11 ms·

I'm not sure data caps are a disease, as such. It costs money to move data around. Caps on "unlimited" deals are obviously a dodgy sales technique, but I don't

I'm not sure data caps are a disease, as such. It costs money to move data around. Caps on "unlimited" deals are obviously a dodgy sales technique, but I don't think that's what's being discussed.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
The natural data cap is the actual line speed of the connection. That would mean a 10Mbit connection == 3.24TB/month That's definitely a cap that is directly related to line speed. But these 150GB caps are purely because the internet companies are also content companies - and their content channels are zero rated. And with a 10Mbit connection, it only takes 33 hours to exceed their arbitrary cap over the whole month.
- woah 8y ago
  That would only make sense if everyone used a totally consistent amount of bandwidth 24/7. The reality is that most bandwidth is used between 5-10pm. Bandwidth caps cause people to use bandwidth sparingly and ease congestion. To allay your complaints about unfairness, you could structure it so that the caps are looser in off hours like 3am, but then again, that wouldn’t benefit most people because they don’t use the internet at 3am. The best system would be to charge based on bandwidth usage, and raise and lower prices based on congestion per tower. But most ISPs don’t have the billing capability to support that, and bandwidth caps sort of approximate it.
  - ryukafalz 8y ago
    >To allay your complaints about unfairness, you could structure it so that the caps are looser in off hours like 3am, but then again, that wouldn’t benefit most people because they don’t use the internet at 3am. On the other hand, something like this might incentivize developers to take advantage of lower pricing during periods of lower congestion. Mobile OSes tend to provide the user a choice between downloading updates anytime or only when on WiFi, but if the pricing structure made this useful, there’s no reason they couldn’t download updates overnight too.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Back in the early 2000s, before most plans move to "unlimited", some ISPs in Portugal did exactly that: they had rather small caps, but then unlimited between 1am and 7am. And we did have developers take advantage of that; for example, there was a popular fork of eMule that had extra scheduling features, so it could automatically run just in that period.
      - gcb0 8y ago
        then they realized they could get away without even that modicum of respect to the clients, because, well they run a legal monopoly. Either you only have one option (fiber, or even cable in some markets) or the 3 to 4 offerings have the same "deals" across the board. I try very hard to be civil on HN, but everyone defending artifical data caps are a bunch of idiots (in the true sense of the greek work: a person that can't live in society and should be voted to be ostracized).
        hueving 8y ago
        >I try very hard to be civil on HN, but everyone defending artifical data caps are a bunch of idiots Not that hard I guess. Data caps are the only reason you have affordable consumer internet because they allow a significant amount of oversubscription which matches the mostly-idle bursty behavior of consumers. You can get leased lines from ISPs with no caps easily. You just won't like the real price that comes with guaranteeing a customer that kind of bandwidth.
        crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        And why should content creators also be the ones who control the very last mile of the internet in the USA? You don't think there's something very wrong with that arrangement? Back in the day, we used to take a dim look at companies who amassed horizontal or vertical monopolies, and broke them up. Well, they're like the replicators from Stargate SG1 and have reassembled into something even uglier. And yet when we discuss this, you fall back on caps and justification by contention ratio... But why are their services zero rated, eh? Of course we know why - it's to kill the opposing services like Netflix, Hulu, or others... except for their services! Logically, the actual lines should belong to the people (government). The money We've(royal) paid has been above and beyond what it would have cost for a REMC-style internet-ification. I don't want the US or State govts being ISPs themselves, but muni style arrangements have worked out well in the past - except when Comcast and ATT haven't lobbied them out of existence.
- SpaceManiac 8y ago
  > purely because the internet companies are also content companies I have no doubt this is a reason, but most ISPs also oversell their bandwidth. If every customer with a 10Mbit line is only using it 10% of the time, your upstream lines only 'need' to be 10% of 10Mbit * the number of customers (plus whatever margin for spikes).
  - woah 8y ago
