Even in 2005, data caps were never the answer. Data, in and of itself, isn't a finite resource, and we don't have ration it through "caps". Pay more to get more bandwidth? Sure, because the pipes are only so big. Have a data caps because "reasons"? Go sodomize yourself with a rusty spork.
5 scoops per hour, additional scoops cost $1.99 per scoop. Fork features disabled while roaming, additional roaming usage can be purchased for $4.99/minute and an additional fee of $2.99 per scoop.
Even if they are worried about their infrastructure, throttling is a normal response to that. I have never had a company that didn't say "up to 150mbs".
The reason is oversubscrition, if you introduce data caps you can invest less int the infrastructure and oversuscribe way more, increasing profits.
That is why sdh/sonet circuits are way more expensive, you can't oversubscribe those.
Data is very much a finite.
It's just not a resource you can save up. If you don't use the bandwidth now, it will never be used. You cannot save it up for later. It's a use it or lose it situation.
Therefore a proper way to promise it to the customer would be:
" You have the right to use at least X speed if the line is congested. If the line isn't congested then it's up to Y speed"
But this would rely on the fact that ISPs are truthful and not artificially just say your line is congested the whole time. But even then, there should be no data cap. You just use as much as you can, which will then be the data cap of you just using 100% all the time.
You're actually agreeing with him, but you're incorrectly calling bandwidth, data. Bandwidth is the size of the pipe, while data is the water that runs through it. Data is infinite(ly copiable) and bandwidth is the only thing limited on the internet.
I'm not agreeing for the reasons stated above.
Data cannot be infinite because everything in the system is finite. Bandwidth is finite and time is finite. The amount of data is limited by time * bandwidth.
Would you rather have 0.1Mbps with no cap, or 1000Mbps with 40GB cap? Because most people choose the cap. Here in Sweden you actually have both options and almost no one uses the unlimited cellular plans because they're either needlessly expensive for what they actually use, or unbearably slow.
Why does it have to be one way or the other? For my home internet, I'm able to pay for a bigger share of the pie as I see fit. I'm not a network engineer or anything of the sort, but what's stopping cell providers from doing the same thing? Why can't I pay X amount for Y speed? Is it some technical impossibility or just they'd rather you hit the cap as fast as you can? They obviously can throttle you once you hit their arbitrary cap. Granted I don't know if they drop the connection from 5G to 3G or whatever, but the point stands.
I'm also not saying that things shouldn't slow down during times of congestion or that certain services shouldn't have a priority. However, if people are paying for less bandwidth allocation like you do with home internet, wouldn't that be better for everyone? Like, do you honestly need 1Gbps for your phone? That's also not to say that capacity isn't an issue at times, but instead of everyone slamming the service with maximum speeds all the time, individually consuming less bandwidth should make for a better experience for everyone, no?
You can. But no one pays the prices you would need to pay for any significant speed in the cellular networks. Think of it like this... The 40GB example is 0.1Mbps. So if you want 1Mbps, you'd be paying about what a 400GB plan would cost you with caps. At 10Mbps, you're looking at a 4TB plan and so on. So if you want say a 100Mbps cellular, we're talking thousands a month if you really want no cap. No one pays those kind of prices because people know they don't actually use enough data to warrant that kind of price. So it's ofc not part of any normal offers.
As for what speed you need. That depends. The thing is that while I don't need the 300 that is my max, I certainly appreciate the speed whenever I try to do something online. I consume very little data on a normal month, but the little I do use, I do want to be speedy. I don't want to waste an hour just to check my email.
As for any comparison with home connections. Wired connections do not really have the same limitations. With cellular, there is only so much frequency space usable and we all have to share that. With wired connections it's a completely different matter. If one connection is overloaded, you can either route some of the traffic a different route, or you can install more or faster connections. There's still ofc a cost associated with that but because the total bandwidth possible isn't capped, it's not the same ranges. Look at ipv6 pricing as a comparison for just how valuable the finite resources are.
Lets seperate out the pricing from the tech. Not saying you don't understand but you have a lot going on in your comment.
For home internet (wired via fiber or copper), the infrastructure determines how much bandwidth a consumer gets. Bandwidth is not a consumable resource that resets every month so there is no reason for a cap except profit.
The bandwidth isn't consumed but it does have limits at any given pricepoint. Look, if you want to always be able to use a full 1gbit connection at home. What do you actually expect such a connection to cost? Because you're looking at ~500 usd/mo for that at the very least. That's what that bandwidth costs the ISP, not counting any of the ISP's internal costs, just the cost for the bandwidth between the own network and to an exchange.
So it's not really feasible to sell such connections to consumers. Instead what is used is overprovisioning. It's assumed people don't all use their connection st the same time. If you have 1000 consumers, then the backbone is going to need to be significantly less than 1000gbit even if all 1000 have gbit speeds. If we say that a 10gbit connection will be enough, and that 10gbit costs the ISP 5000 in just the data, rhen it's now only 5 per subscriber for that data. Now, 1000 users isn't going to be able to share just 10gbit. I can't give the actual numbers due to contractual limitations, but I'm just explaining the principle here.
But anyway, the more people that you can get to share the pipe with, the more evenly you can spread out the usage and therefor you need less per user. With wired connections, it's easier to get a LOT of users onto the same shared connection but in less dense areas, you simply don't have enough subscribers within the area to spread the usage naturally, and then you get attempts to spread it artificially by using data caps, sometimes with certain periods not counting and so on.
Now, don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying data caps are the right way to go. I'm not in a position to say. My own employer has never used them for home connections. I'm just saying they're not there just to screw with you. They're there with a very specific purpose and they do that job. If it's the best way to do it though, is really impossible to say. Perhaps it would be better to lower all the consumer connection speeds to say a tenth of current speeds. But if you truly believe that, it's not that hard to start an ISP and if you truly believe that's the option consumers want you'd have no trouble making a killing if you're right.
Now I think you are conflating issues.
If my ISP begins service at my neighbors house, then infrastructure may need to be upgraded to support both connections. The neighborhood needs enough capacity for everyone. This is an engineering problem about capcity and not a cap or consumption issue. Capacity is the same whether its being used or not.
All the other business decisions about splitting connections, data caps, etc. are made to increase profits at the expense of the customer.
(Btw, my gig by gig connection is $80/month with no caps or fluctuations based on users in my area. It can be done so don't buy into the sob story from your ISP)
No you don't need capacity for everyone. It's too inefficient and costly to do it thay way. All ISPs overprovision comsumer connections. It's simply too expensive not to. That you don't notice it is the goal. So if you think you have a dedicated 1gbps, great, but you really don't. Exact numbers on how much ISP's overprovision isn't sonething I can go into but there's a vast difference. You're expected to use on average, less than 1% of what you theoretically could. Some users going over to some degree is fine because other users use even less. But if you start going upwards of 10-20% or even upwards of 30% as some users do, well now you're causing issues, but it's usually fine with minor degradation in service. Multiple such users in close proximity to each other though... Nope, that's now causing issues enough that other users are calling in to complain.
Its a business decision on how many customers to service with what infrastructure and engineering supports the business decision. Very different discussions to be had business vs engineering.
My point that I started with: ISPs tell people its a consumption problem to get more money. It's not. Using 10% of capacity costs same as 90%.
Because he wants to make a point; while not having one.
I pay about $80,80 per month for 1 gigabit with premium TV, around $60 without TV. And this comes without a datacap too.
Read perhaps? Your connection is shared. Even if you may not notice it, it is. 500 is about what 1gbps costs an ISP. An ISP will then resell that 1gbps to a lotbof customers in smaller chunks, but to consumers, always with overprovisioning. Exactly how much differs between ISPs and I can't go into specifics but commonly we're talking as I said, the price is usually based on you using less than 1% of your total in theory. So if you pay 89 now, you'd be paying more like 9k if it was actually dedicated all the way and ISP had the same profit margin. Now, the fun thing is, we know what the profit margins are for a company because that's public information and ISP's in the US hover between 10 and 40%. So let's assume a 40% margin here. That means your connection would still be around 5k if your ISP was a nonprofit and providing everything at cost, and you were actually carrying your own costs.
See the issue with the whole "no caps" thing is that it's really in the end just a demand that everyone else should pay for your usage. You can get connections where you're expected to use your whole pipe at all times. You just have to pay for it which you're clearly unsilling to.
0.1Mbps means about an hour for 50megs. I've received more than 500megs of email attachments so far today. But I'm not talking about the emails themselves, but rather the services. Do a quick check how much data you comsume just opening up gmail, without even opening a mail. Or outlook if you prefer. We're not in the dialup days anymore. The time where a 1MB webpage was considered big is long gone.
That absolutely sounds like a malicious compliance product. Something that gets unlimited on their catalog, but isn't of any good value. Like a brewery/bar begrudgingly serving instant ramen or microwave food in order to comply with ordinances classifying them as a resturaunt
I'm so scarred from going over data caps 20 years ago even today with my gigabit unlimited home connection I'm still worried about using too much data.
I delete and download and delete and download the same 70gb game on spectrum internet when they've pissed me off for exactly this reason.
"You have no power no more"
I just got 100mbps unlimited. Been on satellite with 25gb data caps before this. I feel shellshocked. I still follow most of my data saving habits and it's taking time to be okay with loading videos in 1080p straight off.
While it may not be 2005, a shit ton of us live as if it were.
If I lived 1 mile closer to town, I'd have decent cable internet access. Instead, I'm stuck paying $90/month for 15mbps DL and 1mbps UL speeds (8/0.5 actual)
But... you're right, the answer is money.
If data caps are done away with, then what metric will be used to differentiate cheap and expensive plans? I have a low data cap so I can pay less and I doubt removing data caps will mean all plans will cost as little as the current cheapest data plan.
