35W (back then 610, I think) and I'd always see this massive Centurylink billboard advertising fiber, in maybe Mounds View, Fridley, Columbia Heights area. I had friends who lived around there with this awesome broadband connection. Meanwhile, best I could ever get from them a couple of miles away was maybe 25 (maaaaaybe 50) mbps DSL, and that would crap out constantly. For years and years. As far as I know, the area where I lived still isn't upgraded.
> During peak hours, U.S. actual
download speeds were 96% of what was advertised,
compared to Europe where consumers received only
74% of advertised download speeds. The U.S. also
fared better in terms of latency and packet loss.
That last stat is totally useless - I'd much rather get 75% of my the advertised speed on my unlimited 75Mbit/$20 connection than 100% of my capped 20Mbit/$40 connection.
The report you link to is unfortunately also woefully outdated, it's from 2014 using data from 2011.
My current Comcast cap is 1TB a month ($10 per 50GB over that).
I discovered when I had someone's son staying at my house that watching Netflix all day at maximum quality settings will burn through that in a little over 3 weeks. Approximately 3GB an hour is consumed.
The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality.
Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.
> Capped broadband is a new development in the US.
No, it's not. Published cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers, prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)
> The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps.
Let's not beat around the bush. The FCC as a whole is not doing this. Republicans, who form a majority of the FCC's voting body, are. Elections have consequences.
Comcast rolled out the 250GB cap in 2008. That's nearly half the time that cable internet has even been legal in the US, and the bulk of the time that broadband has been common.
> Capped broadband is a new development in the US.
Shirley you mean capped but unlimited broadband. At least the throttling will be unlimited. Maybe the caps will be unlimited too. And the excuses. And mysterious service outages.
Note also that data caps don't exist in many places in the US either. For example, Comcast has no data caps here in Maryland. Verizon will only start bugging you if you hit 10TB+ several months in a row.
Competition between telcos is the answer.
In many developed countries the Telco wars/market capture happened long long ago. In most cases there were just one or two winners, who then had no great incentive to upgrade infra. In the markets were the wars are ongoing, low rates will last until some player wins.
I am on Comcast/Xfinity with a 400mb/s plan and yet I still have a 1TB cap. My household, between Steam, Blizzard, Netflix, others, can easily get close to that cap. If I surpass the cap, my costs go up exponentially.
Also, updates are not inconsequential. I've had it happen multiple times where my PS4 has between 2 and 5 update files that are each 5-15GB (sometimes as large as 20-30GB, but that's a rarity) queued up in the same day, and that can happen multiple times a month. Combine that with some 4K streaming, and the 1TB data cap Comcast has in my area looks tiny.
Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full.
I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that.
I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
I hate that companies have no concept of storage optimization anymore - sure, higher-res textures take up more space, but there’s literally no excuse for Battlefield 1 taking up 70GB of my PS4 storage. Plus the PS4 does weird stuff with updates, so I need to leave ~100GB of my 2TB drive free at any time so that it can figure out what to do with those massive update files before deleting the unneeded files...
I have found that forcing the PS4 to use CloudFlare’s DNS speeds up downloads by an order of magnitude, though, which is nice - updates that used to take an hour or more now downloads in <10 minutes.
Let’s be generous and say 1hr of 4K streaming is 10GB, so you can stream 100hrs of 4K content in a month with a 1TB cap - that’s reasonable, assuming everyone in the household watches the same show at the same time. But what if I want to watch Blade Runner 2049 while my wife watches Queer Eye, both in 4K? We’re suddenly looking at 50-60GB of our cap gone in one evening. And then what if a few games downloaded updates earlier on that day? Now we’re hovering around 100GB in a single day.
Sure, that’s an extreme example, and that’s not going to be every single day (Sony only pushes game updates on Tuesdays, for instance), but you can see how easy it would be for a two-person household to eat through 10% of our monthly bandwidth in a single day - and we don’t even have kids with their own devices consuming their own media!
Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is usually one terabyte. There’s a long list of them at https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps , the biggest offenders being AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Viasat (which, yes, is satellite Internet), and Comcast (a.k.a. XFINITY).
The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does not have data caps is because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for seven years when trying to buy other companies.
With AT&T Fiber - 1000Mbps up/down for $100/mo - you get unlimited data. The slower plans are capped at 1TB, but you can add unlimited for $30/mo (or pay exorbitant overages).
For wireless I'm hanging onto a grandfathered unlimited plan. It doesn't allow tethering though.
Yes, both Android and iOS respect carrier policies for this. There's a carrier-configuration bundle loaded from the carrier which can set a bunch of things, including the access point names (APNs) for data. The carrier can choose to set separate APNs for mobile data and tethered data, and can choose whether to lock those settings or make them user-editable.
If you root the phone, of course, you can just change the tethering APN to the data APN, but I don't believe current versions of either Android or iOS let users do it without rooting, if your carrier has marked it non-editable. An Apple support page notes that you "can only edit or view your APN on your iPhone and iPad if your carrier allows it": https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201699.
Just as a counterpoint to some of the people talking about how they use far more than a terabyte per month:
I work fully remotely, video chat often, have someone else in the house watching netflix a lot. I stream music while working. I download large software packages often. 1TB is plenty for me.
A terabyte is a reasonable cap I think. If you want more, you can pay for unlimited data as described in the parent post.
That’s great. You state you have two people in your household. Have a couple of kids and add several more devices that play games, download apps and updates, stream hours of video, and get to download ever increasing ads. I bet that 1 TB wouldn’t be very adequate anymore.
Or, just wait 5 more years. Those files you remotely access will be even bigger, your video chats use even more bandwidth as quality increases, and Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
They’re playing the long game here. They put these data caps in place realizing full well that 90% of people won’t hit them today but in 5-10 years when 90% of customers do hit the caps they’ll cry out about how the caps have been in place for years and were never an issue. You’re playing right into their hand.
Even the highest-bitrate 4K streaming takes 90hours/month.
If you have a family of screen-locked people never leaving home and constantly consuming more input that their senses can possibly absorb, maybe it's OK to pay a little more than 95-99% of households do?
Even if the per-person usage is normla or healthy, why should my sigle-person usage subsidize your 4-person usage?
> Or, just wait 5 more years.
When caps are higher? Comcat has been raising caps over time, from 300GB/month to 1TB/month so far.
> Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
Why would Netflix do that? It is epensive for them for 0 value for 95+% of consumers who have neiether the TVs nor the living rooms nor the eyes nor the content information to perceive 4K content.
Your 90 hours/month figure is only 3 hours/day. It doesn’t exactly take a ‘screen-locked’ household to consume 3 hours/day. I would imagine most households with any number of kids greater than 0 easily consume more than that.
Also, why would they continue to increase caps? For the first time in their history the cable companies are losing video subscribers like crazy and they’re losing them to over-the-top services. They’re going to keep datacaps right where they are and use them to recapture that lost revenue rather than actually attempt to fix the issues consumers have with bundled channels and linear programming.
You do bring an interesting point about having tiers. Currently there aren’t any tiers. There’s the ‘normal’ rate capped at 1 TB and it’s already pretty high IMHO without constantly fighting for an intro rate and then there’s the unlimited rate for nearly double. I just don’t think if you want to play the tiered game that your ‘normal’ rate should be capped at what an average household can be expected to routinely consume.
In the end it doesn’t matter what consumers want or are willing to pay for though because as we all know broadband is at best a duopoly for the vast majority of households so you just get what you get. And that’s whatever XFINITY (maybe they won’t realize it’s still the same shitty Comcast!) decides you get.
So the average hours of tv watched per person in the us is 4 or 5 depending on what study you go by.
I am just going to go off netflix's GB/hour figures. 3GB/hour for HD or 7GB/hour for 4k.
If you refuse to watch in 4k then you won't touch your cap because you are looking at 360-450gb/month.
However if you have bought a tv in the last few years it is likely a 4k tv because why not. Mine was a 55" smart tv for $350 about 2 years ago. Ive seen 4k tv's for under $200.
4k puts those numbers to 840-1050gb/month.
For 1 person. Now imagine a family that does not always watch the same thing.
1TB is designed to be a cap that is more than enough for anybody EXCEPT a cord cutter. If you decide to go with a streaming only tv plan kiss your bandwidth goodby.
A big thing you're missing is games. I've just looked at my Xbox One:
* Hitman 2 - 104GB
* Elder Scrolls Online - 103GB
* Halo 5 - 99GB
* Forza 7 - 99GB
* Destiny 2 - 89GB
* Quantum Break - 160GB (including episodes which you would otherwise have to stream)
And it's pulling 34GB in updates (two games: 27GB + 7GB) without me even knowing (without explicitly checking). A single game using 10% of my cap is not reasonable IMO.
Not sure if this is still the case but in some areas Comcast used to limit the cap to 100gb unless you bundled TV with your internet plan, then it went up to 1tb.
This is still the case in the Houston Tx area. I am paying 50 extra bucks to have "unlimited" internets because kids. We averaged 7 days before our 1TB was used each month.
