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!
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.