8 ms·
Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is usually one terabyte. There’s a long list of them at https://broadbandnow.com/inter
by strenholme 7y ago
Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is usually one terabyte. There’s a long list of them at https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps , the biggest offenders being AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Viasat (which, yes, is satellite Internet), and Comcast (a.k.a. XFINITY).
The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does not have data caps is because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for seven years when trying to buy other companies.
- maxyme 7y agoNot sure if this is still the case but in some areas Comcast used to limit the cap to 100gb unless you bundled TV with your internet plan, then it went up to 1tb.
- S_A_P 7y agoThis is still the case in the Houston Tx area. I am paying 50 extra bucks to have "unlimited" internets because kids. We averaged 7 days before our 1TB was used each month.
- umvi 7y agoAre all of your kids simultaneously streaming hours of video every day?
- knd775 7y agoIt is extremely easy to use 100GB in a month. I have trouble staying below 1TB of usage. Some Xbox One games are over 100GB by themselves.
- rxhernandez 7y agoDo you download 10 new games every month? I dont understand why y'all are downvoting this; it's an honest question.
- Topgamer7 7y agoPretty sure AAA games can get up to like 50GB.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoBelieve this guy, he's the 7th top gamer. The HDD bloat really stuck out to me when I looked at the upcoming WoW Classic Requirements - the current game requires 70 GB of space, but Classic requires 5GB. All games, even old ones trying to stay modern, require a huge amount of space.
- bullsbarry 7y agoI've been thinking about this, then it dawned on me that the current live game has everything in WoW classic, and then everything in every expansion after it. The amount of video and high resolution textures in the current version of the game dwarf the original.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoAbsolutely true. Of course, it's silly for me to think 5-70 GB in 15 years is a huge jump. Doom 1 (1993) was 2.3 MB, and Doom 3 in 2004 required 2.2 GB.
- gumby 7y agoHappens in hardware too: the way Sony made the PS2 compatible with the previous PS ("PS 1") was simply to place an entire first ten playstation on a corner of the PCB. Cheaper and more compatible than writing an emulation mode. Object encapsulation made physical.
- ascagnel_ 7y agoThe emulation there was actually a happy accident -- the MIPS processor of the original PlayStation was repurposed as the sound chip for the PS2. Sony realized during development that they could take advantage of the hardware for backwards compatibility for minimal cost. The PS3 (Emotion Engine) and Nintendo DS (GBA cart slot) are the only consoles I'm aware of that have hardware only for backwards compatibility (although some games used the cart slot for pseudo-peripherals, such as rumble support or a guitar "grip").
- umvi 7y agoI can't really relate; I barely use 10 GB per month, but then again I don't stream lots of video or play video games.
- thelittleone 7y ago100GB... amazing. How far we have come from the day when a enjoyable game fit on 2-3 3.5” floppy disks. :) I’ve played some new games with amazing graphics. But 100GB? Is it mostly hi-res textures?
- sascha_sl 7y agoThat, and other resources tend to get compressed less as bandwidth and storage becomes cheaper overall. Less compression means less load on already underpowered console hardware and more importantly, less memory used, high end games tend to max out their IO and outright memory map things straight from the disk. GTA V on last gen was notorious for reading off the optical disk and HDD simultaniously to spend less time moving things around in memory. Disk failures are a major reason for performance degradation on consoles and why putting SSDs into consoles is a very good idea.
- knd775 7y agoUncompressed audio is apparently a huge portion of the storage footprint of modern games.
- ascagnel_ 7y agoUncompressed, multi-language audio so publishers can ship one disc in all regions. Microsoft supports per-region download slices, but I don't think many publishers take advantage of that because Sony and Nintendo don't support it.
- kristofferR 7y agoMicrosofts own Gears of War 4 is 133GB.
- kabdib 7y agoMy first commercial game would fit in the icon of one of my current company's games . . .