That, and other resources tend to get compressed less as bandwidth and storage becomes cheaper overall. Less compression means less load on already underpowered console hardware and more importantly, less memory used, high end games tend to max out their IO and outright memory map things straight from the disk.
GTA V on last gen was notorious for reading off the optical disk and HDD simultaniously to spend less time moving things around in memory.
Disk failures are a major reason for performance degradation on consoles and why putting SSDs into consoles is a very good idea.
We recently started using XBox Gamepass which is a small monthly fee to get access to a fairly large variety of games (all digitally downloaded) and our bandwidth usage exploded b/c there's no extra charge to pull down 5 games that maybe looked interesting but that you would never pay full price for.
The HDD bloat really stuck out to me when I looked at the upcoming WoW Classic Requirements - the current game requires 70 GB of space, but Classic requires 5GB. All games, even old ones trying to stay modern, require a huge amount of space.
I've been thinking about this, then it dawned on me that the current live game has everything in WoW classic, and then everything in every expansion after it. The amount of video and high resolution textures in the current version of the game dwarf the original.
Happens in hardware too: the way Sony made the PS2 compatible with the previous PS ("PS 1") was simply to place an entire first ten playstation on a corner of the PCB. Cheaper and more compatible than writing an emulation mode.
The emulation there was actually a happy accident -- the MIPS processor of the original PlayStation was repurposed as the sound chip for the PS2. Sony realized during development that they could take advantage of the hardware for backwards compatibility for minimal cost.
The PS3 (Emotion Engine) and Nintendo DS (GBA cart slot) are the only consoles I'm aware of that have hardware only for backwards compatibility (although some games used the cart slot for pseudo-peripherals, such as rumble support or a guitar "grip").
The GBA is another example: native games run on a 32-bit ARM processor, but it also includes a Z80 for backwards compatibility with older Game Boy models.
IIRC, the 3DS puts itself into a DS hardware mode when playing those games. It even has a GBA hardware mode, although Nintendo only used this for the "Ambassador" games they gave to early adopters of the console.
I have about 150 games downloaded to my primary console. Not all of them are that big, but a good number of them are huge. Looking at my firewall logs, it's pulled down 400GB in the last 30 days. I've only installed one new game in that time. Updates for huge games can also be huge.
Also, things other than my Xbox Ones use bandwidth. They are just the largest single consumer of it.
We have 7 people in the house and I can breakdown the usage like this:
Mac sync between 5 machines (this was surprising to me)
Instagram/social(I thought YouTube would be 2nd place)
YouTube
Netflix
I can’t imagine many people use Viasat to watch Netflix when satellite TV exists. Satellite based ISPs are the only ones with a legitimate reason to impose data caps.
Surprised Wave Broadband isn't on the list. They didn't tell me about their cap, but were happy to charge hundreds in overages until I noticed the discrepancy.
edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach it, seems completely reasonable to me.
It’s not even remotely. It’s equivalent to 3 mbps. It’s not a technological limit. It’s only imposed to extract more money and discourage streaming. It sets the country back technologically. It also discourages content creators from jumping to 4K.
People don't buy home internet to max out their connection 100% of the time. It does not make sense for the capacity to be designed for 100% load from 100% of the customers 100% of the time, otherwise you'd price out most of your subscribers. Ergo, you're never going to get it unless you pay some pretty high rates. Even many datacenter connections are billed on some bandwidth percentile billing and not always max link speed as often connections are fairly bursty.
My fastest speed I've measured at my place (Oz) is 1gbps, but due to latency and jitter it's generally much worse. There's a large disconnect happening in tech, where infrastructure isn't keeping up in all countries with what the tech companies are providing. Ironically, ISPs here do sell unlimited plans.
If it were equivalent, you could take any random person's 100 or 200 or 400 mbps service that has a 1 TB per month cap and replace it with 3 mbps uncapped and they would not care.
As someone currently on 400 mbps plan with a 1 TB cap, I can assure you that I would care, and would strenuously object to any such replacement.
I don't have 400 mbps so that I can download more than I could when I had slower plans. I have 400 mbps so I don't have to wait as long for downloads to finish.
Not sure what you mean by "It’s equivalent to 3 mbps". Are you, like, streaming a video of an eagle nest 24/7?
You are paying for residential Internet service. The number of people who would legitimately need to transfer more than 1 TB per month over a residential Internet connection is vanishingly small. Bandwidth, particularly during high-demand hours, costs money. It is not fair for other users to subsidize your extreme usage scenario (since it is an axiom that all costs borne by the ISP are passed on to customers). It is far more fair that you, the extreme outlier, pays more.
The problem is that underprovisioning uses some statistical average that will fail on special situations. Content streaming is so common now that there are peak hours where almost everyone is streaming video. If ISPs need to have that use case in mind, it should be possible for them to sustain that demand 24/7. If they don't do that, it's for one of two reasons. Either they can't sustain peak demand and they are trying to disincentivize usage, or they can handle a heavy demand but want to charge extra for off-peak bandwitdh usage, thus earning money for an already amortized infrastructure.
I agree for a single person streaming 1080p and lower. However, the move to 4K and HDR are causing data consumption rates to rise to the point where 1TB isn't sustainable, especially if you have family sharing the same network and streaming at the same time. Here's how long you it takes to stream 1TB of video with Youtube's various resolutions/bitrates/framerates:
1080p streaming on other services will reach the 1TB cap much quicker. YouTube compression is much more intense than Netflix compression, depending on the show: Netflix picks optimal compression parameters based on the type of show or movie you're watching.
With my tendencies to watch a lot of video content, I myself easily hit over 1.5TB of data consumption each month. Luckily my ISP doesn't do any data caps so I don't have to worry.
Okay, make it 4 TB. My point is, ISPs imposing a cap is reasonable and a way to get the outliers to pay for more of the hardware/personnel required to service their extreme bandwidth requirements.
Why have a cap at all? It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.
The real world of data is generally billed at the 95th percentile of traffic consumption, usually with a commit to buy a certain amount of traffic. So you pay for a specific rate of data, the vendor provisions equipment to handle the agreed upon rate, and then you can do traffic at that rate forever. If you go over your rate, you talk to your vendor.
I don't know of any equipment whose natural operation is to handle a certain amount of traffic, then shut down until the next billing cycle comes around. Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things. They're not, it's just a money grab.
> It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.
I'm not sure that's even true. I'd expect power consumption as well as 'wear and tear' to be less, and possibly significantly so, at idle versus continuous use.
> Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
Some people will definitely test the limits of anything that's supposedly unlimited. I imagine you're partially correct but I suspect data caps are the most comprehensible product attribute for ISPs to limit the relevant costs.
> If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things.
I'd imagine that'd be an even harder sell than congestion pricing for motor vehicle traffic. It is mostly just a 'fact' of the world that almost everyone is going to want bandwidth at the same times. The costs of transitioning to any other arrangement are considerable. And Netflix is probably the player most able to adjust. I'm not sure if they still do, but they did at one time host a lot of their content in ISP data centers.
Wear and tear is generally not an issue with network equipment. You buy it, you run it until it depreciates or breaks or becomes too much trouble, you replace it. I've never heard an argument of "don't run that thing too hard, it'll shorten its life". (If you do hear this, it's usually a sign of inadequate cooling).
Data caps are a poor tool for handling congestion. They're a great tool for frightening people into keeping their load low(and costs for the provider down), or for sucking more money out of people. They don't do a damn thing for immediate load.
Me? I have Comcast business class -- they guarantee me a specific bit rate and I can nail it up at that rate all month long and they don't care. For folks not paying for this service class, Comcast has bandwidth reservation and all the anti-congestion tools they need, they just don't use them -- they get more money out of people's behavior towards data caps.
I think data caps might be the best business tool for ISPs offering services to consumers. After learning about how business Internet services are sold and priced, it's not so surprising that they're more 'rational'.
Those guaranteed rate agreements are tens of times more expensive than consumer internet connections. The whole reason why consumer internet connections are so much cheaper is that they're based on the premise that most people will have bursty behavior. (Download a 25MB facebook page at 400 mbps then idle.) For such usages, it's far better to let everyone achieve high burst rates sometimes, and then implement policies to discourage streaming at high rates all the time, then to limit everyone to the maximum guaranteed bandwidth the network can handle.
That's about 140 hours of 4K streaming. That's a lot for a single person, but not a lot for a family with multiple devices, especially if you throw in some 50 GB games in there.
I would say 5TB is reasonable. If a 4K movie is 100GB. then over 30 days is 3TB of usage. If 1 person per day watches a 4k movie and the household of ~1-5 people does other things as well, 5TB should be sufficient. I think that is a stretch and my gut says yeah, 1TB is good, but I already upload/download 10-20GB per day at work so 5TB seems more reasonable for an upper bound.
And assuming that the only thing that internet is used for is netflix then that's roughly then you're looking at 5780 minutes of video. (or, 50 movies, or 125~ episodes of your favourite netflix-length tv show)
I'm not sure if that's a lot or not, I suspect it's not, but I'm a heavy netflix user so I might be a shitty reference.