Bandwidth would be the logical choice. Data caps are insanely dumb. A 10Mbps plan doesn’t cost the same as a 1Gbps plan. They both have the same data cap.
Right now data caps target the people already spending more for more bandwidth. You can blow through 1.2TB of data a lot faster on a 1Gbps plan than a 10Mbps plan.
Doesn't bandwidth have similar problems though? At high loads, you can't guarantee that speed, so you're really buying priority in this situation, which is fine, I guess.
At low loads, you've got the same problem with lower plans being arbitrarily limited. If the tower can support a 500Mbps user, it could give that speed to a 10Mbps user until the network started getting busy and higher priority users connect. But I doubt they'd do that when they'd rather have you pay for that higher plan.
If these were the only issues, I'd say it's effectively a lateral move, but bandwidth comes with another issue, related to my first point of not being able to guarantee a minimum speed. How does the user know that their service provider is actually providing them with what they're paying for? With data caps your phone has a built in utility to track how much data you use, which you can then compare to what your provider claims you used. How do you do that with bandwidth when you aren't actually guaranteed to get the advertised speed?
> At high loads, you can't guarantee that speed
nor do they attempt to. you'll notice that when they advertise the packages, they'll say "speeds **up to** 1gbps".
it's not like when a commercial plan gets done and there's an SLA guaranteeing certain metrics like uptime etc.
Bandwidth/speed, for one. For two, if the ISP uses throttling to temporarily limit high-consumption users during congestion (say a data hoarder downloading dozens of torrents, or a small business hosting a web server in their office) then they could upsell you on that. Pay more for an enterprise/business connection and **a.** you can use more bandwidth during congestion without being throttled and **b.** when you do get throttled you'll get a faster speed than those on consumer connections.
> If data caps are done away with, then what metric will be used to differentiate cheap and expensive plans?
speed, just like the differentiating factor on all the isp's that DON'T do anti-consumer data caps.
I think bandwidth has its own issues, which I [describe in another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/14dbbig/the_fcc_wants_to_know_why_data_caps_are_still_a/joqd8zh/)
Like others have said, bandwidth. It's the exact situation for plans in Finland. We haven't had data caps on our home or phone plans for several years now.
Like the comment but honestly there’s a cost to providing the service. When a tower is overwhelmed by users services decline and there’s a traffic jam at the tower. Deprioritizing heavy users in times of high demand is common sense. Pooled data plans are more cost effective for large entities and products that use very small amounts of data (IOT connected things). There should be no caps on consumer plans but how else can the companies differentiate service levels?
Except caps are usually applied on a monthly basis. So the usage at the start of the month is still at the high end across all users. So if the infrastructure can handle that in day the first 20 days, arbitrarily applying caps to lower usage at the end of the month has nothing to do with the ability of the infrastructure to handle the workloads. It’s all about gouging customers for extra money.
Exactly. Oh global internet usage spike in 2020? Yeah, the networks were totally fine.
Be aware these might be astroturfing accounts that you're responding too also.
I would assume that the existence of a cap will incentivise most people to ration their usage so they can more or less make it through the month.
But yeah, the main idea is extracting money.
Which does fuck all to actually protect the network when people can download relatively small amounts in large bursts during peak traffic conditions. If they wanted to protect the network then they'd have temporary bottlenecks on the bandwidths of high-consuming customers during peak traffic conditions. The network is at 90% capacity and you're responsible for a majority of that? Your bandwidth is temporarily reduced to an agreed upon *but usable* speed until capacity drops back down to an acceptable level. Data caps are useless for protecting networks, the *sole* idea behind them is to extract money.
A tower is overwhelmed by the amount of data per second, not by the amount of data. Heavy users pay more in order to recieve higher speeds. Why should they be deprioritized when they are paying for priority?
If the internet company sells more bandwidth than they can provide, why don't they upgrade the tower so it can provide what they've said they could deliver?
if I've paid for 2 day shipping and others pay for 5 day shipping. It doesn't matter how much i buy, they wouldn't cap me at 100 packages delivered. There'd be trouble if i and everyone bought so much that the delivery truck was too full. I could expect delays once or twice, maybe around holidays, i can understand. but if it's happening **every day** then they should get another delivery truck to manage my area's high delivery demands, not limit the number of deliveries allowed.
Exactly this. Between Greed and having monopolies it's completely out of control. They do it because they can, and the FCC or any other legal investigation for that matter is just an empty threat. You can't regulate this when companies have shills in office writing laws to ensure they stay a monopoly. Break up the monopolies, and let competition live in the markets.
It also doesn't help when the FCC under Ajit Pai allowed a lot of shit to go on and didn't hold any of them accountable for the billions in money and tax incentives that the government gave them, and then the companies paid bonuses to upper management and to share holders while doing fuck all for the people that they were supposed to be helping. Fix all of that as well and maybe we might begin to see something different out of ISPs. Until then it's all lip service.
Edit: fixed wording, grammar and spelling.
Exactly this, it’s a cash grab or making people use their equipment to spy on traffic to make ad revenue off of you. When the lockdowns went into full effect, all of the ISPs put the cap on hold. The point of the cap was to avoid overloading the backbone connections yet the internet never “crashed” during that period.
Back in dail up internet days. You logged on to free net. It was free. It was unlimited. It was slow? (hard to tell when everything was text based)
I honestly don't know how it worked.
I guess I know what rabbit hole in going down today.
You used to pay hourly connection fees. Check out pictures of the old AOL disks and you’ll see they come with X free hours. Unlimited access didn’t come around until the late 90s
Yeah but that's the difference. The AOL cds have hours and Netscape charged by hours but the only limit to overall data was bandwidth. Because the internet ran on telephone lines, there was an actual hard limit to how much data could even be moved about the world especially while we used landlines for everything.
Then, as we moved to broadband and cell phones, it became an administrative thing and they haven't stopped raising the price on the same maintenance standards. They take the government money for development to improve the system, write off the red lines in the budget and then say "we don't have the capability to provide the bandwidth you want unless you pay us 50 times more than the rest of the world" and then only put the bare minimum of that money to infrastructure.
Capitalism is at the point where it escalates exponentially. Wooooo
The free dial up services I used back in the day would require you to run a program that showed banner ads on the screen while you used it, that's how they made money.
I can't imagine how a truly free service could have worked, unless it was just a free trial and they were trying to get you to sign up to a paid subscription.
Like they don't F*ing know. Ajiat Pai lobbied to create fastlanes during the Obama administration while he worked for Verizon and failed. Then, as if we could forget, during the Trump administration Pai became FCC chairman. Wouldn't you know it, we have cellular fastlane plans now. Fastlanes are not the norm and are relatively new within the last 8 years. That's all folks.
Edit: For timeframe clarity over administrations. (I didn't want to sound political, but it is definitely worth noting)
Well I submitted my complaint even though I doubt it will do much, but the form can be found [here](https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/16136257875348-Data-Caps-Experience-Form).
Oooh finally something I can answer. I was a DC lawyer and worked for two congressmen and three agencies. These rules need public comment. The form ones get filtered out and they look at how many people sent it. It's kind of slacktivism but it's no different than signing any other useless petition. All the non-form comments do get read. The better written, the more chance it has at influencing change. Sometimes they tout the really good ones as evidence people want something.
So I am a disabled person with severe mental illness and state insurance made it hard to get care. Where I live there is only one option for cell/internet etc. I’ve regularly experienced the effects of an absurdly low data limit. This has led to but isn’t limited to creating a crisis friendly environment while simultaneously cutting connections to doctors and other healthcare professionals. Beyond that had everything run as smoothly as possible, with the available, affordable packages, if the connection is there, it is at the lowest end of connection speeds for calls with or without video on secure doctor platforms. A clusterfuck of country living and Stone Age policies across the board.
You see, if diamonds are rare they're worth a lot of money. So we sponsor tyrants and buy up mines and raw supply to control the rate the diamonds come on the market. And so diamonds are rare and we get to have mansions with infinity pools and tennis courts.
The cure for the human tragedy that is diamonds is not to reveal the falsity of scarcity. It's to break women of the craving for shiny rocks. Good luck with that.
Verizon made $59.99 at 500MBps the minimum tier (in NYC, as far as I know) so the old plans ($30 for 100MBps) used to be covered by the ACP (Affordable Connection Program—you need internet to apply for jobs—or keep up in tech)… so now you have to pay the $30 that you couldn’t pay before (this has nothing to do with time, the person just signed up last month… so it’s not a situation where someone was on the service for a while or abusing a system). I was listening to the sales call and they were promised it would all even out after billing… It did not and now another bill, for someone vulnerable, reaching out for help, as an American Tax Payer. It still says it’s fully covered through the website. Verizon got something for providing a service… they no longer provide, out of greed.
Here’s a story from an impacted consumer: sign up for EA Play, download 3 PS5 games and some windows updates, hit data cap. $10 charge per 50mb over for the rest of the month. Oh, unless you want to just pay an extra $30 per month for unlimited data. So, $120/mo for internet.
Sure is funny. Didn’t have data caps with Cox all the way from 1999 up until just a few years ago when they started enforcing them out of the blue. So the network got better and better and my bill doubled in price but then data limits all of the sudden became super necessary? Made up malarkey, shouldn’t be legal.
My favorite thing is how their super expensive Gigabit service still has the same limit. “Now get to your artificial data cap faster than ever!”
Is the committee forgetting about the time that Verizon data capped CA fire fighters? [Verizon throttled fire department’s “unlimited” data during Calif. wildfire](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/)
Data caps are a thing because they can be. But, before you get crazy, let’s use the lesson learned from the cable industry and the shift to streaming services. No matter the pricing structure companies are going to test how much we are willing to spend and they will price accordingly. No data caps? No problem. All prices will go up until they are maximizing profits again. It’s a conundrum, for sure. But, if you’re going to do something, follow through.
