8 ms·

Comcast and AT&T set data caps at 1 TB per month, knowing that we will all soon be doing much more traffic than that. Every year bandwidth requirements go up an

Comcast and AT&T set data caps at 1 TB per month, knowing that we will all soon be doing much more traffic than that. Every year bandwidth requirements go up and it's accelerating. Home internet access in the US went from unlimited usage to capped with $200 overage fees overnight. We need an "Effective Sustained Rate" law that says something like: If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely.

noncoml 9y ago
Net neutrality doesn’t have to do with caps.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  It actually kind of is related to data caps. There's many telcos who use a cap, but make it so certain websites (HBO, Facebook, etc) won't count towards your cap. This means that traffic is no longer being treated equally. It also means you're more likely to use services that don't count towards your data cap, so entrenched players are going to stay entrenched longer.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    I wonder if this will lead to capped content providers to mask their data as online gaming or other different traffic. A mod on the protocol both at servers and clients side would allow that just fine.
  - noncoml 9y ago
    That’s different. The GP was referring to global caps. What you mention is treating data differently(count vs non-count) which is exactly what NN is all about.
pitaj 9y ago
I'm sure you didn't mean to imply this, but I'd like to note that IIRC Title II regulations did not prevent data caps or threshold throttling.
- aceoflulu 9y ago
  Data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Right, but it does prevent zero-rating, which they need to make some of the more restrictive data caps not seem too onerous.
    - pitaj 9y ago
      Title II doesn't prevent zero-rating either.
rayiner 9y ago
> If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely. That's like saying that laptops must be marketed with their "effective sustained" battery life. The MacBook Pro can't be marketed as having 10 hours of wireless web, but rather just 2 hours of "effective sustained" performance. Regardless of whether it's a sensible measure for your typical user, who is actually likely to get the 10 hours because they're using their laptop for office and web browsing. Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely sensible thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet connection is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then going idle. It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print: https://dataplan.xfinity.com https://dataplan.xfinity.com. Note that outlawing data caps doesn't address the phenomenon of companies with market power being able to charge monopoly prices. It just redistributes the burden of that upcharge away from heavy data users to ordinary users. E.g. consider if you outlawed Apple's practice of charging $100, $200, etc., more for $15-20 worth of flash memory on an iPhone. Do you think Apple would just lower those prices and leave it at that? No, they'd raise prices on the base model. All you'd do is hurt the users who keep everything in the cloud in order to favor those who store a lot of data locally. (Unsurprisingly, price discrimination tactics that benefit ordinary users at the expense of power users are unpopular among power users.)
- taf2 9y ago
  So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? I’m not for regulating technology though because it’s by definition not set in stone. What might have been reasonable to measure in the 80s is out of touch with how it might be measured today. Ideally we outlaw deals that restrict competition that allows monopolies in the first place
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? But the baseline measure may not be useful to the customer. In the laptop example: much of the advance in "web browsing battery life" in the last several years has come from lower idle power usage, or being able to reach idle more quickly. An Ivy Bridge Core i5 laptop and a Kaby Lake Core i5 laptop may actually get similar "full load" battery life, but the Kaby Lake model might last twice as long for web browsing or general office use. Reporting the "full load" battery life will actually mislead the consumer about the typical battery life of the two laptops. Likewise, if you sell a gigabit cable connection with a 1 terabyte cap as a "3 mbps" connection, then you're misleading the customer about whether that's fast enough to do things like download an iTunes movie in a reasonable time, use a VPN into their work network, etc. Ironically, you might do more consumer harm by effectively upselling consumers to buy "faster" connections than they need.
shmerl 9y ago
Better, the law should ban these fleecing data caps.
ploxiln 9y ago
If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".
- staunch 9y ago
  There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    > There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.
wmf 9y ago
Note that the cap used to be ~300 GB and around the time people started hitting it they raised it to 1 TB. So history is kind of against your theory.
kstrauser 9y ago
I want a law requiring ISPs to post how much time per month you're allowed to use a connection at full speed. For instance, if you have a 100Mbps connection and a 100GB cap, then you're only allowed to use it for 10,000 seconds ~= 3 hours per month. Does your cell phone's LTE give you 50Mbps for up to 10GB? They're really selling you about 2000 seconds ~= 33 minutes per month. I think any advertisement that doesn't include this basic fact is misleading to the point of being a lie.
- StillBored 9y ago
  And, my own metric, of how many 56k modems do you need to get the same amount of data (@~14GB/month download rate). AKA, most cell phone plans this year, can't even download as much in a month as my 56k modem could in the late 1990's. In the end, the big scam here is that if anything netflix/etc traffic is probably less expensive per packet than most other services because netflix is more than happy to scatter their little caching boxes everywhere, so the ISP's backhaul/peering arrangement has less traffic...
Osiris 9y ago
I bought a business line from CenturyLink at 140/20 for $65/mn with no cap because it's a business line.

noncoml 9y ago

Net neutrality doesn’t have to do with caps.

jdavis703 9y ago
It actually kind of is related to data caps. There's many telcos who use a cap, but make it so certain websites (HBO, Facebook, etc) won't count towards your cap. This means that traffic is no longer being treated equally. It also means you're more likely to use services that don't count towards your data cap, so entrenched players are going to stay entrenched longer.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  I wonder if this will lead to capped content providers to mask their data as online gaming or other different traffic. A mod on the protocol both at servers and clients side would allow that just fine.
- noncoml 9y ago
  That’s different. The GP was referring to global caps. What you mention is treating data differently(count vs non-count) which is exactly what NN is all about.

pitaj 9y ago

I'm sure you didn't mean to imply this, but I'd like to note that IIRC Title II regulations did not prevent data caps or threshold throttling.