Having a cap thats equivalent to downloading say, 20 modern AAA games sounds reasonable to you? In the most technologically advanced and wealthy society in human history? In the nation that played perhaps the largest role in pioneering and establishing the Internet? Seriously?
Yes. Do you download a game every day or something?
Even if you do, you should bear your share of the more beefy infrastructure needed to support that, instead of expecting Joe who only uses the internet once a day to check his email to subsidize you.
It was a way to compare the size of that data. Either way, I’m paying for a speed, and the Internet companies can more than support that level of data in major cities. With the amount of subsidies this kind of infrastructure gets, it’s absolute bootlicking to defend a cap as low as 1TB.
Doesn't to me when they use our tax dollars to expand their infrastructure to the most profitable places then leave last mile loops to the customers to pay and constantly reneg on they're contractual agreements with zero repercussions.
On occasion, if you are an important enough customer, they'll give you peering for free - https://www.xfinity.com/peering . But they'd rather sell you Paid Peering (for obvious reasons)
Generally speaking ISPs don't pay anything for peering. (Unless they are smaller/local ISPs/WISPs or similar, who have to purchase backhaul or upstream to be able to offer service.)
The practical reason is that the people who use more data are exactly the people who are willing to pay more for internet service. Can't really fault a company for squeezing the customers that have proven themselves more dependent on internet service.
That's exactly my point. You'll pay out the ass because the service is that valuable to you and the alternatives -- using public internet, cellular, satellite, becoming your own ISP, paying another provider the build-out costs to run a line to your house, or just going without -- are worse.
I mean it sucks when a company has so much leverage over you because you need what they're selling but you're not entitled to cheap high speed internet. You would have a case if you had no means to get internet access at all but that really isn't the case here.
Like this thread is hilarious because a bunch of hackers whose lives are on the internet and are deriving probably thousands of dollars of value from their high speed internet connection are mad when ISPs realize this and charge more appropriately.
Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such).
The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple, and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services.
In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook googling" for Angolans.
It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things.
- edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil:
Mobile internet plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook, while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator (ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.
Yes, the costs are proportional to the bandwidth, but people want a fast connection at a low price, so ISP's sell a fast connection at a discount and limit how often you can use it through traffic shaping and/or data caps to still turn a profit on it. The business plans are often unlimited, and typically priced a multiple for what's the exact same technology as the home plans underneath. If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans.
I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.
If it was some sort of a natural law that shipping 1 byte cost $x on the margin, then the PSTN never would have survived the shift to unmetered long distance service. Somehow ISPs have been making big profits selling unmetered internet service during a period of hypergrowth. How is it possible that they didn't go broke during this process?
The real story here is that "power user" is a proxy for "cord cutter". If a residential user downloads 1TB per month, then they're a thoroughgoing "over the top" video consumer. The traffic patterns are different for streamers vs. pirates, but it's still people watching TV and not paying cableco for the privilege.
They're just doing price discrimination, rolling out bandwidth caps with punitive fees for violations, and waiting for the 4K frog to boil. Roll it forward, and you're back in the world of all you can eat at a higher price point. Cablecos don't really have to care how you split your bill between internet and video, as long as ARPU stays in the $70-$100 range. "Dumb pipes" are higher margin than cable channels, and don't need contract renegotiations with steely-eyed squeezers like Disney.
Let DIS roll their price increases out directly to consumers with their streaming channels, while you just sitting there running a toll road. It's like a regulated natural monopoly, without the burden of appropriate regulation. This is a nice business.
> If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans.
The premium there is for uptime guarantees, better service, and a certain amount of legislative corruption (without which no discussion of telco/cableco practices would be complete). They are allowed to discriminate between commercial & residential customers, and refuse residential service to commercial addresses.
The ISP needs to build infrastructure to support peak instantaneous load. If the current network is at 50% capacity and I turn on Netflix there's basically no cost to the ISP, even if I've already used my 1TB of data for the month. If they are at 95% capacity then things start to matter a lot more.
If the ISPs were interested in fair pricing, they should offer pricing like the power companies these days, charging more during the day/evening and less during the night when less people are generating traffic. You should be throttled during the afternoon when everyone else is on or pay for the "fast lane".
But they don't operate like that, because $, making them the bad guys.
I assumed the extra cost was not because of the unrestricted bandwidth (Granted I have Xfinity in Chicago and only pay $15 a month for unlimited on Gigabit)but because of the static IP(s) associated with the service. In addition I would assume that trouble calls are elevated over that of a home user with quicker response times.
Just looking at Biz service vs home and assuming that's because of unlimited bandwidth is 1:1, there's more going on there that's different between the two.
Until a few years ago the cost to get additional IP addresses on most business ISPs was pretty minimal. The ISP my company uses does not even charge for additional IP addresses, you just need to give good reasons for why you need a larger IP space. With a previous ISP, additional IP addresses were about $10/mo but the cost of service was easily 3-4x similar rated speeds as a residential connection. Most of the additional cost is due to increased capacity planning and faster service times.
You can get gigabit fiber throughout Asia and Europe for as low as $20 a month with no cap. There is no "discount" for fast connections in the US. The ISP cartel price gouges the whole country and because of their regional monopolies have no incentive to invest in actually having the provisioning to support the speeds they advertise.
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data
Bandwidth is strongly correlated to total transmitted data, as the amount of time in a day isn’t changing any time soon. It may be reasonable to offer some kind of off-peak pricing for customers that can time-shift their internet needs, but the complexity is apparently not worth the benefits.
In particular, if the usage over time of a high-data customer generally looks like a scaled version of the same chart as a low-data customer, there won’t be much effective difference in the two models, and consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.
> Consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.
"Data used between the hours of 11pm and 9am do not count against your data cap." Not difficult to understand, cell phone companies used to do it all the time with minutes.
(Times made up, adjust for real-world peek.)
Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
>Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago).
The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition.
It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.
They help demand management because if they're set low enough, people can't use the highway 5 times a day, they have to limit their usage to just once a day, or maybe a few times a week.
In Australia the bandwidth caps used to be specifically set up with a different peak and off-peak cap to help with this even more.
In the UK most ISPs will instead perform traffic shaping where they will slow down your connection during peak times after a certain small amount of data transfer. This still seems to be disliked by consumers just the same.
Yes. Everyone still needs to go to work at the same time so the resources are still going to be used at the same time. It's charging extra for standard expected usage that the ISPs have known exists for years. If this were really an issue there wouldn't be so much dark fiber in the US hooked into copper cable local loops.
If we had a competitive market in either place, it would be interesting to see what consumers choose. I think I would prefer the traffic shaped example, since the current tiering situation appears to have _both_ limits in the fine print with Comcast.
If there weren't municipal companies with better service, faster speeds, no caps, all for cheaper, then I might agree. But these companies are greedy, and they keep crying wolf while increasing their profits.
WRT. home example, what if it's a router? I'd very much expect the router to use less power idling than when handling 1gbps - especially that routers tend to look into packets, which is computation, which uses power. Also, if the router does does mode change (e.g. Ethernet on one side, fiber on the other), I'd expect more power usage still when busy.
Indeed there is. ISPs don't run a non-oversubscribed network. If they did your bill would be much higher. The costs are in building cables, maintaining cables, buying and maintaining local pop network equipment, building and maintaining whatever backbone they run, installing and maintaining network equipment in network meeting rooms where they connect with transit providers, etc...
I think the suggestion is more along the lines of you buy a set bandwidth with a certain contention ratio (or ratios) and then the ISP lets you contend for the bandwidth as you like.
Having a bandwidth cap is basically the ISP punishing you for contending too often.
That said, assuming the ISP wants to keep an average speed higher than the minimum their contention ratio would offer, people who download a lot would have a greater impact on that, and could therefore cause the ISP to have to invest in more hardware and back-haul.
The counter is that the ISP isn't upgrading their network anyway, they're just juicing the market by charging some people more.
I agree with what I think you are stating implicitly that bandwidth caps a blunt instrument. ISPs don't really have a lot of nobs to turn without setting off the network neutrality crowd. I wish there were more QoS nobs that could be turned to allow for lower latency and traffic prioritization as that would probably have some interesting applications.
Most ISPs are constantly upgrading parts of their network. Earlier this spring AT&T came through my complex and installed fiber in every apartment. Average broadband speeds have increased significantly over the last decade, and for that to have happened significant network upgrades would have to have taken place.
I don't think this directly impacts a cost per unit of data transferred, as the poster was wondering. I agree that maintaining the network and ensuring it can meet capacity is a cost that the ISP passes on to their customers, but I would point out that this is why people pay a monthly subscription to their ISP.
To my mind the question would be "if an ISP has network with a fixed capacity, do their monthly operating costs differ between a month where they consistently utilize 50% of that capacity compared to another month where they utilize 80%?"
I suspect the cost to the ISP is the same in either case: they have purchased the equipment and bandwidth to support the network and those costs are fixed, regardless of how much of that bandwidth they are actually using. If that is true, this idea that there is only so much data per month to go around and if you use more then your neighbor then you should be charged more money would be fundamentally dishonest.