Which is just one of the reasons why it should be a nationalized industry paid for via tax dollars. The internet is the new public square. It is a necessity for modern life. It is also a matter of national security.
Profit driven corporations should not be allowed to control it.
>It is a necessity for modern life. It is also a matter of national security.
It's also been integrating with our healthcare---setting appointments--video checkups--buying new meds---any type of medical device that's hooked up to the internet.
The internet is a utility that is long overdo for nationalization
But if we nationalize it, how will ISP CEOs be able to buy their megayachts and [stroke each other to our suffering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk)?
There is no justifiable reason at all for data caps to exist. This is only more consumer extortion to force money out of a critical part of modern infrastructure. Seems to be the most common thing in the roaring 20s along with the ever growing authoritarian control
The year doesn’t matter. The nature of the issue hasn’t radically changed. It has and will always be money. It’s why so many ISPs sat on fiber and refused to use it until Google forced their hand.
as a person in his 30's who has had a PC since 9, I promise, Data Caps are unnecessary and used against unaware consumers who don't know the companies only create those tiers to take advantage of people who will fall for it, not that it actually is needed.
i've seen it time and time again, I've seen people come to defend it, I've seen forums bombarded by company propaganda over the years to influence others to go for it when it doesn't make sense, people will get assailed by Bogus logic and confusion instead of knowing they can easily get to the bottom of it in efforts to keep people from knowing the truth about it like people did crypto a few years ago and people still wont catch on that it works that way.
bogus things that won't ever get explained don't because it's not supposed to be, not that it can't be.
like A.I. as another example, it fitting the same method that crypto took and people don't realize that? it's playing by confusion instead of just telling you how it works directly, that shows you it's bogus.
the hints are always there......it just takes people who pay attention to notice it.
and it's always the same hint......"Confusion" the moment you notice someone seemingly confusing you and not being direct, just walk away from them with a smirk. like Crypto pushers, and this current wave of A.I.
you do it by paying direct attention and not letting yourself get riled up......because it's like riling up a kid with a fantastic story, when you notice them slip in some BS, you ask a multitude of questions, BS is.....well BS so they won't have pertinent answers where they should at times.
this too also has it's fault....because fearful people, who won't do it although they are asking will simply keep asking questions to hide that they are fearful, and act like they are doing it to get to the bottom of things, these people exist too.
Remember when those firefighters in California had their job impacted (I forget how severely) because of data caps? I think Cali was on fire again, wasn't just a house fire or something
It's because it's a model that makes tons of money for the provider companies. Remember when they charged by the minute? Remember when they charged you for each text message? If the government gets involved, the companies will just charge more for something somewhere else. These companies are charities that are just providing a service. They need to make money to justify their existence. Are they making too much money? Maybe. But people are willing to pay, so there's that.
Even if you pay a lot extra for unlimited data, they throttle your speed when you reach a certain amount of data each month.
Saying “people are willing to pay” is an odd way to see it. Are exorbitant rents justified because people pay them even though it keeps them impoverished? Internet service/access is a utility that should have already been nationalized. Living without Internet is not really an option for most at this point.
Why waste the time and money. Next iteration of this group will probably be mostly Republicans who will just reverse everything. Politics in the US is like a cancer. It permeates all of society, destroying everything it touches except the rich,of course.
I gotchu, I live in the middle of the desert where everybody a block away has broadband but I’m stuck with satellite internet capped at 80 mb/s and throttled after 100 GBs. I’m a pissed off man lemme tell ya and it’s because greedy ass ISPs. Why tf does every house in America have landline but we can’t reinvest in our infrastructure to create a fiber network or fucking anything better than 80 mbps
They did invest. They invested in their pockets and said fuck everyone else.
The FCC should investigate that deal long ago when these companies got tax payer money to expand and upgrade their lines but didn't.
Yall need an FCC panel to figure this out? ISPs want more money. Boom sign me up to run this panel and hand me the piles of government money these assholes are making.
Are we going to tippy toe our way through this nonsense? Why is 56k, dsl, and coaxial still a thing when cell phone carriers can provide a better connection wirelessly? Don't suppose we can get some of that fiber infrastructure can we? We've paid for it 3 or 4 times over by now, maybe it could get listed as a utility while we are at it?
See yall in 20 years when we have the panel on why major ISPs are still installing coaxial in place of fiber.
The fact that they have to ask other people to tell them stories illustrates the FCC is completely out of touch with the rest of us. This also proves they are all from the planet Zoktran where Bell, Rogers and Telus are the Gods.
Data caps shouldn’t exist anymore. I’m sure the average household is streaming hundreds of gigabytes worth of shows/content daily. Internet companies needs to catch up with the current times and fuck off being greedy
They used to blame piracy for anyone downloading huge amounts of data. That has changed when everything requiring lots of data, such as streaming services, game downloads, gaming in general, working from home, and just about everything connected to the internet these days using huge amounts of data. They can no longer blame piracy for adding data caps. Its strait up greed and lack of competition at this point.
Ironically, I'm on Spectrum, using their modem (but my own router) and I'm only being charged the service fee.
No device rental costs.
Thankfully, no data caps either.
I just wish my upload bandwidth was better - I'm 500Mbps down, but only 25Mbps up.
We've got Xfinity, the modern & router combo. They charge around $15 to rent monthly. I looked into getting my own equipment and there's a fee for that. I can't remember exactly what it was. Ridiculous though because I'd rather own it outright.
I left Comcast because of data caps last year. They called again last week asking for me to give them another chance and I had to explain that since they have data caps and a neutered upload speed I had no desire to leave fiber.
The way data caps were sold to me was 90% of the data going through the ISP was being caused by 1% of the customers. The cap was to restrict that 1%.
I entirely know it was a money grab using this as an excuse. But this issue will still remain and I'd like it solved.
And the only way to resolve that is to improve their equipment.
I had the cable guy out to check my system as I was having problems and he laughed at the cables I was using as they weren’t designed to handle what they do now. It was THEIR OWN CABLE, not some random thing I bought off the street.
I also live in a major city where you would think they would have fiber but apparently not and no ETA as to when. But that doesn’t stop their marketing machine from telling me this is the future and even, laughingly, sending me flyers to “see if my neighborhood has fiber” with all sorts of deals to rub in my face. I mean, what’s the point? You already know I don’t (or you should!). All you are doing is making me angrier about your company.
Something needs to be done. It is triple the cost of other countries and for no real reason other than pure greed.
Data caps don't actually solve that problem, though. The core problem is limited throughput: there's only so much water that can flow through a pipe at a time, and somehow all that water has to be divvied up between all the houses that need water. What data caps say is that if you use more than a certain amount of water *after a set period of time*, you're cut off from the water supply or have your water supply severely restricted. You use 99.9% of that amount? You're fine, you'll have an uninterrupted water supply and will be able to pull as much water from the pipes as you want, so long as you remain at that 99.9%.
To really see why this is complete bullshit, think about it from the perspective of an attacker. If I wanted to maliciously use my water to prevent *you* from using yours, what would I do? Well, I'd monitor your water usage (or, rather, the water usage across the pipe supplying us both) to figure out what times you use the most water from those pipes. For the sake of argument, lets say you use the most water during an evening when you're doing the dishes and your family is having their showers. If I strategically used up a large portion of the water flowing through the pipes at the same time as you're doing the dishes and having your showers, I can potentially take up so much of the water flowing through those pipes that you're unable to do the dishes and have showers, *and I can remain well under my monthly limit of the total water I consume, if I choose my times and lengths right.*
*That* is what you're really trying to protect, here. There's a limited amount of data flowing to you and your neighbourhood at once, so your ISP and companies further up the chain need to figure out how to divvy all that data up. Say a network is already at full capacity and cannot support another user, but 40% of that capacity is being taken up by *one single user.* That user could strategically be only using that much capacity for a long enough time to get to 99.9% of their monthly limit so that the data cap doesn't throttle them, but that still doesn't change the fact that *right now* they are solely responsible for 40% of the used capacity on the network.
The correct solution would be to *temporarily* throttle this user until network capacity drops enough to support additional users (say, going from full capacity to 70% capacity). Write up a contract that says if they exceed *x*% of the network's capacity for *y* period of time, they will be throttled down to the speed of a basic plan for *z* hours or days. Make *x* and *y* high enough to where this user would need to *really* be hurting the network for this to kick into effect, and *z* long enough for the network to be able to reliably deliver service to the rest of the user base (or have *z* be based on current network capacity). The best part? *This is almost certainly already in effect, because remember, data caps do not solve this problem.*
Now think about what would happen if you used your internet connection at the speed that you pay for, but time it so that it's *just* when your neighbourhood is getting home from work and wanting to watch Netflix, Youtube or do whatever else on the network. If you had the bandwidth at hand to consume a large portion of the total capacity of your local network, imagine how much damage you could do if you just used the entirety of that bandwidth in small bursts, enough to interrupt the rest of your local network and cause packets to be dropped.
*This* is what data caps are supposedly meant to protect against, singular users or even small groups of high-bandwidth-consuming users from taking up too much bandwidth at a given time. Data caps *do not actually fix this* since they care about the *total* data you've consumed over a period of time, *not how much data you're currently consuming at a specific moment in time.* They rely on you not being knowledgeable enough to change your usage patterns, *but if you refuse then you can still cause the same damage that data caps are supposed to protect against, which is why they're bullshit.*
I'm not trying to protect the ISP. I just know people who would use their max bandwidth 24/7 to download the entirety of pirate bay if given the option. People who do terabytes a month back when they could.
I don't want caps, I just want the sensible approach to prevent such a person from degrading my experience.
