6 ms·

As someone who comes from a country where monthly data caps for home internet are completely unheard of and it's standard to have internet with download speeds

by utf985 7y ago

As someone who comes from a country where monthly data caps for home internet are completely unheard of and it's standard to have internet with download speeds between 5 and 10 MB/s for roughly $20/month since circa 2006, I find it both puzzling and worrying that capped home broadband can still exist in any developed country, especially with such tiny limits and ridiculous prices that some of the posters here have mentioned. A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single person household.

throwanem 7y ago
Comcast, and effectively all US broadband providers, are massively underprovisioned for the quantity of service they've sold, because that was a good way to make a lot of money and because, until very recently, it was quite difficult for residential customers to actually use enough bandwidth for the underprovisioning to pose an issue. Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made.
- rayiner 7y ago
  All consumer broadband providers everywhere are heavily overprovisioned. Guaranteed bandwidth costs hundreds to thousands of dollars per month. I haven't seen more recent studies on this, but as of 2014, U.S. providers were less overprovisioned than ones in Europe: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3352 https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3352 > During peak hours, U.S. actual download speeds were 96% of what was advertised, compared to Europe where consumers received only 74% of advertised download speeds. The U.S. also fared better in terms of latency and packet loss.
  - kristofferR 7y ago
    That last stat is totally useless - I'd much rather get 75% of my the advertised speed on my unlimited 75Mbit/$20 connection than 100% of my capped 20Mbit/$40 connection. The report you link to is unfortunately also woefully outdated, it's from 2014 using data from 2011.
- magicalist 7y ago
  > Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made. This sounds like a cynical take on their motives but is actually just buying into the narrative the ISPs have pushed that these caps are because the bits are limited and caps introduce fairness. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-doesnt-throttle-heaviest-internet-users-anymore/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-... In actuality Comcast has outright said it's a business decision, not a technological one, and at&t said uverse had no need for caps unlike their old dsl network and then added them anyways. It's rent seeking, plain and simple. The exact same way that the extra cable fees go up multiple times a year outside the advertised contract price and uncorrelated with inflation, government requirements or broadcast carriage fees. And then they spin it as fairness for the heaviest users to pay more and justify it as only 1 in 20 people have to pay it anyways, so, hey, don't worry about it.
  - luma 7y ago
    Notably, Comcast does not have bandwidth caps in markets where FIOS or other high speed providers have coverage. These caps are purely a way to capitalize on a monopoly position.
    - btgeekboy 7y ago
      This is not true. Anecdotally, Comcast has caps in the Seattle area, where they have multiple competitors, including Frontier FIOS.
      - luma 7y ago
        Here is their official list: https://dataplan.xfinity.com/faq/ https://dataplan.xfinity.com/faq/ Comcast doesn't consider local(ish) providers as competition, this really only applies to Verizon etc.
    - jyrkesh 7y ago
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  My current Comcast cap is 1TB a month ($10 per 50GB over that). I discovered when I had someone's son staying at my house that watching Netflix all day at maximum quality settings will burn through that in a little over 3 weeks. Approximately 3GB an hour is consumed.
hedora 7y ago
Capped broadband is a new development in the US. The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality. Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Capped broadband is a new development in the US. No, it's not. Published cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers, prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Now we just need the caps to be mandatory with all service advertisements and signups and it almost might make sense.
- DannyB2 7y ago
  > Capped broadband is a new development in the US. Shirley you mean capped but unlimited broadband. At least the throttling will be unlimited. Maybe the caps will be unlimited too. And the excuses. And mysterious service outages.
- coldpie 7y ago
  > The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. Let's not beat around the bush. The FCC as a whole is not doing this. Republicans, who form a majority of the FCC's voting body, are. Elections have consequences.
nguoi 7y ago
>A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days Final Fantasy XV is the biggest I've seen, 100GB recommended on Steam. No doubt there's even bigger.
- nuclearghost 7y ago
  Gears 4 Approximate size 117.53 GB https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gears-of-war-4/9nblggh4pbbm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gears-of-war-4/9nblggh4pbb...
- shadowoflight 7y ago
  Also, updates are not inconsequential. I've had it happen multiple times where my PS4 has between 2 and 5 update files that are each 5-15GB (sometimes as large as 20-30GB, but that's a rarity) queued up in the same day, and that can happen multiple times a month. Combine that with some 4K streaming, and the 1TB data cap Comcast has in my area looks tiny.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full. I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that. I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Thankfully Steam can soak up a reasonable amount of your internet's pipes and does use delta files.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hos234 7y ago
Competition between telcos is the answer. In many developed countries the Telco wars/market capture happened long long ago. In most cases there were just one or two winners, who then had no great incentive to upgrade infra. In the markets were the wars are ongoing, low rates will last until some player wins.
- trilila 7y ago
  In some countries even with two or three providers you get a lot faster internet connections without limits.
rayiner 7y ago
The median monthly data usage on Comcast's network is under 200GB per month: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-network-usage https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-.... Even cord cutters average under 500GB per month: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/charter-data-use-rising-rapidly-as-cord-cutters-average-400gb-a-month https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/chart.... Even among uncapped users, less than 5% use more than 1TB (which is a typical cap): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/terabyte-using-cable-customers-double-increasing-risk-of-data-cap-fees https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/terab.... Note also that data caps don't exist in many places in the US either. For example, Comcast has no data caps here in Maryland. Verizon will only start bugging you if you hit 10TB+ several months in a row.
LinuxBender 7y ago
I am on Comcast/Xfinity with a 400mb/s plan and yet I still have a 1TB cap. My household, between Steam, Blizzard, Netflix, others, can easily get close to that cap. If I surpass the cap, my costs go up exponentially.
- paulmd 7y ago
  In many markets they offer you a $50/mo upsell for unlimited data usage.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Thanks for the tip, I will ask them about this.
trilila 7y ago
My thoughts exactly, and i come from a country where 1Gbps is pretty standard.
papln 7y ago
How many 50GB games do you download each month?