    A 100mbit connection that is not oversold can easily run a few hundred to a thousand dollars a month.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      Maybe a decade ago. It's down below $50/month now from a major exchange point. Even less if you deal in larger quantities as ISPs would.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    It's called contention. Typical ratios are about 20:1 - for every 20Mbits of throughput they sell to customers, they have about 1Mbit of throughput to the internet. Leased lines are uncontended, but they're also vastly more expensive than conventional broadband services.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      I don't care how they do contention. That's a business plan. What I do care about is fraudulent business practices. I expect a minimum speed alongside a maximum speed. And if their contention ratio is 10:1 then I expect 1Mbit-10Mbit for that connection. But no, the content/internet media companies play insane games, zero rating their stuff, enforcing arbitrary 'kill netflix' limits, and evil layer 7 filtering. They need broken up into lines owned by the state, service over lines sold to whomever provides service (like an ISP or a content company), and customers leasing the lines like how power works. These megagiant media corps should have never owned the physical connections. At all.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  The problem is there's simply not enough capacity for _everyone_ to use their 10 Mbit connection at the same time. That's a necessary property of efficient packet-switched networks. As a result of this, people who use more total data generally incur higher infrastructure costs to the provider than those who use less; even if those two groups of people have the exact same link speed.
- hueving 8y ago
  The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of customers. Traffic out to the internet involves way more than your last mile connection.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of customers. The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of active customers. But you don't need monthly limits for that, it's true all the time inherently. It's also kind of a scam on the ISP side because content providers are generally happy to peer with ISPs at no cost to the ISP, so it's not as if there's a non-artificial bottleneck there.
dkfndodbxob 8y ago
It doesn't really cost money to move data around. The biggest cost by far is building the infrastructure. If the capacity is available, the cost of using it is minimal.
- munk-a 8y ago
  I'd assume ISPs are taking infrastructure into their cost calculations, even in a case where the initial build out was government subsidized... things break, there are ongoing costs. And my totally uninformed understanding is that the ongoing maintenance costs, and the costs of expanded service are both pretty minimal.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Both are incorrect. Almost no ISP infrastructure is “government subsidized.” Almost all the subsidies are urban ISPs subsidizing rural ones. There was a tiny bit of actual government subsidy under Obama as part of the post-recession stimulus. And ongoing maintenance and support costs are very high. Even if you don’t trust Verizon’s SEC disclosures (showing 5% or less in operating profit for wireline) look at the financial statements for something like Chattanooga’s EBP. The vast majority of revenue goes to ongoing costs, before you even get to paying down the initial build out.
    - shmerl 8y ago
      Given severe lack of competition among ISPs in US, I don't buy the bogus argument that current prices are fair. Simple market logic suggests, that they overcharge, because they can. Therefore they do have more than enough money for their upgrades. And on top of that, most simply prefer to pocket them instead of investing into the network, with "no one needs it" excuse. Something they would never have done with healthy competition.
- Ma8ee 8y ago
  It does cost money to move data around, even if it is an upfront cost when you build the infrastructure. When your users move enough data that you are getting close to the capacity of your infrastructure you need to invest more money to extend your infrastructure. Or to express it slightly differently: if there weren’t any data to move you wouldn’t have to build any infrastructure and you wouldn’t have any costs. If you want to move data you have to build the infrastructure which cost money, which means that it costs money to move data.
scarejunba 8y ago
Fi's data is just "pay more get more", which makes sense to me. I don't think unlimited deals make sense since there's a true marginal cost here.
- plussed_reader 8y ago
  Up to $100/6GB of mobile data. The next 9GB of mobile data are at normal up/down rates, then everything over 15GB is metered for the rest of the billing cycle. 'Bill Protection'.
  - xur17 8y ago
    It's $20 for a plan + $10/GB of mobile data. Not sure where $100/6GB comes from.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      Who is keeping multiple plans? You use one phone and one data plan and get fleeced when you blow past your data plan.
      - xur17 8y ago
        I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. I presented pricing for a single user on a single plan.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