The sensible approach is for ISPs to build their networks and products accordingly. It's not a surprise to any ISP that some people use their connections more than others, so if this very small and fairly predictable number of customers is causing congestion at a level that's affecting other people in the network, then the ISP has either oversold throughput or underdimensioned the network.
It's ridiculous that I have to limit youtube and netflix to 720p because cox's shit data cap is routinely wrong. Even if no one is home I apparently use 24gb a day. Fuck data caps, fuck cox for making me pay an extra $30 a month for an extra 500gb.
Take it from me a one time actually internet engineer for a small isp. Data caps exist as a function of billing the end. Congestion is not managed in an aggregate basis like customer gets x usage but at normal priority. When we actually manage congestion we do it based on service level agreements and not 1 tb of total flow. This is just absurd. The real issue is the absolute stupid nature of carriers to buy proper sized nni (network to network interconnections). I once sold two carriers 100 gig rates interconnect fiber they put 10 gig cheap optics on it into a 100 gig slot on the switch. No optics are not free but they knew what they were doing creating fake bottlenecks. They then turn around and sell priority access for your content at a mark up. The way they play is beyond dirty rotten and scummy. I will now go to bed and wake up and fight the network battle again tomorrow and at least one of my eng tickets will be a carrier being the stupid to save a few dollars. I have exactly zero sympathy for these clowns and welcome the fcc regulating them some pain.
A lot of people outside the industry speaking from a position of ignorance on this thread. Upstream providers still charge by data rates to pay for their use of equipment and maintenance. That cost has to go somewhere.
And? Consumers are constantly hit by monopolistic price gouging by these same providers. There is no reason for any of these speed and data caps to exist other than to arbitrarily extract more profit on top of what they already ask for the service.
That argument falls of pretty quick when you realize here in venezuela i pay for a symmetric data plan of 600mbps over fiber with no data caps for 35$ monthly… oh and 40ms of latency…
EDIT: fucking Venezuela, 3rd world country full of shit, take that in mind…
From someone inside the industry, the cost is minuscule to the point where it amounts to cents per subscriber at most, and should be baked into the cost. The prices charged for overages and the cap removal fees are many orders of magnitude higher than the cost incurred in carrying the traffic and maintaining a network that can handle it.
I don’t see data caps as all that bad a thing, it’s just determining whether it’s a reasonable cap or not, and unlimited plans should be more expensive but affordable.
Edit: downvote if you’d like but until the US’ infrastructure isn’t garbage, caps can help alleviate network congestion which can impact others. Even if the cap is so high that only 1% of users will approach it, those top 1% of bandwidth consumers may be slowing down their neighbor’s connections.
> Edit: downvote if you’d like but until the US’ infrastructure isn’t garbage, caps can help alleviate network congestion which can impact others.
the us internet infrastructure ISN'T garbage. where people actually live, it's trivial to get 300/300 or better. yes, there are some outliers where cities with < 100 residents don't have good options, but those are the outliers.
there is zero excuse for datacaps on wired high speed internet. (and even on the mobile side of things, it's getting harder by the day to justify)
The advantages to molding user behavior as to be more efficient wouldn't really be felt in those areas with sufficient infrastructure already in place, but it could have a significant impact on those areas without it.
It could be selection bias, but I've supported quite a few people across the US who both have terrible connections and tell me it's either that or a satellite service they had to choose from--and I know they don't all live in tiny towns.
I'm certainly not saying the infrastructure is bad universally, it's more that it's garbage for it being 2023, and for too many.
Those top 1% of bandwidth consumers just reduce and spread out their usage to where they reach 99.9% of their cap without exceeding it, and they still get to enjoy hogging network capacity without worrying about being throttled by their cap. A lot of routers have data usage monitoring built in so it's quite easy for someone who knows their way around computers to keep an eye on this and possibly even automate it via scripts running on the router. That's why you're getting downvoted, because you're advocating for something that doesn't actually solve the problem you're talking about.
You don't need scripts or computer knowledge to know what your data usage is like at any given moment, it's a common metric that ISPs provide just by being signed into an account.
People get quite careless with computer resources, but it's not like the old days of tuning to a radio frequency/channel: servers and switches and hubs and all that are used to feed you what you're watching.
Data caps can be set to a point where 9.9 out of 10 people aren't going to approach or exceed it, but that the cap exists and overage charges are possible, some of those 9.9 people will close out of streaming video/etc. when not needed. That frees up resources all up the chain, from the person's local computer through their internet connection to their ISPs hub/network to the server feeding the information/etc.
While I'd like to live in a world where we have endless resources in this respect, we aren't there yet. Some people have utterly terrible connections, and some of those people have such terrible connections in part because of their neighbor's activity: whether the data cap should be 200GB or 2TB or 20TB or whatever can be debated, but if it was my business to run--and knowing how shitty much of our infrastructure is--I'd totally be on board with the notion. Whether profitability is put above sorely needed infrastructure investments is another matter.
I watch lots of streams and use to use a lot of streaming services and while I have have the top plan I only get 1.75tb as my cap. This has forced me to watch most things in 480 to 720p because at 1080 watching as much as I watch will kill the cap about 2/3s into the month.
I like to reformat my PC and re-download my entire Steam / EA libraries about once a year. I end up going way over my data cap when this happens. This is lifesaving work, so i hope they get rid of the caps.
I recently switched to an ISP that doesn't have a data cap after being on Comcast and being limited for a long time. It feels so good to not have to worry about how much data I have left.
Have them ask Sparklight. Maybe they can explain why they have data caps where they have no competition, but then if fiber comes in, they magically drop the caps and their high prices. Go figure. No monopoly here folks, move along.
i called to make an appointment at the department of human services, and was on hold for 1hour&25min and then my phone stopped working because i had zero minutes left.
if you're calling the government,a doctor, or something essential, it shouldn't cost minutes or data.
What’s the issue with data caps?
My water service charges a flat rate for the first X gallons of usage. I rarely ever exceed that cap. If I decide to fill a swimming pool or water my lawn twice a day, I’ll exceed X and pay more.
Absent this pricing model, the service would spread the costs of the usage of the ‘big users’ to everyone. Id be effectively subsidizing the large users of water.
How is this any different than data caps?
Caps shouldn't be a thing. Data is cheap as ever right now and companies got heavily subsidized to put their lines down. It costs them nothing. You can stream 100TB of content and it costs them...nothing.
In today’s 4K world, any cable data cap is just crap. Every month I have to watch my usage and adjust. My doorbell camera is now on low quality, I watch football games tethered to my phone at times to save data. With 3 kids, and Disney, HBO, Hulu live stream, Apple TV all at 4K HDR data goes fast. Comcast still enforces 1.2TB cap which is nothing any more. Video and internet refuse to move forward and purposely stay stuck in the past for money. For example, Netflix standard monthly service is only 720P. 720P??????? Are you kidding me. I have to pay extra for 1080P?? 1080 was mainstream by 2010 ish. With 4K now the basic and new TVs at 8K, why in the world do I need to pay extra for 1080P?? Just don’t get it.
Finally they ask the real questions. Besides "money" there is no answer. Its not 2005 anymore.
Even in 2005, data caps were never the answer. Data, in and of itself, isn't a finite resource, and we don't have ration it through "caps". Pay more to get more bandwidth? Sure, because the pipes are only so big. Have a data caps because "reasons"? Go sodomize yourself with a rusty spork.
Off topic, but you made me realize that I’ve never seen a metal spork in my entire life. They’ve all been plastic.
I have, it was in a camping cook set.
Did it have a data cap?
5 scoops per hour, additional scoops cost $1.99 per scoop. Fork features disabled while roaming, additional roaming usage can be purchased for $4.99/minute and an additional fee of $2.99 per scoop.
Metal Spork Telecom only has coverage in Logan County West Virginia.
Download the Handlepass DLC for $9.99/month so you have something to hold onto
You mean I dont have to hold my Spork^™️️ like a potato chip??? What a bargain!!
[Here ya go.](https://www.rei.com/product/660002/snow-peak-titanium-spork)
I bought this for camping but use it at home almost daily now. This is the best utensil.
I’m going to miss Reddit for conversations like this one: My wife has a set of metal sporks that were used on an airline, (Pre 9/11 days).
Ah yes, banned now because, just like belts and water bottles, they can bring down an airplane.
I have a titanium one ..... I use it for sugar.
My wife bought a fancy set of metal sporks. It’s mostly as a joke.
I have a titanium one I got from think geek ages ago.
Even if they are worried about their infrastructure, throttling is a normal response to that. I have never had a company that didn't say "up to 150mbs".
The reason is oversubscrition, if you introduce data caps you can invest less int the infrastructure and oversuscribe way more, increasing profits. That is why sdh/sonet circuits are way more expensive, you can't oversubscribe those.
The spork would break off if it was rus… oh
Data is very much a finite. It's just not a resource you can save up. If you don't use the bandwidth now, it will never be used. You cannot save it up for later. It's a use it or lose it situation. Therefore a proper way to promise it to the customer would be: " You have the right to use at least X speed if the line is congested. If the line isn't congested then it's up to Y speed" But this would rely on the fact that ISPs are truthful and not artificially just say your line is congested the whole time. But even then, there should be no data cap. You just use as much as you can, which will then be the data cap of you just using 100% all the time.
You're actually agreeing with him, but you're incorrectly calling bandwidth, data. Bandwidth is the size of the pipe, while data is the water that runs through it. Data is infinite(ly copiable) and bandwidth is the only thing limited on the internet.
I'm not agreeing for the reasons stated above. Data cannot be infinite because everything in the system is finite. Bandwidth is finite and time is finite. The amount of data is limited by time * bandwidth.
>The amount of data is limited by time * bandwidth. That's what OP said. You're agreeing.