Consumer ISPs are effectively bandwidth resellers: they buy in bulk at wholesale rates, split it up, and sell retail quantities to individuals. Wholesale bandwidth is generally billed based on the peak transfer rate during the billing period, and not a fixed price.(1) You also can’t assume a fixed network capacity- ISPs will buy enough equipment to maintain service to their customers instead of having brownouts. This capex cost is directly caused by higher aggregate usage from new and existing customers, so it makes sense to charge them by usage as well.
(1) This is overly simplistic; these are individually-negotiated B2B contracts, so details vary widely.
I would think that would mostly apply to DSL ISPs that are just using a telcos infrastructure. I suppose AT&T Fiber may be charged by AT&Ts backbone for traffic transiting their network or something like that. The major ISPs AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc... are building their own networks at least in part.
Yes, the truly big backbone ISPs aren’t generally paying for interconnection to the others. Instead, they have the capital expenses of maintaining and extending that backbone to handle growing internet traffic in general. If they don’t keep up with demand, they’ll lose customers and potentially their settlement free agreements with the other backbone providers.
Where I live there are no competitors for the one cable internet ISP (DSL is not available and satellite is n competitive). As such they have not need to worry about losing customers to _competitors_.
Based on this article, I suspect that ISPs like Comcast and Charter are not extending their backbone to handle growing internet traffic. It seems they are charging exorbitant fees to discourage increased usage instead (in this article, the subscriber canceled their Hulu account and lowered the resolution of video supplied by Netflix).
Having only one ISP locally is typically either caused by market size or local regulation. Comcast does offer a national backbone and sells transit, cdn and other similar services through a subsidiary called Comcast Technology Solutions. The backbone at a national level has definitely received upgrades and they are advertising multiple terabits of capacity. Of course upgrading the transit network does not help if your local link is saturated, which is a problem in some areas.
If there is truly demand for unmetered internet someone will step in and fill the void. Some ISPs also use total transfer as a way to discriminate between business internet and residential internet.
Those are both consumer ISPs, and thus not subject to the same market pressure as I described for Tier 1 ISPs (without naming them as such). Similarly, consumer divisions of Tier 1 ISPs are driven more by local market forces than anything else.
I don't understand how this answers the question "Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?". This all sounds like maintenance and they'd have that if I use 1GB or 1TB.
If every customer can use 1TB, it is more likely that many customers will be using more bandwidth at the same time, therefore requiring more infrastructure to ensure their connections still provide their advertised bandwidth
I don't see how that would affect anything. If we assume that most people consume the most data in the evenings (streaming Netflix, etc), no matter the cap, you would see issues if bandwidth was an issue. If I'm downloading ISOs of Linux during the day at 100% everyday while people are at work, big deal, right? But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use.
> But, if everyone is streaming at the same time, if there was going to be an issue, it would happen if caps existed or not because at some point during the month you're going to have nearly all your customers with data to use.
It's a giant bucket of 'it depends'. If the CDN network serving the content has placed hardware within the ISPs network, it's likely a non-issue. This was a major issue before folks like Netflix started moving their CDNs closer to the customer. You might have a hard time finding the articles, but I recommend looking at the pissing match Level 3 and Verizon got into years back.
>it would happen if caps existed or not
I'm not convinced. You are essentially arguing that scarcity of a resource has no affect on consumption.
The way I've seen this handled in the UK (a while ago, but I think some ISPs still do it) is to have caps at certain times (either by having a limit or throttling bulk P2P downloads), but then allow unlimited downloads at other times, especially overnight
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
Data caps allow ISPs to run oversubscribed networks, which are very profitable. If you're streaming 24/7, then that bandwidth isn't available to sell to your neighbor. In that sense, cost is indeed directly related to amount of data transferred.
I remember someone writing a proxy that ran over Facebook, maybe it was specifically chat, in response to that. However, I am not able to find it right now.
edit: I found it here[0].
> The idea of this project is to tunnel Internet traffic through Facebook chat (packets are sent as base64), the main component is tuntap and also the Google's Gumbo parser which does the interaction with Facebook (login, send/receive messages, etc.).
I really hate that there's some whiny wiki editor complaining that those Angolans are exploiting their fundamentally exploitative zero system. I'm all for it, good on them.
It is not exploitative at all to give people access to wikipedia (or even facebook) without giving them general internet access.
I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
> But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free
One of the (many) criticisms of Nestle is that they went to 3rd-world countries and gave new mothers free supplies of bottled formula. Then after the mothers switched to formula and stopped lactating, they took away the free milk offer and forced them to pay out the nose for a life-essential product that their bodies would have otherwise produced naturally.
Just like with Nestle, giving away limited Internet that can only access Facebook/Wikipedia has the effect of forcing those services to become critical architecture. It denies nations the autonomy to decide how their own networks should be run, and puts them at a massive disadvantage when competing on those networks or building their own services.
In exchange for giving away access to their product (and only their product) for free, Facebook gets a monopoly-level stranglehold on how information is transmitted across those regions -- and that's not just bad for the Internet as a whole, it's bad for the countries and their citizens.
Have heard the worst things about Nestle, and that baby formula fact does not seem surprising.
I agree it could be on the national interest of a country to forbid nestle formula given like that (or, for that matter, basic internet given by facebook). Also, the nestle case seems more clearly exploitative to me, because they meant to deprive women of something by giving them the formula.
Facebook has no other reason to supply them with their zero service other than to get valuable data out of them. Unless FB is the most well disguised charitable organization ever
> Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
If the data is coming from outside the ISPs network, it might be on a paid connection. Although I think it's less popular today, it was common for paid connections to be billed based on the physical capacity as well as the amount of transfer (95th percentile billing used to be ubiquitous).
Within the ISPs network, or on unpaid connections, the marginal cost per byte is discontinuous: most of the time it's so low it's probably hard to measure, but when you hit the capacity of a link, the cost can be high to increase capacity.
An ISP, especially a residential ISP is not expected to have capacity for all its users to transit data across the internet at the full speed of the last mile connections at all time. There is oversubscription, and it's ok and reasonable. To the extent that someone is using a residential connection at full speed all day every day, that's not really reasonable, and they should be in a different account type. However, ISPs play a large part in this: they should make this more clear, their data caps should be sized to bandwidth, they should offer transfer rate capping in case of overage, and the overage fees should be more reasonable.
>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred?
I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings).
Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet.
If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.
>Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such).
the more data you have to transfer the more bandwidth you need to have available to be able to offer some desired throughput to your customers
There is some cost to transfer between ISPs or to higher tier ISPs, though generally that cost is negligible. They always pay for accepting traffic and generally they have agreements that only the difference between out-in is paid. At my current host, the peering cost of data is about 5€/TB outgoing transfer, though recently they removed this altogether and cover it from other profits.
The real world cost of a TB of data is basically the cost of the energy moving it, which is increasingly cheap.
Since no one answered your question even remotely, no there is no cost to the ISP related to the amount of data transferred. It's basically how much pipe do you want, not how much water are you going to flow. So at the ISP I worked at we'd buy a fiber connection from say sprint, and it would be 10 gig speed. There were no costs involved with how much we transferred. 0 bytes or hit that line 100% saturation 24x7, costs the same.
What are you talking about, basically every tier 1 carrier is going to charge you based on usage. Usually per average mbps or gbps with a minimum commit (so you'd buy, say, a 100G link with a 10G commit, then you pay $x per gbps using 95th percentile[1] with a minimum of 10gbps).
The only exception is if you peer and have a bilateral agreement, in which case you pay nothing anyway.
If the ISP you worked at used other ISPs (tier 2 or 3) as upstreams then yeah, you get the same service as business class internet (flat rate for a capped link speed) but once you're one of the big boys it's absolutely metered and charged by usage.
Since infrastructure is the same initial cost to everyone; I would guess that electricity is the main cost. Driving continuous max bandwidth should require more energy and thus cost more.
I say this without knowing too much about it; but I do know the cable line is separate from the power line... so the cable company needs to drive the bits through the coaxial with their own electricity, correct?
A long, sustain, high bitrate seems like that would use more, no?
In all fairness AWS will charge you something like $90 for 1TB of traffic per month. I am all for cheap unlimited data plans but I can see why an ISP would create tiers of service and charge a premium to multi-terabyte users (and why non multi-terabyte users shouldn't pay for multi-terabyte users).
It's not a good comparision, AWS charges this to lock AWS users into their ecosystem. It's free from the internet into AWS and extremely expensive out to the internet. This is of course by design to make sure you can't have some services outside AWS.
I think if it becomes a common problem for most of the USA, it could finally push the monopoly conversation to the forefront. People being frustrated with charges for a service that should have been next to free is what broke up Bell Systems.
I don't know about Facebook, but I use vk.com to share video files (~100 GiB/month) with a friend who only has access to a mobile plan with 10 GiB data per month and unlimited data to a few social networks.
I put a directory into a multi-volume .7z archive (sliced into 200 MiB chunks, their per-file limit), upload the chunks through their API (solving a simple captcha every 5-10 GiB), and that's it.
I believe I've read about people in Philippines (?) using Facebook for sharing files using a similar process.