by utf985 7y ago

throwanem 7y ago

Comcast, and effectively all US broadband providers, are massively underprovisioned for the quantity of service they've sold, because that was a good way to make a lot of money and because, until very recently, it was quite difficult for residential customers to actually use enough bandwidth for the underprovisioning to pose an issue. Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made.

rayiner 7y ago
All consumer broadband providers everywhere are heavily overprovisioned. Guaranteed bandwidth costs hundreds to thousands of dollars per month. I haven't seen more recent studies on this, but as of 2014, U.S. providers were less overprovisioned than ones in Europe: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3352 https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3352 > During peak hours, U.S. actual download speeds were 96% of what was advertised, compared to Europe where consumers received only 74% of advertised download speeds. The U.S. also fared better in terms of latency and packet loss.
- kristofferR 7y ago
  That last stat is totally useless - I'd much rather get 75% of my the advertised speed on my unlimited 75Mbit/$20 connection than 100% of my capped 20Mbit/$40 connection. The report you link to is unfortunately also woefully outdated, it's from 2014 using data from 2011.
magicalist 7y ago
> Now, with the advent of 4k streaming and similar popular consumer services that actually do require significant bandwidth, it's not surprising to see this sort of activity as a means of avoiding the need to provision backhaul equal to the promises these companies have made. This sounds like a cynical take on their motives but is actually just buying into the narrative the ISPs have pushed that these caps are because the bits are limited and caps introduce fairness. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-doesnt-throttle-heaviest-internet-users-anymore/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-... In actuality Comcast has outright said it's a business decision, not a technological one, and at&t said uverse had no need for caps unlike their old dsl network and then added them anyways. It's rent seeking, plain and simple. The exact same way that the extra cable fees go up multiple times a year outside the advertised contract price and uncorrelated with inflation, government requirements or broadcast carriage fees. And then they spin it as fairness for the heaviest users to pay more and justify it as only 1 in 20 people have to pay it anyways, so, hey, don't worry about it.
- luma 7y ago
  Notably, Comcast does not have bandwidth caps in markets where FIOS or other high speed providers have coverage. These caps are purely a way to capitalize on a monopoly position.
  - btgeekboy 7y ago
    This is not true. Anecdotally, Comcast has caps in the Seattle area, where they have multiple competitors, including Frontier FIOS.
    - luma 7y ago
      Here is their official list: https://dataplan.xfinity.com/faq/ https://dataplan.xfinity.com/faq/ Comcast doesn't consider local(ish) providers as competition, this really only applies to Verizon etc.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
tenebrisalietum 7y ago
My current Comcast cap is 1TB a month ($10 per 50GB over that). I discovered when I had someone's son staying at my house that watching Netflix all day at maximum quality settings will burn through that in a little over 3 weeks. Approximately 3GB an hour is consumed.