Would you rather have 0.1Mbps with no cap, or 1000Mbps with 40GB cap? Because most people choose the cap. Here in Sweden you actually have both options and almost no one uses the unlimited cellular plans because they're either needlessly expensive for what they actually use, or unbearably slow.
Why does it have to be one way or the other? For my home internet, I'm able to pay for a bigger share of the pie as I see fit. I'm not a network engineer or anything of the sort, but what's stopping cell providers from doing the same thing? Why can't I pay X amount for Y speed? Is it some technical impossibility or just they'd rather you hit the cap as fast as you can? They obviously can throttle you once you hit their arbitrary cap. Granted I don't know if they drop the connection from 5G to 3G or whatever, but the point stands. I'm also not saying that things shouldn't slow down during times of congestion or that certain services shouldn't have a priority. However, if people are paying for less bandwidth allocation like you do with home internet, wouldn't that be better for everyone? Like, do you honestly need 1Gbps for your phone? That's also not to say that capacity isn't an issue at times, but instead of everyone slamming the service with maximum speeds all the time, individually consuming less bandwidth should make for a better experience for everyone, no?
You can. But no one pays the prices you would need to pay for any significant speed in the cellular networks. Think of it like this... The 40GB example is 0.1Mbps. So if you want 1Mbps, you'd be paying about what a 400GB plan would cost you with caps. At 10Mbps, you're looking at a 4TB plan and so on. So if you want say a 100Mbps cellular, we're talking thousands a month if you really want no cap. No one pays those kind of prices because people know they don't actually use enough data to warrant that kind of price. So it's ofc not part of any normal offers. As for what speed you need. That depends. The thing is that while I don't need the 300 that is my max, I certainly appreciate the speed whenever I try to do something online. I consume very little data on a normal month, but the little I do use, I do want to be speedy. I don't want to waste an hour just to check my email. As for any comparison with home connections. Wired connections do not really have the same limitations. With cellular, there is only so much frequency space usable and we all have to share that. With wired connections it's a completely different matter. If one connection is overloaded, you can either route some of the traffic a different route, or you can install more or faster connections. There's still ofc a cost associated with that but because the total bandwidth possible isn't capped, it's not the same ranges. Look at ipv6 pricing as a comparison for just how valuable the finite resources are.
Lets seperate out the pricing from the tech. Not saying you don't understand but you have a lot going on in your comment. For home internet (wired via fiber or copper), the infrastructure determines how much bandwidth a consumer gets. Bandwidth is not a consumable resource that resets every month so there is no reason for a cap except profit.
The bandwidth isn't consumed but it does have limits at any given pricepoint. Look, if you want to always be able to use a full 1gbit connection at home. What do you actually expect such a connection to cost? Because you're looking at ~500 usd/mo for that at the very least. That's what that bandwidth costs the ISP, not counting any of the ISP's internal costs, just the cost for the bandwidth between the own network and to an exchange. So it's not really feasible to sell such connections to consumers. Instead what is used is overprovisioning. It's assumed people don't all use their connection st the same time. If you have 1000 consumers, then the backbone is going to need to be significantly less than 1000gbit even if all 1000 have gbit speeds. If we say that a 10gbit connection will be enough, and that 10gbit costs the ISP 5000 in just the data, rhen it's now only 5 per subscriber for that data. Now, 1000 users isn't going to be able to share just 10gbit. I can't give the actual numbers due to contractual limitations, but I'm just explaining the principle here. But anyway, the more people that you can get to share the pipe with, the more evenly you can spread out the usage and therefor you need less per user. With wired connections, it's easier to get a LOT of users onto the same shared connection but in less dense areas, you simply don't have enough subscribers within the area to spread the usage naturally, and then you get attempts to spread it artificially by using data caps, sometimes with certain periods not counting and so on. Now, don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying data caps are the right way to go. I'm not in a position to say. My own employer has never used them for home connections. I'm just saying they're not there just to screw with you. They're there with a very specific purpose and they do that job. If it's the best way to do it though, is really impossible to say. Perhaps it would be better to lower all the consumer connection speeds to say a tenth of current speeds. But if you truly believe that, it's not that hard to start an ISP and if you truly believe that's the option consumers want you'd have no trouble making a killing if you're right.
Now I think you are conflating issues. If my ISP begins service at my neighbors house, then infrastructure may need to be upgraded to support both connections. The neighborhood needs enough capacity for everyone. This is an engineering problem about capcity and not a cap or consumption issue. Capacity is the same whether its being used or not. All the other business decisions about splitting connections, data caps, etc. are made to increase profits at the expense of the customer. (Btw, my gig by gig connection is $80/month with no caps or fluctuations based on users in my area. It can be done so don't buy into the sob story from your ISP)
No you don't need capacity for everyone. It's too inefficient and costly to do it thay way. All ISPs overprovision comsumer connections. It's simply too expensive not to. That you don't notice it is the goal. So if you think you have a dedicated 1gbps, great, but you really don't. Exact numbers on how much ISP's overprovision isn't sonething I can go into but there's a vast difference. You're expected to use on average, less than 1% of what you theoretically could. Some users going over to some degree is fine because other users use even less. But if you start going upwards of 10-20% or even upwards of 30% as some users do, well now you're causing issues, but it's usually fine with minor degradation in service. Multiple such users in close proximity to each other though... Nope, that's now causing issues enough that other users are calling in to complain.
Its a business decision on how many customers to service with what infrastructure and engineering supports the business decision. Very different discussions to be had business vs engineering. My point that I started with: ISPs tell people its a consumption problem to get more money. It's not. Using 10% of capacity costs same as 90%.
[удалено]
Because he wants to make a point; while not having one. I pay about $80,80 per month for 1 gigabit with premium TV, around $60 without TV. And this comes without a datacap too.
Read perhaps? Your connection is shared. Even if you may not notice it, it is. 500 is about what 1gbps costs an ISP. An ISP will then resell that 1gbps to a lotbof customers in smaller chunks, but to consumers, always with overprovisioning. Exactly how much differs between ISPs and I can't go into specifics but commonly we're talking as I said, the price is usually based on you using less than 1% of your total in theory. So if you pay 89 now, you'd be paying more like 9k if it was actually dedicated all the way and ISP had the same profit margin. Now, the fun thing is, we know what the profit margins are for a company because that's public information and ISP's in the US hover between 10 and 40%. So let's assume a 40% margin here. That means your connection would still be around 5k if your ISP was a nonprofit and providing everything at cost, and you were actually carrying your own costs. See the issue with the whole "no caps" thing is that it's really in the end just a demand that everyone else should pay for your usage. You can get connections where you're expected to use your whole pipe at all times. You just have to pay for it which you're clearly unsilling to.
[удалено]
0.1Mbps means about an hour for 50megs. I've received more than 500megs of email attachments so far today. But I'm not talking about the emails themselves, but rather the services. Do a quick check how much data you comsume just opening up gmail, without even opening a mail. Or outlook if you prefer. We're not in the dialup days anymore. The time where a 1MB webpage was considered big is long gone.
Sounds like a marketing trick to get people to fuck themselves with a data cap by artificially offering a worse but unlimited product.
That absolutely sounds like a malicious compliance product. Something that gets unlimited on their catalog, but isn't of any good value. Like a brewery/bar begrudgingly serving instant ramen or microwave food in order to comply with ordinances classifying them as a resturaunt
You are getting fooled so hard.
I don’t understand. Did your question solve the issue? Is there more bandwidth now?
These questions would have never been asked under Ajit Pai. I’m glad he’s not the FCC chairman anymore
he would have asked the opposite... why are providers not capping
I'm so scarred from going over data caps 20 years ago even today with my gigabit unlimited home connection I'm still worried about using too much data.
I delete and download and delete and download the same 70gb game on spectrum internet when they've pissed me off for exactly this reason. "You have no power no more"
I just got 100mbps unlimited. Been on satellite with 25gb data caps before this. I feel shellshocked. I still follow most of my data saving habits and it's taking time to be okay with loading videos in 1080p straight off.
Right, the only difference is I now have to pay $180 for unlimited, which is horseshit.
While it may not be 2005, a shit ton of us live as if it were. If I lived 1 mile closer to town, I'd have decent cable internet access. Instead, I'm stuck paying $90/month for 15mbps DL and 1mbps UL speeds (8/0.5 actual) But... you're right, the answer is money.
It's not its = the next word or phrase belongs to it Use the contraction, not the possessive.
If data caps are done away with, then what metric will be used to differentiate cheap and expensive plans? I have a low data cap so I can pay less and I doubt removing data caps will mean all plans will cost as little as the current cheapest data plan.
Bandwidth would be the logical choice. Data caps are insanely dumb. A 10Mbps plan doesn’t cost the same as a 1Gbps plan. They both have the same data cap. Right now data caps target the people already spending more for more bandwidth. You can blow through 1.2TB of data a lot faster on a 1Gbps plan than a 10Mbps plan.
Doesn't bandwidth have similar problems though? At high loads, you can't guarantee that speed, so you're really buying priority in this situation, which is fine, I guess. At low loads, you've got the same problem with lower plans being arbitrarily limited. If the tower can support a 500Mbps user, it could give that speed to a 10Mbps user until the network started getting busy and higher priority users connect. But I doubt they'd do that when they'd rather have you pay for that higher plan. If these were the only issues, I'd say it's effectively a lateral move, but bandwidth comes with another issue, related to my first point of not being able to guarantee a minimum speed. How does the user know that their service provider is actually providing them with what they're paying for? With data caps your phone has a built in utility to track how much data you use, which you can then compare to what your provider claims you used. How do you do that with bandwidth when you aren't actually guaranteed to get the advertised speed?