I'm not sure data caps are a disease, as such. It costs money to move data around. Caps on "unlimited" deals are obviously a dodgy sales technique, but I don't think that's what's being discussed.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

The natural data cap is the actual line speed of the connection. That would mean a 10Mbit connection == 3.24TB/month That's definitely a cap that is directly related to line speed. But these 150GB caps are purely because the internet companies are also content companies - and their content channels are zero rated. And with a 10Mbit connection, it only takes 33 hours to exceed their arbitrary cap over the whole month.

woah 8y ago
That would only make sense if everyone used a totally consistent amount of bandwidth 24/7. The reality is that most bandwidth is used between 5-10pm. Bandwidth caps cause people to use bandwidth sparingly and ease congestion. To allay your complaints about unfairness, you could structure it so that the caps are looser in off hours like 3am, but then again, that wouldn’t benefit most people because they don’t use the internet at 3am. The best system would be to charge based on bandwidth usage, and raise and lower prices based on congestion per tower. But most ISPs don’t have the billing capability to support that, and bandwidth caps sort of approximate it.
- ryukafalz 8y ago
  >To allay your complaints about unfairness, you could structure it so that the caps are looser in off hours like 3am, but then again, that wouldn’t benefit most people because they don’t use the internet at 3am. On the other hand, something like this might incentivize developers to take advantage of lower pricing during periods of lower congestion. Mobile OSes tend to provide the user a choice between downloading updates anytime or only when on WiFi, but if the pricing structure made this useful, there’s no reason they couldn’t download updates overnight too.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Back in the early 2000s, before most plans move to "unlimited", some ISPs in Portugal did exactly that: they had rather small caps, but then unlimited between 1am and 7am. And we did have developers take advantage of that; for example, there was a popular fork of eMule that had extra scheduling features, so it could automatically run just in that period.
    - gcb0 8y ago
      then they realized they could get away without even that modicum of respect to the clients, because, well they run a legal monopoly. Either you only have one option (fiber, or even cable in some markets) or the 3 to 4 offerings have the same "deals" across the board. I try very hard to be civil on HN, but everyone defending artifical data caps are a bunch of idiots (in the true sense of the greek work: a person that can't live in society and should be voted to be ostracized).
      - hueving 8y ago
        >I try very hard to be civil on HN, but everyone defending artifical data caps are a bunch of idiots Not that hard I guess. Data caps are the only reason you have affordable consumer internet because they allow a significant amount of oversubscription which matches the mostly-idle bursty behavior of consumers. You can get leased lines from ISPs with no caps easily. You just won't like the real price that comes with guaranteeing a customer that kind of bandwidth.
        crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        And why should content creators also be the ones who control the very last mile of the internet in the USA? You don't think there's something very wrong with that arrangement? Back in the day, we used to take a dim look at companies who amassed horizontal or vertical monopolies, and broke them up. Well, they're like the replicators from Stargate SG1 and have reassembled into something even uglier. And yet when we discuss this, you fall back on caps and justification by contention ratio... But why are their services zero rated, eh? Of course we know why - it's to kill the opposing services like Netflix, Hulu, or others... except for their services! Logically, the actual lines should belong to the people (government). The money We've(royal) paid has been above and beyond what it would have cost for a REMC-style internet-ification. I don't want the US or State govts being ISPs themselves, but muni style arrangements have worked out well in the past - except when Comcast and ATT haven't lobbied them out of existence.
SpaceManiac 8y ago
> purely because the internet companies are also content companies I have no doubt this is a reason, but most ISPs also oversell their bandwidth. If every customer with a 10Mbit line is only using it 10% of the time, your upstream lines only 'need' to be 10% of 10Mbit * the number of customers (plus whatever margin for spikes).
- woah 8y ago
  A 100mbit connection that is not oversold can easily run a few hundred to a thousand dollars a month.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Maybe a decade ago. It's down below $50/month now from a major exchange point. Even less if you deal in larger quantities as ISPs would.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  It's called contention. Typical ratios are about 20:1 - for every 20Mbits of throughput they sell to customers, they have about 1Mbit of throughput to the internet. Leased lines are uncontended, but they're also vastly more expensive than conventional broadband services.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    I don't care how they do contention. That's a business plan. What I do care about is fraudulent business practices. I expect a minimum speed alongside a maximum speed. And if their contention ratio is 10:1 then I expect 1Mbit-10Mbit for that connection. But no, the content/internet media companies play insane games, zero rating their stuff, enforcing arbitrary 'kill netflix' limits, and evil layer 7 filtering. They need broken up into lines owned by the state, service over lines sold to whomever provides service (like an ISP or a content company), and customers leasing the lines like how power works. These megagiant media corps should have never owned the physical connections. At all.
Ajedi32 8y ago
The problem is there's simply not enough capacity for _everyone_ to use their 10 Mbit connection at the same time. That's a necessary property of efficient packet-switched networks. As a result of this, people who use more total data generally incur higher infrastructure costs to the provider than those who use less; even if those two groups of people have the exact same link speed.
hueving 8y ago
The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of customers. Traffic out to the internet involves way more than your last mile connection.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of customers. The natural data cap is the line speed of the ISP's peering links to upstream providers divided by the number of active customers. But you don't need monthly limits for that, it's true all the time inherently. It's also kind of a scam on the ISP side because content providers are generally happy to peer with ISPs at no cost to the ISP, so it's not as if there's a non-artificial bottleneck there.

