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> 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

> 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: Go idle? Since when? Steam auto updates my games, Windows downloads multi-gigabyte updates in the background. My Android phone syncs files in the background to cloud storage, and on a nightly basis finds a good dozen or so apps to auto-update. For many people, Alexa now streams music in the background whenever they are home. Multiplayer online games nowdays have voice chat, increasingly richer and more populated worlds, and support video streaming of one's exploits. Even that 5MB Facebook page is actually an endlessly scrolling multimedia fest, that starts streaming videos as they come into view. Heck Hacker News is one of the few paginated sites left!

icebraining 9y ago
It's not "endlessly scrolling", it's scrolling for the few minutes you're looking at it. Nobody scrolls FB pages - or even downloads updates - for 24h in a day, and it would be absurd to limit speeds as if they did.
- com2kid 9y ago
  Average usage of FB is 50 minutes a day. Snapchat has 30 minutes. Reddit has some ungodly number, but is much less multimedia heavy. And that is average, I know multiple people who average ~2hrs a day on Facebook.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Even if you’re reading FB 50 minutes a day, you’re probably only downloading 5-10 minutes of that time. In the last two months, The FB app has used 557 MB of data on my iPhone. That’s about 1% of my soft data cap over that time with VZN.
    - com2kid 9y ago
      Checking my Laptop's network usage, over the last 30 days, Chrome has downloaded 88 GB of data. To be fair, I stream movies using the Netflix website, 3 movies, so approximately 18GB to video. The rest? Who knows. Youtube is certainly part of it, though I rarely watch videos full screen so whatever 480p takes up. Then there are mobile apps like Snapchat which, for heavy users, can eat up an easy 5GB or more per month. I had the Chrome bandwidth monitor open while researching that number. The 3 or 4 articles I read to figure out the average Snapchat data use ended up themselves using 36MB of data! (and this is with an ad blocker running...) Figure it took me 3 minutes (not really) to do the research. that is 12MB per minute of data consumption just browsing the internet for references! My overall point here is that data usage has exploded, and not just for consumption of streaming media.
cweagans 9y ago
This. Even when I'm sleeping, my internet connection is literally never idle. I wouldn't consider myself to be a heavy internet user - demanding and impatient, maybe, but I'm always clocking in at < 1000GB.

icebraining 9y ago

It's not "endlessly scrolling", it's scrolling for the few minutes you're looking at it. Nobody scrolls FB pages - or even downloads updates - for 24h in a day, and it would be absurd to limit speeds as if they did.

com2kid 9y ago
Average usage of FB is 50 minutes a day. Snapchat has 30 minutes. Reddit has some ungodly number, but is much less multimedia heavy. And that is average, I know multiple people who average ~2hrs a day on Facebook.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Even if you’re reading FB 50 minutes a day, you’re probably only downloading 5-10 minutes of that time. In the last two months, The FB app has used 557 MB of data on my iPhone. That’s about 1% of my soft data cap over that time with VZN.
  - com2kid 9y ago
    Checking my Laptop's network usage, over the last 30 days, Chrome has downloaded 88 GB of data. To be fair, I stream movies using the Netflix website, 3 movies, so approximately 18GB to video. The rest? Who knows. Youtube is certainly part of it, though I rarely watch videos full screen so whatever 480p takes up. Then there are mobile apps like Snapchat which, for heavy users, can eat up an easy 5GB or more per month. I had the Chrome bandwidth monitor open while researching that number. The 3 or 4 articles I read to figure out the average Snapchat data use ended up themselves using 36MB of data! (and this is with an ad blocker running...) Figure it took me 3 minutes (not really) to do the research. that is 12MB per minute of data consumption just browsing the internet for references! My overall point here is that data usage has exploded, and not just for consumption of streaming media.

cweagans 9y ago

This. Even when I'm sleeping, my internet connection is literally never idle. I wouldn't consider myself to be a heavy internet user - demanding and impatient, maybe, but I'm always clocking in at < 1000GB.