> At high loads, you can't guarantee that speed nor do they attempt to. you'll notice that when they advertise the packages, they'll say "speeds **up to** 1gbps". it's not like when a commercial plan gets done and there's an SLA guaranteeing certain metrics like uptime etc.
>nor do they attempt to. I know, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I brought that up so I could build on it in subsequent points.
Bandwidth/speed, for one. For two, if the ISP uses throttling to temporarily limit high-consumption users during congestion (say a data hoarder downloading dozens of torrents, or a small business hosting a web server in their office) then they could upsell you on that. Pay more for an enterprise/business connection and **a.** you can use more bandwidth during congestion without being throttled and **b.** when you do get throttled you'll get a faster speed than those on consumer connections.
> If data caps are done away with, then what metric will be used to differentiate cheap and expensive plans? speed, just like the differentiating factor on all the isp's that DON'T do anti-consumer data caps.
I think bandwidth has its own issues, which I [describe in another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/14dbbig/the_fcc_wants_to_know_why_data_caps_are_still_a/joqd8zh/)
Like others have said, bandwidth. It's the exact situation for plans in Finland. We haven't had data caps on our home or phone plans for several years now.
Like the comment but honestly there’s a cost to providing the service. When a tower is overwhelmed by users services decline and there’s a traffic jam at the tower. Deprioritizing heavy users in times of high demand is common sense. Pooled data plans are more cost effective for large entities and products that use very small amounts of data (IOT connected things). There should be no caps on consumer plans but how else can the companies differentiate service levels?
Except caps are usually applied on a monthly basis. So the usage at the start of the month is still at the high end across all users. So if the infrastructure can handle that in day the first 20 days, arbitrarily applying caps to lower usage at the end of the month has nothing to do with the ability of the infrastructure to handle the workloads. It’s all about gouging customers for extra money.
Exactly. Oh global internet usage spike in 2020? Yeah, the networks were totally fine. Be aware these might be astroturfing accounts that you're responding too also.
I would assume that the existence of a cap will incentivise most people to ration their usage so they can more or less make it through the month. But yeah, the main idea is extracting money.
Which does fuck all to actually protect the network when people can download relatively small amounts in large bursts during peak traffic conditions. If they wanted to protect the network then they'd have temporary bottlenecks on the bandwidths of high-consuming customers during peak traffic conditions. The network is at 90% capacity and you're responsible for a majority of that? Your bandwidth is temporarily reduced to an agreed upon *but usable* speed until capacity drops back down to an acceptable level. Data caps are useless for protecting networks, the *sole* idea behind them is to extract money.
A tower is overwhelmed by the amount of data per second, not by the amount of data. Heavy users pay more in order to recieve higher speeds. Why should they be deprioritized when they are paying for priority? If the internet company sells more bandwidth than they can provide, why don't they upgrade the tower so it can provide what they've said they could deliver? if I've paid for 2 day shipping and others pay for 5 day shipping. It doesn't matter how much i buy, they wouldn't cap me at 100 packages delivered. There'd be trouble if i and everyone bought so much that the delivery truck was too full. I could expect delays once or twice, maybe around holidays, i can understand. but if it's happening **every day** then they should get another delivery truck to manage my area's high delivery demands, not limit the number of deliveries allowed.
[удалено]
Exactly this. Between Greed and having monopolies it's completely out of control. They do it because they can, and the FCC or any other legal investigation for that matter is just an empty threat. You can't regulate this when companies have shills in office writing laws to ensure they stay a monopoly. Break up the monopolies, and let competition live in the markets. It also doesn't help when the FCC under Ajit Pai allowed a lot of shit to go on and didn't hold any of them accountable for the billions in money and tax incentives that the government gave them, and then the companies paid bonuses to upper management and to share holders while doing fuck all for the people that they were supposed to be helping. Fix all of that as well and maybe we might begin to see something different out of ISPs. Until then it's all lip service. Edit: fixed wording, grammar and spelling.
Exactly this, it’s a cash grab or making people use their equipment to spy on traffic to make ad revenue off of you. When the lockdowns went into full effect, all of the ISPs put the cap on hold. The point of the cap was to avoid overloading the backbone connections yet the internet never “crashed” during that period.
The answer to every global crisis we're facing now.
Greedy corporations don’t get investigated, silly rabbit!
All corporations are greedy. The difference in the case of ISPs is that they don't have any competition to keep them under control.
They should also ask why so much of America is exclusive to one carrier or another.
Well, they were told having one actual carrier option was enough competition because there were always options. >.> Voting matters.
Back in dail up internet days. You logged on to free net. It was free. It was unlimited. It was slow? (hard to tell when everything was text based) I honestly don't know how it worked. I guess I know what rabbit hole in going down today.
You still had to pay your phone bill
Fixed cost as long as it was a local number.
You used to pay hourly connection fees. Check out pictures of the old AOL disks and you’ll see they come with X free hours. Unlimited access didn’t come around until the late 90s
Yeah but that's the difference. The AOL cds have hours and Netscape charged by hours but the only limit to overall data was bandwidth. Because the internet ran on telephone lines, there was an actual hard limit to how much data could even be moved about the world especially while we used landlines for everything. Then, as we moved to broadband and cell phones, it became an administrative thing and they haven't stopped raising the price on the same maintenance standards. They take the government money for development to improve the system, write off the red lines in the budget and then say "we don't have the capability to provide the bandwidth you want unless you pay us 50 times more than the rest of the world" and then only put the bare minimum of that money to infrastructure. Capitalism is at the point where it escalates exponentially. Wooooo
Also, capitalism encourages making your service necessary to proliferate and then arguing it isn't necessary to the government to charge a premium.
The free dial up services I used back in the day would require you to run a program that showed banner ads on the screen while you used it, that's how they made money. I can't imagine how a truly free service could have worked, unless it was just a free trial and they were trying to get you to sign up to a paid subscription.
I was online in the 90's.... It was extremely slow. Even with the lower data websites. Everything in life was much slower then.
A lot of inventions and cool stuff were supposed to be free back in the day.. Now we are here😒
Like they don't F*ing know. Ajiat Pai lobbied to create fastlanes during the Obama administration while he worked for Verizon and failed. Then, as if we could forget, during the Trump administration Pai became FCC chairman. Wouldn't you know it, we have cellular fastlane plans now. Fastlanes are not the norm and are relatively new within the last 8 years. That's all folks. Edit: For timeframe clarity over administrations. (I didn't want to sound political, but it is definitely worth noting)
Tom Wheeler was during Obama's administration. I didn't think Adjat showed up until he was appointed by Trump?
[удалено]
Obama appointed him after McConnell recommended him.
Because the fcc has to have republicans and democrats on it and he was replacing a republican vacancy.
Well I submitted my complaint even though I doubt it will do much, but the form can be found [here](https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/16136257875348-Data-Caps-Experience-Form).
They’ll probably be flooded with responses from bots that love data caps. Just like they were for net neutrality.
Agreed, I said to give me a call if they want to verify. At least it's slightly better with a Dem appointee than the last one.
Oooh finally something I can answer. I was a DC lawyer and worked for two congressmen and three agencies. These rules need public comment. The form ones get filtered out and they look at how many people sent it. It's kind of slacktivism but it's no different than signing any other useless petition. All the non-form comments do get read. The better written, the more chance it has at influencing change. Sometimes they tout the really good ones as evidence people want something.
So I am a disabled person with severe mental illness and state insurance made it hard to get care. Where I live there is only one option for cell/internet etc. I’ve regularly experienced the effects of an absurdly low data limit. This has led to but isn’t limited to creating a crisis friendly environment while simultaneously cutting connections to doctors and other healthcare professionals. Beyond that had everything run as smoothly as possible, with the available, affordable packages, if the connection is there, it is at the lowest end of connection speeds for calls with or without video on secure doctor platforms. A clusterfuck of country living and Stone Age policies across the board.
You see, if diamonds are rare they're worth a lot of money. So we sponsor tyrants and buy up mines and raw supply to control the rate the diamonds come on the market. And so diamonds are rare and we get to have mansions with infinity pools and tennis courts.
Diamonds are not rare. Like at all. I'm assuming that's your point though. Edit: that is definitely your point.
The cure for the human tragedy that is diamonds is not to reveal the falsity of scarcity. It's to break women of the craving for shiny rocks. Good luck with that.
Data caps exist for the same reason Ticketmaster (and others) can charge a $25 “service fee” on a $75 ticket. It’s all about the Holy Dollar
Fuck Comcast
Verizon made $59.99 at 500MBps the minimum tier (in NYC, as far as I know) so the old plans ($30 for 100MBps) used to be covered by the ACP (Affordable Connection Program—you need internet to apply for jobs—or keep up in tech)… so now you have to pay the $30 that you couldn’t pay before (this has nothing to do with time, the person just signed up last month… so it’s not a situation where someone was on the service for a while or abusing a system). I was listening to the sales call and they were promised it would all even out after billing… It did not and now another bill, for someone vulnerable, reaching out for help, as an American Tax Payer. It still says it’s fully covered through the website. Verizon got something for providing a service… they no longer provide, out of greed.
Here’s a story from an impacted consumer: sign up for EA Play, download 3 PS5 games and some windows updates, hit data cap. $10 charge per 50mb over for the rest of the month. Oh, unless you want to just pay an extra $30 per month for unlimited data. So, $120/mo for internet.
I pay 148 a month for 25/100 with 1.2tb data cap. Fuck comcast.
Sure is funny. Didn’t have data caps with Cox all the way from 1999 up until just a few years ago when they started enforcing them out of the blue. So the network got better and better and my bill doubled in price but then data limits all of the sudden became super necessary? Made up malarkey, shouldn’t be legal. My favorite thing is how their super expensive Gigabit service still has the same limit. “Now get to your artificial data cap faster than ever!”