The problem with this article is that it implies that the only use for high use of data transfer is to binge watch or consume various forms of media. Data caps don't kill that and never will.
What data caps kill are peer to peer services, self hosting, and anything where people actually participate in the internet rather than acting as consumers only. It's part of the ongoing push to make the internet into another television where people all use the same centralized services and never interact with each other directly.
Phone usage has made this even worse since smartphone network connectivity is not real internet connectivity. There people have learned to accept data caps (which make sense given the limited actual frequency bandwidth available for radio in free space). But also they've learned to accept the inability to host servers, use ports, or do anything other than HTTP/S. The ISPs have seen this and are now copying the violations that wireless telcos have brought in.
> data caps (which make sense given the limited actual frequency bandwidth available for radio in free space)
Time -- or better, demand-- based rates would make a lot more sense than caps for that purpose.
If you note most cellular data caps ignore the providers own services or various partners (like youtube). I'm not saying that the cellular rate structure has nothing to do with the limitations of the last mile physical medium, but it would be an error to assume it has too much to do with it either.
Why host a server at a home, with the security catastrophe that invites ot your local network, instead of running your peer node on a rented machine in a cloud or a colo, that you SSH into from your client?
To learn how to deal with the security catastrophe that is hosting your own stuff. Just putting your things on other people's servers doesn't necessarily make it secure.
Well, because I consume most of my media at home, so I’d much rather store it there instead of having to stream it from the internet. But I also like listening to my music when I’m out of the house, so I need a way to connect to my home when I’m on a different network.
This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_ at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how much data they will allow to be delivered.
Thus the situation in this article: they subscriber purchases a 4K television and chooses a higher bandwidth cable internet plan. They do not realize that they are only paying to use the same fixed amount of data up more quickly.
I wonder if we'll eventually see companies like Netflix and Disney pressure cable companies to drop these bandwidth caps. In this article the subscriber cancels their Hulu account and turns down the Netflix video quality, directly costing Hulu money and devaluing their 4K television.
This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_ at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how much data they will allow to be delivered.
To be more precise, they stress download speed. Comcast’s 1Tb plan has upload speeds of 30Mbps
In fairness, few people really need high upload speeds, which is why most plans are as asymmetrical as they are.
One exception may be content creators, who quickly become aware of this fact once they try uploading their first YouTube video.
In any case, although Comcast (and others) may advertise / stress download speeds, that information is really easy to look up for anyone who is interested [0], and is probably shown somewhere along the checkout path.
I've noticed some combinations of mobile plans and high speeds from the towers are particularly bad. I've seen plans where you could drain your entire month's quota in under a minute of sustained use at the supposed maximum. I imagine that as the high speed becomes more popular the caps will go up, but as it's building out I've seen some silly things. Even full-speed 4G can theoretically drain a full gigabyte in under four minutes (quick Google shows companies promising up to 5MB/s in some cases), so it can theoretically drain a lot of people's full months in under an hour. Though I'm not sure if the network will actually let you do that continuously, if for no other reason than I'm sure they got tired of calls from people complaining about some app using up their full month's quote in five minutes when they didn't even know the app was running, etc.
Look, paying for 'speed' and data usage isn't that weird.
Your speed tier determines how much of the shared bandwidth you're allowed to consume at any given moment.
Your data tier determines how much total data you're allowed to transfer.
These numbers become related at the edges but in the middle can be picked somewhat independently. Very few people need 24/7 full-tilt internet so it makes sense to buy more point-in-time bandwidth while keeping your data tier low.
I still don't get why the government gave free money to companies to invest in their assets. Even in a universe where they spent in on what they were supposed to, the extra profit they would have made from it would have been free money. Can I have some free money from the government?
> I still don't get why the government gave free money to companies to invest in their assets.
Because the sponsors of the bills and authors of the clauses used to work for the same ISPs and were functionally writing blank checks of taxpayer money to their old employers and present campaign donors.
Its why the FCC is almost wholly staffed by board members or C level management of big telecom.
Also capacity is only limited due to ISPs not spending BILLIONS OF DOLLARS THE GOVERNMENT has already given them to update our infrastructure. Trash companies
Higher transfer rate, but since most plans are "unlimited" they're talking about charging for the total size of data transferred (on top of charging you more if you want it to happen faster)
I'm working from home and have Swedish provider Bahnhof. Since I pull a lot of backups and use 4k TV in often at 100TB (Terrabyte). Not a single complaint and 40$/mo
You download 800MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for $40 per month? Color me incredulous.
Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a $40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.
There's far too much variance to have a European standard. I vaguely recall seeing bandwidth-capped plans in the country I'm living in now last time I was shopping for internet plans, but I'll have to check again.
That 20 Mbit/s driving across remote areas probably wouldn't even hold true for Switzerland.
But yes, overall I'd say the US definitely has worse home internet infrastructure (though it's unfortunately still not as bad as some other developed countries).
From my experience in Switzerland a lot of times holds true for me(in city however I can achieve a lot more then Mbit/s)
But for sure it depends on location, but for now in the remote areas I have been there it worked like a charm.
But recently in a relatively big city in US, i was at measly 5 Mbit/s.
However I am sure there are as always areas with low or maybe even nonexistent coverage in any case in any country. But the percentage of that can cover widely practically speaking.
You can also drive across other remote parts of Norway and find yourself limited to EDGE. I am not sure why you're making it sound like Norway has functional 4G/LTE all over, which is not the case.
>Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.
Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries.
- Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people.
- Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people.
- The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people.
Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population
>It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.
The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.
And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile.
Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak.
Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.
The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.
You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"
Bahnhof also build their own infrastructure using their signed up customers and hosting clients money. AFAIK, internet providers in the us don't and can't invest like this to improve speed and lower cost.
In the UK my ISP (which has excellent service but a small customer base, so it has actual quotas, not a faux "unlimited" service with some hidden usage policies) charges £45 pcm for the cheapest 200GB quota and £55 pcm for 2TB quota. So that means 1.8TB of quota comes to £10 pcm end user cost (ie that has their profit and taxes baked in). Maybe much less difference than you realised.
Just how long have you been with A&A? Usage policies aren't so hidden these days. You can easily find the link to the 1-2 page PDF on traffic management. If an ISP advertises unlimited, the usually mean it. I mean, of course, Virgin might have 29 unplanned maintenance events and "faults" over the course of a month, which might interrupt unlimited downloading
How much does unmetered 10Gbps of back-end network transit cost?
In the US at scale I think it would be around $5,000/month. That gives you peak capacity of 3PB but you can’t expect anything like perfect utilization.
With a bit of hand-waving I would guess your provider’s transit cost is on the order of $3-5/TB/month...
Even if EU geography brings this down to $1/TB/month, they are losing money on you. I seriously doubt it’s going to be on the order of $0.10/TB/month for transit.
That’s why most of my comment was regarding commercial transit costs.
AWS is what bandwidth costs look like when it’s a profit center.
I would certainly expect residential lines, with the extreme overhead of operating the service, to be priced closer to AWS rates than to baseline commercial transit rates.
A couple of petabytes in a month? A 1Gbit connection does about 75 Terabytes a week so unless you have a truly exceptional connection, that seems excessive
I used to live in Texas, my experience with Comcast was a daily nightmare compared to Sweden where I had 100/100 for around $30 a few years ago. My provider in Sweden recently started advertising 10000/10000 for around $50 per month, no cap :)
I currently live in Germany where the internet is a bit worse but still much better compared to the US. I get 500/100 here with no cap for $40 per month.
How do you go about getting them? I can't find a site that sells UK internet under the name bahnhof. There is a swedish site that doesn't accept UK addresses and an english site that is selling data center orientated stuff.
This is the type of world I want to live in, and it is entirely possible and doable here in the US. We just need to get our politicians on board, which is easier said than done.
Not only possible but fast too. I was amazed how fast South Africa went from 4mbps adsl to fibre with gigabit available. Not throughout of course but still...was surprised how fast things move if there is a sense of competition.
Indeed, most large CDNs will ship you, for free, hardware to install at your ISP PoP in order to reduce both theirs and your bandwidth costs. Google does it, Akamai does it, Netflix does it. Assuming a decent cache hit ratio, this drastically reduces bandwidth on expensive, percentile-billed Tier 1 upstreams that most ISPs still depend on - especially in the US, where truly neutral internet exchange points are rare.
Interestingly, the 1TB cap is exactly what ISPs use to plan for and calculate their percentile-billed upstream commitments, as a 1TB cap corresponds to a sustained 3Mbps usage.
This is what the whole net neutrality debate was about. If ISPs cap data for small video sites, but not Netflix, that results in a massive advantage to Netflix (and, presumably, other large incumbents).
What T-mobile did for Binge On is allow any legal video service to sign on and be zero rated. They didn’t advertise it, but they even allowed some porn sites.
There was a poster on HN who said that his little small non profit was able to fill out a form and be zero rated.
I want a no cap connection and I want a fast (200mbps+) connection but I’m also perfectly happy to accept that I can’t have (don’t want to pay the price of) a connection that allows me to use 200mbps 24/7 for a year.