- S_A_P 7y agoWe have 7 people in the house and I can breakdown the usage like this: Mac sync between 5 machines (this was surprising to me) Instagram/social(I thought YouTube would be 2nd place) YouTube Netflix
- celticmusic 7y agothat should be considered predatory and illegal.
- basch 7y agomight be cheaper to let a stack of blu-rays loop.
- 99052882514569 7y agoA cap of 1 TB seems completely reasonable to me. edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach it, seems completely reasonable to me.
- mdszy 7y agoI've gone over mine, quite easily. It's complete bullshit and there's no practical reason for it beyond fucking over customers.
- Spivak 7y agoThe practical reason is that the people who use more data are exactly the people who are willing to pay more for internet service. Can't really fault a company for squeezing the customers that have proven themselves more dependent on internet service.
- mdszy 7y agoWhy should I pay more just because a company thinks I can or would be willing to? I'm not willing to.
- Spivak 7y agoThen don't? Prove them wrong!
- mdszy 7y agoah yes i'll just go ahead and choose between my two options 1. pay out the ass for the service i need 2. not have internet in 2019 oh boy oh golly i sure do have some reasonable choices here don't i
- Spivak 7y agoThat's exactly my point. You'll pay out the ass because the service is that valuable to you and the alternatives -- using public internet, cellular, satellite, becoming your own ISP, paying another provider the build-out costs to run a line to your house, or just going without -- are worse. I mean it sucks when a company has so much leverage over you because you need what they're selling but you're not entitled to cheap high speed internet. You would have a case if you had no means to get internet access at all but that really isn't the case here. Like this thread is hilarious because a bunch of hackers whose lives are on the internet and are deriving probably thousands of dollars of value from their high speed internet connection are mad when ISPs realize this and charge more appropriately.
- alexkiritz 7y agoI can’t imagine many people use Viasat to watch Netflix when satellite TV exists. Satellite based ISPs are the only ones with a legitimate reason to impose data caps.
- Reedx 7y agoWith AT&T Fiber - 1000Mbps up/down for $100/mo - you get unlimited data. The slower plans are capped at 1TB, but you can add unlimited for $30/mo (or pay exorbitant overages). For wireless I'm hanging onto a grandfathered unlimited plan. It doesn't allow tethering though.
- yegle 7y agoThe $100/month 1Gbps plan used to be $70/month and ATT just includes the additional $30 to make it unlimited. There was a short period of time when the old $70/m plan includes unlimited data, which is what I'm using.
- ding_ding 7y agoJust as a counterpoint to some of the people talking about how they use far more than a terabyte per month: I work fully remotely, video chat often, have someone else in the house watching netflix a lot. I stream music while working. I download large software packages often. 1TB is plenty for me. A terabyte is a reasonable cap I think. If you want more, you can pay for unlimited data as described in the parent post.
- ding_ding 7y agobring on the downvotes, orange-siters
- bronco21016 7y agoThat’s great. You state you have two people in your household. Have a couple of kids and add several more devices that play games, download apps and updates, stream hours of video, and get to download ever increasing ads. I bet that 1 TB wouldn’t be very adequate anymore. Or, just wait 5 more years. Those files you remotely access will be even bigger, your video chats use even more bandwidth as quality increases, and Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content. They’re playing the long game here. They put these data caps in place realizing full well that 90% of people won’t hit them today but in 5-10 years when 90% of customers do hit the caps they’ll cry out about how the caps have been in place for years and were never an issue. You’re playing right into their hand.
- Havoc 7y agoNot a big fan of caps as a concept, but 1 TB is quite high. You're not gonna hit that easily with normal consumer use
- bradenb 7y agoAnecdata: I have CenturyLink gigabit fiber service with no data cap for $80/mo.
- jyrkesh 7y agoFortunately, CenturyLink explicitly exempts their gigabit service from the cap. Hoping that never changes, but it's a good step.
- typenil 7y agoSurprised Wave Broadband isn't on the list. They didn't tell me about their cap, but were happy to charge hundreds in overages until I noticed the discrepancy.