aceoflulu 9y ago
Data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  Right, but it does prevent zero-rating, which they need to make some of the more restrictive data caps not seem too onerous.
  - pitaj 9y ago
    Title II doesn't prevent zero-rating either.

rayiner 9y ago

> If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw data caps entirely. That's like saying that laptops must be marketed with their "effective sustained" battery life. The MacBook Pro can't be marketed as having 10 hours of wireless web, but rather just 2 hours of "effective sustained" performance. Regardless of whether it's a sensible measure for your typical user, who is actually likely to get the 10 hours because they're using their laptop for office and web browsing. Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely sensible thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet connection is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then going idle. It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print: https://dataplan.xfinity.com https://dataplan.xfinity.com. Note that outlawing data caps doesn't address the phenomenon of companies with market power being able to charge monopoly prices. It just redistributes the burden of that upcharge away from heavy data users to ordinary users. E.g. consider if you outlawed Apple's practice of charging $100, $200, etc., more for $15-20 worth of flash memory on an iPhone. Do you think Apple would just lower those prices and leave it at that? No, they'd raise prices on the base model. All you'd do is hurt the users who keep everything in the cloud in order to favor those who store a lot of data locally. (Unsurprisingly, price discrimination tactics that benefit ordinary users at the expense of power users are unpopular among power users.)

taf2 9y ago
So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? I’m not for regulating technology though because it’s by definition not set in stone. What might have been reasonable to measure in the 80s is out of touch with how it might be measured today. Ideally we outlaw deals that restrict competition that allows monopolies in the first place
- rayiner 9y ago
  > So then all the measurements are relative but at least there is an equal and measurable baseline? But the baseline measure may not be useful to the customer. In the laptop example: much of the advance in "web browsing battery life" in the last several years has come from lower idle power usage, or being able to reach idle more quickly. An Ivy Bridge Core i5 laptop and a Kaby Lake Core i5 laptop may actually get similar "full load" battery life, but the Kaby Lake model might last twice as long for web browsing or general office use. Reporting the "full load" battery life will actually mislead the consumer about the typical battery life of the two laptops. Likewise, if you sell a gigabit cable connection with a 1 terabyte cap as a "3 mbps" connection, then you're misleading the customer about whether that's fast enough to do things like download an iTunes movie in a reasonable time, use a VPN into their work network, etc. Ironically, you might do more consumer harm by effectively upselling consumers to buy "faster" connections than they need.

shmerl 9y ago

Better, the law should ban these fleecing data caps.

ploxiln 9y ago

If the caps apply equally to any and all data, I really have no problem with them, and neither should you. We're just asking for a content-agnostic utility. Not "as much as you can eat". Consider if electricity was "unlimited". "Unlimited" is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. Delivering lots of data to each of many subscribers is just not that easy and cheap. At least with explicit caps companies can compete by offering higher caps. Instead of mysterious limitations on "unlimited".

staunch 9y ago
There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. There's no technical or financial reason why every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household. The only expensive part is running conduit and it's a one-time cost. It's disappointing how many people buy into the talking points of these shitty corporations as they work hard to fleece and permanently damage an entire country.
- rayiner 9y ago
  > There's no "mess" with unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is not like electricity itself. It's a fundamentally cheap thing to flash LEDs down glass pipes. Electricity is actually a lot like Internet. Sending electrons down a wire isn't as cheap as sending flashes of light down optical fibers, but in both cases variable costs are vastly lower than the fixed costs.[1] In both cases, there is a total system capacity you can achieve for a given fixed cost. And in both cases, usage is such that what you're really trying to manage is the amount of fixed capacity in relation to usage peaks. It's fundamentally about managing congestion rather than delivering units of a product. > every major American city shouldn't have unlimited gigabit for $50/mo per household Other than the fact that it's not economically possible? Chattanooga charges $60 for 100 megabit and $70 for gigabit, and its just about breaking even. And Chattanooga is a very favorable city for fiber buildout: power lines are overhead, not buried (the same reason Google built in places like Kansas City, not San Francisco), and its a southern city with relatively low cost of labor. New York, D.C., etc., are all going to be more expensive. Nor is $50 for gigabit common in western countries for fiber, at least in places where fiber isn't subsidized. Gigabit fiber in the U.K. is $70-100/month. In Sweden and Denmark it's $120+/month (and typically have multi-thousand up-front install costs). [1] The typical American pays 12 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. The fuel cost for a fossil fuel plant is about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while for nuclear it's less than 1 cent. Almost all of the cost of electricity, just like with broadband, is operations and maintenance of the infrastructure, and fixed cost recovery.

wmf 9y ago

Note that the cap used to be ~300 GB and around the time people started hitting it they raised it to 1 TB. So history is kind of against your theory.

kstrauser 9y ago

I want a law requiring ISPs to post how much time per month you're allowed to use a connection at full speed. For instance, if you have a 100Mbps connection and a 100GB cap, then you're only allowed to use it for 10,000 seconds ~= 3 hours per month. Does your cell phone's LTE give you 50Mbps for up to 10GB? They're really selling you about 2000 seconds ~= 33 minutes per month. I think any advertisement that doesn't include this basic fact is misleading to the point of being a lie.

StillBored 9y ago
And, my own metric, of how many 56k modems do you need to get the same amount of data (@~14GB/month download rate). AKA, most cell phone plans this year, can't even download as much in a month as my 56k modem could in the late 1990's. In the end, the big scam here is that if anything netflix/etc traffic is probably less expensive per packet than most other services because netflix is more than happy to scatter their little caching boxes everywhere, so the ISP's backhaul/peering arrangement has less traffic...

Osiris 9y ago

I bought a business line from CenturyLink at 140/20 for $65/mn with no cap because it's a business line.