That’s why I’m thinking there should be some kind of tiering where I get unlimited 50 mbps (still ok for round the clock 4K) and also N terabytes at the 200mbps for those occasional big downloads.
My current broadband is 500mbit without data caps, but I suspect that if I do use 500mbit 24/7 for long then they’d start throttling of contacting me. I’d be happier with a model with public caps than one with secret caps and throttling. It could be that I really do have a true 500mbit no-cap subscription, I don’t know!
Internet is sort of naturally capped and throttled for almost all residential users. You already can't easily download something at 500 mbit, servers do not stay underutilized and may not have enough bandwidth for your speed, and servers from more than a couple of hops away won't even be able to serve you at that speed over a single tcp connection, so you have to look at things like torrents. Then home routers, they suck too and might struggle with this speed, wifi most definitely is out of question. You also need to store all that data somewhere and at that speed you will run out of storage pretty quickly. ISPs are aware of all this and can bravely offer you speeds you will not be able to use beyond speed testing. They even expect new customers to go crazy with downloads in first months of broadband usage and eventually drop their usage to normal levels. Keep in mind, something like 10 mbit 24/7 usually costs them very little to even care and I think these days 50 mbits is at that level too, they are unlikely to mind if 1 out of 1000 users uses 50 mbits 24/7.
How common is it to have data cap on cable internet? I lived in a few countries in the last 10 years and have never experienced it. Is US the exception here or other countries also have such limits?
Data caps are common when there is little to no competition and ISPs feel like they can get away with it. Rare when there is competition. Even on mobile where they physically have very limited bandwidth, but when there is enough competition they can't get away charging for it and resort to things like sms warnings, throttling, fair use policies.
I live and work from home in suburban Atlanta and data caps are everywhere for the last 8 years. The options are the monopoly Cable provider (Comcast), DSL not fiber, and cellular Internet. My home has poor cell reception. When Comcast implemented the 350 GB cap, I would routinely flirt with it. Had to change my online backup habits and more. Now it is 1 TB, which is more manageable.
Also in the Atlanta area, in an area fortunate to be serviced by AT&T Fiber & Comcast's high-speed option. AT&T offers unlimited* data plans on their highest-speed plans, or as an option on other plans:
I’m in Atlanta. Before I moved from Dekalb I had AT&T fiber symmetrical gigabit and ran 1.5 TB some months without a charge. AT&T hasn’t built out fiber where I live now but I have a Comcast 1 gigabit connection. They offer up to 2 gigabit but it expensive. Cap is 1TB but you can go over for 2 months without being charged.
I think there is always a cap in name, mine is like 1000GB per month. Though I never hit that limit anyway, so not experiencing it as well.
"Called the "Xfinity Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan," the cap restricts the amount of data you consume in your home to 1TB per month regardless of the speed of your plan. Comcast claims 99 percent of customers use less than 1TB per month, but it does now offer an unlimited option for $50 more per month"
I have Comcast and used to pay the $50 a month for unlimited. It brought my bill $123 for internet. We don't have tv service with them. I switched to their business account that doesn't have caps and my bill dropped to $99 a month. But my download speed went from 150 to 75. But my upload went from 5 to 15. Download was never a problem but the better upload is nice.
Comcast introduced the terabyte limit a few years ago. Luckily I have RCN in my area and was immediately able to switch when they started trying to charge me.
We still have data caps in Belgium. One of the most popular ISP has lower tier internet subscriptions which have a 150GB and 200GB data cap per month.
Even though most are "unlimited" nowadays, they're still under a fair usage policy which means that if you download too much (usually 1TB+), you will get a call to explain why you download so much or you'll have your internet speed reduced.
Most major ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Brighthouse) have a data cap in the United States, however I rarely hear of them enforcing them. They're usually 1TB with another tier for truly unlimited.
I listen to 80 something podcasts, most of which are weekly if not daily, and watch 2-3 hours of YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on Weekdays and probably 20 hours on the weekend and never come close to hitting the cap.
I've been charged multiple times by Comcast for going over. Apple TV 4K with Netflix blows through it in about two weeks with two adults that work full time and rarely stream at most a few hours a day.
Are you running any crypto seeds, torrenting, gaming, have an unsecured network, etc?
According to this article https://www.androidcentral.com/how-much-data-does-streaming-... Netflix 4k is 7.2gb an hour, if you have a 1TB Comcast cap and they're counting that as 1000gb you should be fine for at east 130 hours (giving an allowance for phone/app/os updates and random browsing).
> Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance.
I've got a 55" 4K at a viewing distance of maybe 6', tops, if you're leaning waaaaay back on the couch, and can only barely tell the difference. A good 1080p source (high bitrate h264 or h265, or a normal ol' 1080p bluray) looks a hell of a lot better than Netflix's 4k. HDR matters a ton more than 4k itself does, as far as how good something looks.
[EDIT] and what really matters is having semi-decent speakers in a somewhat-OK 5.1 layout, with a proper receiver. I'd drop to 720p on the picture before I'd give that up.
Not sure how that is relevant to my comment, but the 2017 nominal median income per capita was $31,786 in the United States. That means even a $650 television is more than a week's gross pay for as much as 40% of the US population.
Most of us are quite content with even 720p too and just because something is 'under $1000' doesn't mean you need to replace a perfectly functional television.
The average person spends something like 35 hours a week watching TV and the average household spent $285 per month on media last year. Not spending a large amount of your income on a nice TV is kind of insane given that.
That doesn’t sound right. Two hours a day, 14 days, two adults (watching separately) is 56 hours of 4K streaming. Netflix 4K streaming is 3.5 to 7 GB per hour. So worst case for two weeks is 392GB. Now over a month, with a little extra watching on weekends, I can see how you’d blow past the cap.
Thats been my experience as well but cheap phone plans do have very limited data some only 5 to 10gb. I've seen multiple people blow all of it in less than a week on Netflix alone.
I live in a major Canadian city it’s still somewhat common to see, though usually more for budget brands. Packages usually are capped at 200 GB and the next tier will be unlimited.
I’d say the shift to more unlimited offerings happened about 5 years ago.
On a consumer, not high-tier plan? It's a standard in close to every country. Where is that not the case? (I assume cable here as "any non mobile" rather than actual cable tv internet provider)
You can find a non-capped (at least in theory) plan everywhere if you pay enough of course.
I cannot find a single capped broadband package here in Ireland (only mobile or satellite has a cap). I've also travelled throughout the EU and have not encountered anyone with a broadband data cap. You can get consumer 1 gbps for 25-55€/month in many towns in Ireland, at that point there's hardly any need for differentiating between high and low tier.
It is actually unlimited? Several companies in the United States offer "unlimited data" but throttle speeds after you use 50 GB~ so much that it is basically unusable.
Unlimited has to be unlimited by law. After 10gb of usage a day, you need to text a number (for free) to get a few more gb, and so on. That's just there to prevent flooding the network too much.
From what I have heard it depends on the mobile provider. Some have daily limit around 10+ GB. But that seems quite reasonable.
I have monthly 10GB 4G for my phone and I have never hit it.
I've heard stories after a screw up the mobile provider gave unlimited 4G for a year and the guy used it as his internet at his home.
a cap on speed translates to a data cap per month. could you give an example of say your speed cap?
lets say a month is 30 days, a day 24 hours, an hour 3600 seconds, then a month is 2.592 Ms.
so an "unlimited" plan at say
1Gbps is actually always upper limited at 2592 Tb (bit) per month or 324 TB (byte) per month
I think governments should ban the "unlimited" names and force the ISP's to simply state actual limits or variable limit calculations if dependent on congestion. Here in belgium we have instead some vague "reasonable usage" policy...
Hopefully the pain will force voters to vote to make internet a utility, or cause home prices in areas with symmetric fiber connections to have higher values causing more homeowners to put more pressure on politicians.
The question was specifically "Would people be happy with" which also assumes that they would be happy with a reframing, but they are, in fact, not happy with that price at all.
Reframing or not, it doesn't matter. With zero choice, they could frame it as "you'll pay us $1000/mo and you'll stop complaining or it'll be $1500" and people would still buy it because the alternative isn't a competitor... it's no Internet service at all.
They don't bother wording it nicer because they don't have to. There's no competition.
I'm upset about this because I used to pay the $80/month for unlimited with the only provider in the area. Then, I got an email saying my $80 would only cover up to 1TB and using unlimited would cost me $50 more. I called them and asked about it and got lines like "you still have the same internet plan as long as you don't use as much". It's frustrating to have no options and the price of your service nearly double overnight with customer service agents who, because it's their job, regularly tell you to go fuck yourself.
I'm at least upset about it because few come close to how noncompetitive US ISP markets are, the FCC is totally complicit and run by board members of big telecos that want to operate an ISP cartel with regional monopolies, and no where else in the world is a physical line network connection metered because metering it makes no sense - the cost is in maintaining the lines and having the infrastructure to support peak throughput. Having people running their gigabit connection all night long seeding torrents doesn't impact the bottom line of the ISP at all, whereas everyone using a gigabit at the same hour ever evening does.