hedora 7y ago

Capped broadband is a new development in the US. The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality. Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Capped broadband is a new development in the US. No, it's not. Published cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers, prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Now we just need the caps to be mandatory with all service advertisements and signups and it almost might make sense.
DannyB2 7y ago
> Capped broadband is a new development in the US. Shirley you mean capped but unlimited broadband. At least the throttling will be unlimited. Maybe the caps will be unlimited too. And the excuses. And mysterious service outages.
coldpie 7y ago
> The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. Let's not beat around the bush. The FCC as a whole is not doing this. Republicans, who form a majority of the FCC's voting body, are. Elections have consequences.

nguoi 7y ago

>A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days Final Fantasy XV is the biggest I've seen, 100GB recommended on Steam. No doubt there's even bigger.

nuclearghost 7y ago
Gears 4 Approximate size 117.53 GB https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gears-of-war-4/9nblggh4pbbm?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gears-of-war-4/9nblggh4pbb...
shadowoflight 7y ago
Also, updates are not inconsequential. I've had it happen multiple times where my PS4 has between 2 and 5 update files that are each 5-15GB (sometimes as large as 20-30GB, but that's a rarity) queued up in the same day, and that can happen multiple times a month. Combine that with some 4K streaming, and the 1TB data cap Comcast has in my area looks tiny.
- paulmd 7y ago
  Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full. I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that. I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Thankfully Steam can soak up a reasonable amount of your internet's pipes and does use delta files.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hos234 7y ago

Competition between telcos is the answer. In many developed countries the Telco wars/market capture happened long long ago. In most cases there were just one or two winners, who then had no great incentive to upgrade infra. In the markets were the wars are ongoing, low rates will last until some player wins.

trilila 7y ago
In some countries even with two or three providers you get a lot faster internet connections without limits.

rayiner 7y ago

The median monthly data usage on Comcast's network is under 200GB per month: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-network-usage https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-average-.... Even cord cutters average under 500GB per month: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/charter-data-use-rising-rapidly-as-cord-cutters-average-400gb-a-month https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/chart.... Even among uncapped users, less than 5% use more than 1TB (which is a typical cap): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/terabyte-using-cable-customers-double-increasing-risk-of-data-cap-fees https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/terab.... Note also that data caps don't exist in many places in the US either. For example, Comcast has no data caps here in Maryland. Verizon will only start bugging you if you hit 10TB+ several months in a row.

LinuxBender 7y ago

I am on Comcast/Xfinity with a 400mb/s plan and yet I still have a 1TB cap. My household, between Steam, Blizzard, Netflix, others, can easily get close to that cap. If I surpass the cap, my costs go up exponentially.

paulmd 7y ago
In many markets they offer you a $50/mo upsell for unlimited data usage.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I will ask them about this.

trilila 7y ago

My thoughts exactly, and i come from a country where 1Gbps is pretty standard.

papln 7y ago

How many 50GB games do you download each month?