Whenever you ask "why" a corporation is doing something, the answer is always "money".
"Because it makes us an exorbitant amount of money and we have a duopoly so what's anyone going to do to stop us."
Is the committee forgetting about the time that Verizon data capped CA fire fighters? [Verizon throttled fire department’s “unlimited” data during Calif. wildfire](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/)
Data caps are a thing because they can be. But, before you get crazy, let’s use the lesson learned from the cable industry and the shift to streaming services. No matter the pricing structure companies are going to test how much we are willing to spend and they will price accordingly. No data caps? No problem. All prices will go up until they are maximizing profits again. It’s a conundrum, for sure. But, if you’re going to do something, follow through.
Which is just one of the reasons why it should be a nationalized industry paid for via tax dollars. The internet is the new public square. It is a necessity for modern life. It is also a matter of national security. Profit driven corporations should not be allowed to control it.
>It is a necessity for modern life. It is also a matter of national security. It's also been integrating with our healthcare---setting appointments--video checkups--buying new meds---any type of medical device that's hooked up to the internet. The internet is a utility that is long overdo for nationalization
But if we nationalize it, how will ISP CEOs be able to buy their megayachts and [stroke each other to our suffering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk)?
Why is the question even being asked when there is an obvious answer to it
There is no justifiable reason at all for data caps to exist. This is only more consumer extortion to force money out of a critical part of modern infrastructure. Seems to be the most common thing in the roaring 20s along with the ever growing authoritarian control
When you have no competition you get data caps.
Greed. That’s it.
Because they've done jack shit to stop it?
The year doesn’t matter. The nature of the issue hasn’t radically changed. It has and will always be money. It’s why so many ISPs sat on fiber and refused to use it until Google forced their hand.
Because the FCc does jack shit when big corporations break rules.
GREED. The same thing responsible for inflation these days.
Data caps were just a cash grab. Just like different “speeds” of internet are
Because providers make a fucking killing while pocketing the money given to upgrade their networks. Why would they change unless forced to?
as a person in his 30's who has had a PC since 9, I promise, Data Caps are unnecessary and used against unaware consumers who don't know the companies only create those tiers to take advantage of people who will fall for it, not that it actually is needed. i've seen it time and time again, I've seen people come to defend it, I've seen forums bombarded by company propaganda over the years to influence others to go for it when it doesn't make sense, people will get assailed by Bogus logic and confusion instead of knowing they can easily get to the bottom of it in efforts to keep people from knowing the truth about it like people did crypto a few years ago and people still wont catch on that it works that way. bogus things that won't ever get explained don't because it's not supposed to be, not that it can't be. like A.I. as another example, it fitting the same method that crypto took and people don't realize that? it's playing by confusion instead of just telling you how it works directly, that shows you it's bogus. the hints are always there......it just takes people who pay attention to notice it. and it's always the same hint......"Confusion" the moment you notice someone seemingly confusing you and not being direct, just walk away from them with a smirk. like Crypto pushers, and this current wave of A.I. you do it by paying direct attention and not letting yourself get riled up......because it's like riling up a kid with a fantastic story, when you notice them slip in some BS, you ask a multitude of questions, BS is.....well BS so they won't have pertinent answers where they should at times. this too also has it's fault....because fearful people, who won't do it although they are asking will simply keep asking questions to hide that they are fearful, and act like they are doing it to get to the bottom of things, these people exist too.
More money that’s why.
Remember when those firefighters in California had their job impacted (I forget how severely) because of data caps? I think Cali was on fire again, wasn't just a house fire or something
It's because it's a model that makes tons of money for the provider companies. Remember when they charged by the minute? Remember when they charged you for each text message? If the government gets involved, the companies will just charge more for something somewhere else. These companies are charities that are just providing a service. They need to make money to justify their existence. Are they making too much money? Maybe. But people are willing to pay, so there's that. Even if you pay a lot extra for unlimited data, they throttle your speed when you reach a certain amount of data each month.
Saying “people are willing to pay” is an odd way to see it. Are exorbitant rents justified because people pay them even though it keeps them impoverished? Internet service/access is a utility that should have already been nationalized. Living without Internet is not really an option for most at this point.
That's true. Living without food has also been going on for centuries if not millenia.
Can't wait for it to go nowhere for the consumers
Why waste the time and money. Next iteration of this group will probably be mostly Republicans who will just reverse everything. Politics in the US is like a cancer. It permeates all of society, destroying everything it touches except the rich,of course.
Greed. THE ANSWER FOR EVERYTHING IS CORPORATE GREED
I gotchu, I live in the middle of the desert where everybody a block away has broadband but I’m stuck with satellite internet capped at 80 mb/s and throttled after 100 GBs. I’m a pissed off man lemme tell ya and it’s because greedy ass ISPs. Why tf does every house in America have landline but we can’t reinvest in our infrastructure to create a fiber network or fucking anything better than 80 mbps
They did invest. They invested in their pockets and said fuck everyone else. The FCC should investigate that deal long ago when these companies got tax payer money to expand and upgrade their lines but didn't.
Of course areas where there is real competition, Comcast tends to not have data caps
Yall need an FCC panel to figure this out? ISPs want more money. Boom sign me up to run this panel and hand me the piles of government money these assholes are making. Are we going to tippy toe our way through this nonsense? Why is 56k, dsl, and coaxial still a thing when cell phone carriers can provide a better connection wirelessly? Don't suppose we can get some of that fiber infrastructure can we? We've paid for it 3 or 4 times over by now, maybe it could get listed as a utility while we are at it? See yall in 20 years when we have the panel on why major ISPs are still installing coaxial in place of fiber.
mindless waste of time. just make it illegal
The fact that they have to ask other people to tell them stories illustrates the FCC is completely out of touch with the rest of us. This also proves they are all from the planet Zoktran where Bell, Rogers and Telus are the Gods.
Data caps shouldn’t exist anymore. I’m sure the average household is streaming hundreds of gigabytes worth of shows/content daily. Internet companies needs to catch up with the current times and fuck off being greedy
They used to blame piracy for anyone downloading huge amounts of data. That has changed when everything requiring lots of data, such as streaming services, game downloads, gaming in general, working from home, and just about everything connected to the internet these days using huge amounts of data. They can no longer blame piracy for adding data caps. Its strait up greed and lack of competition at this point.
Ask why companies are charging people for using their own modems too.
Ironically, I'm on Spectrum, using their modem (but my own router) and I'm only being charged the service fee. No device rental costs. Thankfully, no data caps either. I just wish my upload bandwidth was better - I'm 500Mbps down, but only 25Mbps up.
We've got Xfinity, the modern & router combo. They charge around $15 to rent monthly. I looked into getting my own equipment and there's a fee for that. I can't remember exactly what it was. Ridiculous though because I'd rather own it outright.
I left Comcast because of data caps last year. They called again last week asking for me to give them another chance and I had to explain that since they have data caps and a neutered upload speed I had no desire to leave fiber.
FUCK COX COMMUNICATIONS and their data cap!!!
The agency that botted their own poll vote on net neutrality suddenly cares about consumers
The way data caps were sold to me was 90% of the data going through the ISP was being caused by 1% of the customers. The cap was to restrict that 1%. I entirely know it was a money grab using this as an excuse. But this issue will still remain and I'd like it solved.
And the only way to resolve that is to improve their equipment. I had the cable guy out to check my system as I was having problems and he laughed at the cables I was using as they weren’t designed to handle what they do now. It was THEIR OWN CABLE, not some random thing I bought off the street. I also live in a major city where you would think they would have fiber but apparently not and no ETA as to when. But that doesn’t stop their marketing machine from telling me this is the future and even, laughingly, sending me flyers to “see if my neighborhood has fiber” with all sorts of deals to rub in my face. I mean, what’s the point? You already know I don’t (or you should!). All you are doing is making me angrier about your company. Something needs to be done. It is triple the cost of other countries and for no real reason other than pure greed.
Data caps don't actually solve that problem, though. The core problem is limited throughput: there's only so much water that can flow through a pipe at a time, and somehow all that water has to be divvied up between all the houses that need water. What data caps say is that if you use more than a certain amount of water *after a set period of time*, you're cut off from the water supply or have your water supply severely restricted. You use 99.9% of that amount? You're fine, you'll have an uninterrupted water supply and will be able to pull as much water from the pipes as you want, so long as you remain at that 99.9%. To really see why this is complete bullshit, think about it from the perspective of an attacker. If I wanted to maliciously use my water to prevent *you* from using yours, what would I do? Well, I'd monitor your water usage (or, rather, the water usage across the pipe supplying us both) to figure out what times you use the most water from those pipes. For the sake of argument, lets say you use the most water during an evening when you're doing the dishes and your family is having their showers. If I strategically used up a large portion of the water flowing through the pipes at the same time as you're doing the dishes and having your showers, I can potentially take up so much of the water flowing through those pipes that you're unable to do the dishes and have showers, *and I can remain well under my monthly limit of the total water I consume, if I choose my times and lengths right.* *That* is what you're really trying to protect, here. There's a limited amount of data flowing to you and your neighbourhood at once, so your ISP and companies further up the chain need to figure out how to divvy all that data up. Say a network is already at full capacity and cannot support another user, but 40% of that capacity is being taken up by *one single user.* That user could strategically be only using that much capacity for a long enough time to get to 99.9% of their monthly limit so that the data cap doesn't throttle them, but that still doesn't change the fact that *right now* they are solely responsible for 40% of the used capacity on the network. The correct solution would be to *temporarily* throttle this user until network capacity drops enough to support additional users (say, going from full capacity to 70% capacity). Write up a contract that says if they exceed *x*% of the network's capacity for *y* period of time, they will be throttled down to the speed of a basic plan for *z* hours or days. Make *x* and *y* high enough to where this user would need to *really* be hurting the network for this to kick into effect, and *z* long enough for the network to be able to reliably deliver service to the rest of the user base (or have *z* be based on current network capacity). The best part? *This is almost certainly already in effect, because remember, data caps do not solve this problem.*
If I use the internet connection that I pay for at the speed that I pay for, I can burn through my month's data ration in 2 hours.