Because the pricing model isn't reflective of the real costs associated with the business its blatantly price gouging and exploitative and they can only get away with it because they have no competition because they bought out politicians to guarantee it so. Its a systemic disaster dumpster-fire mess than private citizens can't do jack about besides move to the ~2% of the country with competitive or public ISPs.
For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.
Unlimited internet has been a welcome respite from the inconsistent and unfair pricing of mobile data plans. Seeing that change without an explanation feels wrong.
I can imagine ISPs responding with "Here's your explanation: our infrastructure isn't built out to have everyone downloading 1TB/mo and if you want that you need to pay for it"
To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.
So I'm personally upset over this because it's a nickel-and-diming false choice between paying even more than our already-overpriced bills, or watching your quality of service decrease because a greedy company decided not to keep up with an eminently reasonable change in standards of quality.
>For me it's not a framing issue. I get upset by that sentence the minute the total receipt goes above $80/mo.
So are you upset by the fact you can't get unlimited internet for a reasonable price, or that the ISP advertised $80 month and you had to pay $130? If it's the latter than it's purely a framing issue.
>To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.
That seems entirely orthogonal to having bandwidth caps. To the company and society as a whole, having crappy service and gouging 90% of the users for $100/month and 10% of your users for $150/month is the same as having crappy service and gouging all of your users for $105/month. If anything the first option is "fairer" because users that use the service less pay less.
In this case I'm entirely upset by the former, and will leave the discussion of potentially inappropriate marketing tactics for another day.
You're right that bandwidth caps aren't my main complaint about ISPs, but overall displeasure with internet service is relevant to the bandwidth cap discussion because bandwidth caps are a feature that contributes to that displeasure.
Fairly or not, I blame ISPs for taking us from "A world where everyone pays $50/mo" to "A world where everyone pays $80/mo". Now they're trying to turn that world into a world where you have the choice between $100/mo and $150/mo. There's a fairness question to be discussed (I personally think it's not unreasonable to have society-wide, fast, affordable, unlimited internet be the default) but there's also a value decrease there that deserves just as much attention as the fairness question. That decrease (and not the fairness issue) is where my frustration is directed.
Maybe in a market with real competitors. But like others have said, what usually happens is people with existing unlimited plans lose them overnight to ISP's with a monopoly in their area. Then, ISP's charge $50 more per month for them to get the service they already had.
The problem is your neighbourhood soccer moms have no idea what 1TB is, they just see that ISP1 costs $80 and ISP2 costs $130. You'd need all the ISPs to switch to this "discount" scheme all at once, which won't happen.
Basically every service provider in every industry uses the same "extra fees" model over "discount". From mobility networks to drycleaners to restaurants. Customers just aren't used to seeing things the other way around, and will immediately balk at the sight of higher initial prices.
I would be okay with that if the $50 discount were automatic, for any month where you stay under 1 TB.
Instead, you pay $80/month, plus a $200 penalty for each additional terabyte. You have to prepay $50/month to avoid the risk of a penalty. Comcast would rather make a bunch of money selling insurance, than put a fair price on data.
We have a 4k tv and watch quite a bit of Netflix/YouTube/NowTv. Our usage has been around ~ 450 GB/month, which apparently puts us on the 93 percentile of usage though not sure if this is for our plan (100 Mbit) or all of Virgin Media (our cable provider)
> In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed at least 1 terabyte of data
How? I have a 4K TV (and a couple of 1080), I work from home, my wife streams all day, and my torrents are always seeding, and have a gigabit line (with unlimited data).
I only average about 500GB a month, and my peak was 772GB.
I guess the only thing I don't do on a regular basis is play games.
Don't get me wrong, the caps are just rent seeking and also totally unfair (how come watching Comcast on Demand doesn't count against the cap but Netflix does, even though both come from servers on Comcast's network?), but it blows my mind that people can actually hit that 1TB cap.
I had an interesting time when I lived with 3 roommates and we got a gigabit connection (this was ~5 years ago, it was a big deal). We hit 3TB/month consistently and interestingly enough, it was about 80% going to consoles. We'd play a lot of Destiny and matchmaking would always make us "host" (because we had the beefy connection)... turns out a surprising amount of data gets pushed through your connection when you're hosting 16 player games for hours a day, on three consoles.
Sounds like you're not actually watching in 4k. A 4k video could be around 7-11GB/hour [1], so 10+ movies and binge several shows and you've over the 1TB easy. Sounds like a lot for a one person, but with a family it's easy to chew up 100+hrs in a month
Yes, of course not, because no one has that much 4k content. I guess that was sort of implied in my comment. Even with a 4k TV it's pretty hard to find enough 4k content to blow out that cap.
I don't really get why this is so controversial? I mean, all of the HN crowd here must understand the idea of oversubscription, and many of us have also seen prices for dedicated 1 Gb/s connection in data centers?
Am I missing something here? Am I overestimating the costs of bandwidth, does the Netflix/CDN edge serves inside of the ISP network lower it dramatically?
This is hardly the only possible response to oversubscription, just the one that maximizes short term profits. The customer certainly isn't funding better internet (if it did the government subsidies would have worked), and they certainly aren't getting the advertised service.
So yea, you could frame this in terms of rationality, but since when was rationality the sole basis of ethics, and since when have ethics become irrelevant to human life?
Dedicated gigabit in a datacenter can be pretty low cost, easily $200 per month or even lower. Local caching servers can reduce bandwidth tenfold. A typical residential fiber infrastructure built in the last decade has planned capacity for decades into the future, there cannot possibly be a congestion on that level yet.
It’s obviously way more complex than that, though. The ISP isn’t going to make sure that all of their peering links have enough bandwidth to carry the full advertised bandwidth of all of their customers connections simultaneously, in case everyone tries to download at full speed from the same website at once. On their end, the bandwidth is under provisioned. Data caps are a way of managing that that give customers higher peak speeds in exchange for limited data transfer.
Here in Vancouver BC Canada, we do have data caps but it appears to have been only $10 CAD ($7 US) to upgrade to unlimited for that month. Hence, it's not a massive issue other than in principle to some.
Currently there are two companies, Shaw (cable) and Telus (fibre to the home), and some smaller ISPs that use either Shaw cables or Telus DSL.
Internet pricing here tends to look like $20-35 CAD per month on the low end up to about $110 for a high end fibre symmetrical connection, with most plans coming in around $50-75 if you play the "bounce from ISP to ISP every few months" game. Data cap costs appear to look reasonable on most plans and you can get them without caps.
> Cable executives prefer not to call them caps, referring instead to “data plans” and saying it’s a matter of fairness. People who use more bandwidth should pay more, they say, especially since capacity isn’t unlimited
If any internet provider or cell provider offered reasonable pay per GB data rates without an unreasonable minimum monthly usage charge, I would be all over it. Google Phi is probably by far the closest thing I've ever seen, but Comcast & Verizon are absolutely not willing to let me pay only for what I use, so it's very funny to hear rationalizing quotes about "fairness".
Ran a business connection at home, and still on that account, it's about 50% more for the coverage but no caps and much more responsive when I've needed on-site service. Of course I'd like to save the extra ~$50/month for 1gig down, 80mb up vs the 200/20 I have now. But the static/unblocked IP and the better service level make it necessary for when I'm working at home.
For comparison, about $140/month with fees for 200/20 business, where consumer gigabit/80 is about $90/month iirc. Business gigabit is like $300/mo (f that).
Maybe this is not the case for Comcast but Netflix deploys edge servers into the data centers of ISP to cache content local to the client. So this should make the data on-net and keeping it inside the ISP's pipes. if this is the case, why would overages be factored in with this traffic? Greed ... count all traffic as traffic on-net and off ?
I have no problem with a data cap. But any and all services received from that provider (i.e. television service) should have to count towards that cap.
Problem is the lack of real competition. Capping usage so it hits only X% is reasonable but then not if you already you pay $100 a month. Still, back to point one, only competition can sort this out and is lacking. Even if they raised prices to $150 after a few years, they'd raise them more.
On the other hand, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple etc have shifted everything online so they are saving on distribution.
It's on a forty something inch tv we generally watch netflix and maybe because we don't watch terrestrial tv at all any more, we don't notice the lower quality.
As long as I don't have buffering I'm happy.
Anyway we live in a rural area and get our internet by wireless so beggars can't be choosers!
Network congestion is a real thing. If everyone else in my neighborhood is streaming Netflix in 4k, it's going to reduce my connection's performance. Why shouldn't the cable company charge them more for that? If we all pay the same, I'm subsidizing them.
Because if there are that many people in your neighborhood who can stream Netflix in 4K, the ISP can lay fiber in a densely populated area making a metric shit ton of money for the foreseeable future, and the pipes will not be clogged. They can easily fit everyone in their fiber infrastructure.
The ISP isn't losing money from offering fiber to New Yorkers. They lose money by paying for infrastructure in less populated areas in middle America. They're trying to make up for that by making urban customers effectively subsidize the Capex the company needs to spend elsewhere
This is a problem in the US and not elsewhere because it's a massive country with people spread all over
Don’t put the burden on your neighbors, put in on your ISP to upgrade their infrastructure. You all agreed to a level of service, time for your ISP to live up to it.