dkfndodbxob 8y ago

It doesn't really cost money to move data around. The biggest cost by far is building the infrastructure. If the capacity is available, the cost of using it is minimal.

munk-a 8y ago
I'd assume ISPs are taking infrastructure into their cost calculations, even in a case where the initial build out was government subsidized... things break, there are ongoing costs. And my totally uninformed understanding is that the ongoing maintenance costs, and the costs of expanded service are both pretty minimal.
- rayiner 8y ago
  Both are incorrect. Almost no ISP infrastructure is “government subsidized.” Almost all the subsidies are urban ISPs subsidizing rural ones. There was a tiny bit of actual government subsidy under Obama as part of the post-recession stimulus. And ongoing maintenance and support costs are very high. Even if you don’t trust Verizon’s SEC disclosures (showing 5% or less in operating profit for wireline) look at the financial statements for something like Chattanooga’s EBP. The vast majority of revenue goes to ongoing costs, before you even get to paying down the initial build out.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    Given severe lack of competition among ISPs in US, I don't buy the bogus argument that current prices are fair. Simple market logic suggests, that they overcharge, because they can. Therefore they do have more than enough money for their upgrades. And on top of that, most simply prefer to pocket them instead of investing into the network, with "no one needs it" excuse. Something they would never have done with healthy competition.
Ma8ee 8y ago
It does cost money to move data around, even if it is an upfront cost when you build the infrastructure. When your users move enough data that you are getting close to the capacity of your infrastructure you need to invest more money to extend your infrastructure. Or to express it slightly differently: if there weren’t any data to move you wouldn’t have to build any infrastructure and you wouldn’t have any costs. If you want to move data you have to build the infrastructure which cost money, which means that it costs money to move data.

scarejunba 8y ago

Fi's data is just "pay more get more", which makes sense to me. I don't think unlimited deals make sense since there's a true marginal cost here.

plussed_reader 8y ago
Up to $100/6GB of mobile data. The next 9GB of mobile data are at normal up/down rates, then everything over 15GB is metered for the rest of the billing cycle. 'Bill Protection'.
- xur17 8y ago
  It's $20 for a plan + $10/GB of mobile data. Not sure where $100/6GB comes from.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    Who is keeping multiple plans? You use one phone and one data plan and get fleeced when you blow past your data plan.
    - xur17 8y ago
      I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. I presented pricing for a single user on a single plan.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]