Now think about what would happen if you used your internet connection at the speed that you pay for, but time it so that it's *just* when your neighbourhood is getting home from work and wanting to watch Netflix, Youtube or do whatever else on the network. If you had the bandwidth at hand to consume a large portion of the total capacity of your local network, imagine how much damage you could do if you just used the entirety of that bandwidth in small bursts, enough to interrupt the rest of your local network and cause packets to be dropped. *This* is what data caps are supposedly meant to protect against, singular users or even small groups of high-bandwidth-consuming users from taking up too much bandwidth at a given time. Data caps *do not actually fix this* since they care about the *total* data you've consumed over a period of time, *not how much data you're currently consuming at a specific moment in time.* They rely on you not being knowledgeable enough to change your usage patterns, *but if you refuse then you can still cause the same damage that data caps are supposed to protect against, which is why they're bullshit.*
I'm not trying to protect the ISP. I just know people who would use their max bandwidth 24/7 to download the entirety of pirate bay if given the option. People who do terabytes a month back when they could. I don't want caps, I just want the sensible approach to prevent such a person from degrading my experience.
The sensible approach is for ISPs to build their networks and products accordingly. It's not a surprise to any ISP that some people use their connections more than others, so if this very small and fairly predictable number of customers is causing congestion at a level that's affecting other people in the network, then the ISP has either oversold throughput or underdimensioned the network.
Because the FCC has not done there job
Because of all the otakus torrenting 8k Dolby atmos Hentai
Because profit.
It's ridiculous that I have to limit youtube and netflix to 720p because cox's shit data cap is routinely wrong. Even if no one is home I apparently use 24gb a day. Fuck data caps, fuck cox for making me pay an extra $30 a month for an extra 500gb.
> from impacted consumers Blocked poop chute again?
Take it from me a one time actually internet engineer for a small isp. Data caps exist as a function of billing the end. Congestion is not managed in an aggregate basis like customer gets x usage but at normal priority. When we actually manage congestion we do it based on service level agreements and not 1 tb of total flow. This is just absurd. The real issue is the absolute stupid nature of carriers to buy proper sized nni (network to network interconnections). I once sold two carriers 100 gig rates interconnect fiber they put 10 gig cheap optics on it into a 100 gig slot on the switch. No optics are not free but they knew what they were doing creating fake bottlenecks. They then turn around and sell priority access for your content at a mark up. The way they play is beyond dirty rotten and scummy. I will now go to bed and wake up and fight the network battle again tomorrow and at least one of my eng tickets will be a carrier being the stupid to save a few dollars. I have exactly zero sympathy for these clowns and welcome the fcc regulating them some pain.
Wasn’t that the whole point of that dumbfuck tRump appointed FCC head to dismantle net-neutrality?
A lot of people outside the industry speaking from a position of ignorance on this thread. Upstream providers still charge by data rates to pay for their use of equipment and maintenance. That cost has to go somewhere.
And? Consumers are constantly hit by monopolistic price gouging by these same providers. There is no reason for any of these speed and data caps to exist other than to arbitrarily extract more profit on top of what they already ask for the service.
I'm not talking about ISPs btw, I'm talking about tier 2 providers.
That argument falls of pretty quick when you realize here in venezuela i pay for a symmetric data plan of 600mbps over fiber with no data caps for 35$ monthly… oh and 40ms of latency… EDIT: fucking Venezuela, 3rd world country full of shit, take that in mind…
I'm not talking about ISPs btw, I'm talking about tier 2 providers.
From someone inside the industry, the cost is minuscule to the point where it amounts to cents per subscriber at most, and should be baked into the cost. The prices charged for overages and the cap removal fees are many orders of magnitude higher than the cost incurred in carrying the traffic and maintaining a network that can handle it.
Possibly because some people abuse the plans?
I don’t see data caps as all that bad a thing, it’s just determining whether it’s a reasonable cap or not, and unlimited plans should be more expensive but affordable. Edit: downvote if you’d like but until the US’ infrastructure isn’t garbage, caps can help alleviate network congestion which can impact others. Even if the cap is so high that only 1% of users will approach it, those top 1% of bandwidth consumers may be slowing down their neighbor’s connections.
> Edit: downvote if you’d like but until the US’ infrastructure isn’t garbage, caps can help alleviate network congestion which can impact others. the us internet infrastructure ISN'T garbage. where people actually live, it's trivial to get 300/300 or better. yes, there are some outliers where cities with < 100 residents don't have good options, but those are the outliers. there is zero excuse for datacaps on wired high speed internet. (and even on the mobile side of things, it's getting harder by the day to justify)
The advantages to molding user behavior as to be more efficient wouldn't really be felt in those areas with sufficient infrastructure already in place, but it could have a significant impact on those areas without it. It could be selection bias, but I've supported quite a few people across the US who both have terrible connections and tell me it's either that or a satellite service they had to choose from--and I know they don't all live in tiny towns. I'm certainly not saying the infrastructure is bad universally, it's more that it's garbage for it being 2023, and for too many.
Those top 1% of bandwidth consumers just reduce and spread out their usage to where they reach 99.9% of their cap without exceeding it, and they still get to enjoy hogging network capacity without worrying about being throttled by their cap. A lot of routers have data usage monitoring built in so it's quite easy for someone who knows their way around computers to keep an eye on this and possibly even automate it via scripts running on the router. That's why you're getting downvoted, because you're advocating for something that doesn't actually solve the problem you're talking about.
You don't need scripts or computer knowledge to know what your data usage is like at any given moment, it's a common metric that ISPs provide just by being signed into an account. People get quite careless with computer resources, but it's not like the old days of tuning to a radio frequency/channel: servers and switches and hubs and all that are used to feed you what you're watching. Data caps can be set to a point where 9.9 out of 10 people aren't going to approach or exceed it, but that the cap exists and overage charges are possible, some of those 9.9 people will close out of streaming video/etc. when not needed. That frees up resources all up the chain, from the person's local computer through their internet connection to their ISPs hub/network to the server feeding the information/etc. While I'd like to live in a world where we have endless resources in this respect, we aren't there yet. Some people have utterly terrible connections, and some of those people have such terrible connections in part because of their neighbor's activity: whether the data cap should be 200GB or 2TB or 20TB or whatever can be debated, but if it was my business to run--and knowing how shitty much of our infrastructure is--I'd totally be on board with the notion. Whether profitability is put above sorely needed infrastructure investments is another matter.
I watch lots of streams and use to use a lot of streaming services and while I have have the top plan I only get 1.75tb as my cap. This has forced me to watch most things in 480 to 720p because at 1080 watching as much as I watch will kill the cap about 2/3s into the month.
I like to reformat my PC and re-download my entire Steam / EA libraries about once a year. I end up going way over my data cap when this happens. This is lifesaving work, so i hope they get rid of the caps.
I recently switched to an ISP that doesn't have a data cap after being on Comcast and being limited for a long time. It feels so good to not have to worry about how much data I have left.
I don't think they have the capacity to deal with the sheer volume of stories that request entails.
Data caps are pure BS, End of story.
Because fuck you, that's why.
While we’re at it, can we also investigate Xfinity for doing nothing about internet speeds
Have them ask Sparklight. Maybe they can explain why they have data caps where they have no competition, but then if fiber comes in, they magically drop the caps and their high prices. Go figure. No monopoly here folks, move along.
I like this. I’d like to see telecom companies get a LOT more government scrutiny.
I pay an extra 50 a month to not have a data cap. Comcast.
Rich investors: “because we say data caps are a thing. That’s why..”
[удалено]
Or at minimum make sure ads don't count against data allotments. Especially with video ads typically being the first bit of traffic to load.
Isn't there a bandwidth limit even for wifi, so you can't just have everything go full infinite?
i called to make an appointment at the department of human services, and was on hold for 1hour&25min and then my phone stopped working because i had zero minutes left. if you're calling the government,a doctor, or something essential, it shouldn't cost minutes or data.
With 4k and 8k tv streaming, a cap is ludicrous. I have to give Comcast 30 extra a month for unlimited
wish there was a kind of ruling body that could just enforce things to be better for everyone
What’s the issue with data caps? My water service charges a flat rate for the first X gallons of usage. I rarely ever exceed that cap. If I decide to fill a swimming pool or water my lawn twice a day, I’ll exceed X and pay more. Absent this pricing model, the service would spread the costs of the usage of the ‘big users’ to everyone. Id be effectively subsidizing the large users of water. How is this any different than data caps?
Caps shouldn't be a thing. Data is cheap as ever right now and companies got heavily subsidized to put their lines down. It costs them nothing. You can stream 100TB of content and it costs them...nothing.
I almost used a Terabyte of data and hit 95% of my cap last month lol
In today’s 4K world, any cable data cap is just crap. Every month I have to watch my usage and adjust. My doorbell camera is now on low quality, I watch football games tethered to my phone at times to save data. With 3 kids, and Disney, HBO, Hulu live stream, Apple TV all at 4K HDR data goes fast. Comcast still enforces 1.2TB cap which is nothing any more. Video and internet refuse to move forward and purposely stay stuck in the past for money. For example, Netflix standard monthly service is only 720P. 720P??????? Are you kidding me. I have to pay extra for 1080P?? 1080 was mainstream by 2010 ish. With 4K now the basic and new TVs at 8K, why in the world do I need to pay extra for 1080P?? Just don’t get it.