A monthly bandwidth limit corresponds to a lower average bandwidth. For instance, if my calculations aren't wrong, a monthly limit of 1TB corresponds to an average bandwidth limit of around 400KB/s, even if your link should be capable of much more than that.
I know that its probably a cliche at this point but stories like this give me the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe physical media will make a strong comeback.
Maybe they are doing him a favor. Maybe he shouldn't be spending all of his time binge watching Netflix and perhaps he has a much larger problem ('why') that he should address instead.
Here in Canada there was a huge problem with data caps when Netflix launched. Since then they've loosened a bit, but even now, most low-to-mid broadband internet packages have caps under 200GB.
I have no issue with this. Unfortunately people have failed to recognize that pricing methods used by ISPs aren't related to the cost of providing some amount of data, but provided to cover their entire business + profit, divided out amongst the customer base.
The only thing data caps do is ensure that heavy users pay more. The alternative to them, is that Comcast would just raise all customers' bills even more.
In an ideal situation, we'd have pure metered data usage, and pay by the MB, similar to how we pay for electricity or natural gas usage. Then people who barely use it would pay drastically less, and yes, the heaviest users would pay even more.
An awful fact of life in pseudo-capitalist America: if a corporate entity can charge you more, they will (and it does NOT matter whether it aligns to traditional supply-and-demand models or not)...And in the case of internet service (in the U.S.), consumers can not exercise their market ability to move to an alternative provider. In America, on paper it states "market capitalism"...but - at least for internet service - in reality, it is nothing more than an awful form of the not-nice parts of communism. We lack choice in our markets. </vent>
These corporations work very hard at regulatory capture and lobbying to keep the "pseudo" firmly in place and the capitalism to a minimum.
The ironic part is that local governments usually end up repairing the distortions in the market and externalized costs caused by these monopolies via social programs. The whole thing ends up more socialist with an added layer of inefficiency and graft than just working out a socialist solution up front.
These plans are already overpriced. Charging more for the same thing is fleecing, and an indicator of a sick monopolized market. Hopefully once low orbit satellite plans will kick off for real, crooks like Comcast and the like won't be able to do it anymore.
Hot take: I watch almost no HD video, and I practically don't download anything. Why should I have to pay the same money than someone who spends all day streaming 4K Netflix from 5 screens?
"Just buy a lower speed" is not feasible since ISPs keep pushing the lower speed that you can get higher and higher. Overselling. If all you get is fibre, here the minimum is usually 100 Mbps, which I evidently don't need. Same about data caps in mobile connections.
Because that's how flat rates work: Everyone pairs the same price for the same product and the losses due to bad actors or power users are caught by the majority of users who don't use the product that much.
My comment was my obtuse way of pointing out that companies will therefore always have the excuse of "some users are using the system heavily" for pushing up prices.
OFCOM and the ASA banned the use of the word "unlimited" to describe broadband plans with a usage cap, which pretty much killed caps overnight. More recently, they banned "up to" speed claims - the advertised speed must be representative of the actual speed of the majority of users during peak hours. Broadband providers must also offer a guaranteed minimum speed, with the right to cancel the contract without penalty if that speed cannot be achieved.
Especially if you're paying for one of the better services, like Andrews and Arnold etc. They have caps listed on their broadband pages. There have been regular stories where customers have been sent letters about their bandwidth usage even though they're on 'unlimited' plans. The ISPs generally refer to clauses in ToS, which (imho) doesn't mean anything can be 'unlimited'.
I was at Uni around ten years ago (actually it's more like 12, getting old!), I remember we had Sky Broadband (in a flat full of IT students) and seriously abused it. They never complained.
I don't think you use a lot of bandwith, seeing as you never had a complaint.
I had a complaint from plusnet that I was in the top 1% of downloaders. I complained back that there will always be a top 1% of downloaders even when you get rid of them as that's how percentages work.
You may be unaware of bandwidth throttling that takes place with a lot of ISPs after you have used a certain amount in a month. One example, up until recently, is virgin media [0]
Not everywhere. I always thought data caps were mostly in place in areas with ISP monopoly, but I'm moving to an area where Comcast is the only viable option, and they don't have any cap.
Maybe it's in populated areas where the infrastructure is not that great. It's hard to really grasp the logic since they claim that 98% of their customers never hit the cap. So what's the point?
To keep someone from reselling their bandwidth for commercial purposes. Like running lots of servers or starting up a wireless Internet provider and using the residential connection as back-haul/peering.
There’s no such thing as unlimited anything. If you use more, you pay more. If you find this notion ridiculous, imagine for a moment that a company offered unlimited gasoline for your car, or if your rental property advertised an unlimited number of occupants per bedroom. That’s bananas!
As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap. Isn’t that sort of existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by this quantity of video content.
I think your argument is valid but there are other valid arguments too.
I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.
I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for 20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays, and he only uses about 100 metres of it.
None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.
Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay-per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.
Were these examples of other situations where people are forced to pay an unfair amount for services they don't need meant as a rebuttal? Because it seems to me that you're supporting maxaf's argument.
The objectionable parts of data caps are the arbitrary hard cutoffs and massively inflated overage fees. It's crazy that the second TB/month may cost 10x the standard monthly rate with a 1TB cap, especially since most ISPs don't provide any easy way to track or limit the amount used. It should be more linear. Really the bill should have two parts: a small fixed connection fee based on the provisioned peak bandwidth to cover last-mile equipment costs and basic unmetered, contention-free connectivity at perhaps 500kbps, and a charge for data transferred above that limit proportional to the product of data size and priority/weight. Priorities should be set on the CPE side of the link using the DSCP field according to whatever policies the subscriber chooses, with "unmetered" (weight=0) as the default classification for automated background traffic and low-priority/bulk (weight=1) as the default for anything initiated by the user.[1] Higher priority traffic would carry a higher weight in the bandwidth allocation when the link is under contention but would also cost more per MB. For example, if there are 100 subscribers using only bulk traffic and 50 subscribers using only priority-2 traffic on a 1Gbps shared link the available bandwidth (925Mbps after the reservation for "unmetered") would be divided into 200 shares (100 + 2x50) with bulk traffic getting one share (4.6Mbps) per subscriber and priority traffic getting two shares (9.3Mbps). Put another way, 1MB of priority-2 traffic costs twice as much as 1MB of bulk traffic but is delivered in half the time. Of course other priorities/weights are possible, including fractions.
[1] This part would require better interfaces for classifying traffic at the source, since almost everything looks like opaque TLS traffic to the router these days. The router has no concept of whether a human being is waiting for a given transfer to complete, or how much the subscriber (who may not be the end user) is willing to spend to speed up the process. I'd imagine an algorithm based on target speeds and a monthly budget could work reasonably well as an approximation, though, combined with some basic source- and destination-based rules.
The poor sap and you don't pay the same amount. Fuel taxes, which are levied as a percentage of what you spend on fuel, will be different for you and the poor sap who drives less. The more you drive, the more you pay in fuel tax, which (ostensibly) goes towards road maintenance.
If we wanted a pay to play model, fuel tax is a great idea. But based on the breakdown of my city's funding, basically none of the roads are paid for by it.
The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount. It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund the road?
This is actually a surprisingly terrible way to sell Internet, and it's amazing to me that so many people still argue that this is how it should be.
If you don't use the Internet much you should pay less for Internet, but you shouldn't be artificially restricted in how fast the Internet works! Throttling is terrible, and the fact that people literally wait for an hour for a Windows update to download because they have cheaper Internet is... kinda dystopian.
We should push ISPs to provide all customers the fastest possible speed their network can do at the time, instead of artificially throttling them, and then charge them for usage.
> As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap
If he's sticking with UHD content on Netflix then 4-5 hours average per day per account per month would reach Comcast's 1TB monthly data cap.[1]
If there are multiple users on his account (e.g. him and his kids) then you're talking just 1-2 hours of Netflix streaming per person per day per month. The UHD subscription package for Netflix allows streaming on up to four devices simultaneously.
>If there are multiple users on his account (e.g. him and his kids) then you're talking just 1-2 hours of Netflix streaming per person per day per month.
How much TV does the average person watch? Around 4 hours daily. If you only watch Netflix then it's easy to get 1-2 hours a day. That's only 2 shows a day.
Imagine if your rental property advertised a fixed number of occupants but also a "step cap", charging extra for steps inside the property exceeding 100,000 per month.
Buy a car in the UK now have these special loans where it's not a lease, not a purchase but somewhere in the middle. You buy the car but you can't drive it more than X miles a year. And after a few years you have to pay a lump sum to have the car or give it back. So it's kind of like that.
I'm pretty sure that Tesla offered unlimited free use of their Supercharger network to some of their early buyers.
The natural limit on an ISP is the speed of your connection times 247 usage. The unnatural but obvious second limit is the actual speed of your connection times 247 usage.
Since I own my house, I can have as many people in it as I want, subject to the laws of physics. (My local fire marshal may or may not have something to say about that; I haven't checked.)
A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single person household.