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Coronavirus could force ISPs to abandon data caps forever
- nickthegreek 7y agoNo it wont. Sure they might waive fees for a 60 days or so but to think that these corporations would give up their free money piggy bank is untethered from reality. If anything they will use it to try and get people to upgrade to a higher tier.
- dsr_ 7y agoA shiny nickel says that right now, there is an ISP sales VP asking if the terms of service for customer lines exclude using a VPN to get in to work, and if this can be detected and used as a forced upsell.
- Spivak 7y agoI'm actually hoping that ISPs start to squeeze in this direction just because it's something that might actually garner enough anger/support to force legislators to say what exactly buying "internet service" means. Businesses aren't gonna be happy when people start expensing their internet service. So please force customers to upgrade to a $2-3x "business class" package if they want to use their internet to do any work/commercial activity.
- penagwin 7y agoUntil the ISPs decide that all freelancers and any VPN are "business use" and then the legislators don't do anything about it.
- grecy 7y agoI agree 100%. I worked at a telco and managed the usage metering system. We regularly had meeting with sales and marketing, and time and again there was no way on earth they were going to give up usage caps, it's just too much money to leave on the table. They will hold onto usage caps tooth and nail until they're mandated by law to drop them, and even then they'll try to blackmail the legislators (my company did it often) with lines like "Oh OK, now we can't roll out fibre to x, y, z city". So the legislators back off, and usage caps stay!
- jariel 7y ago"corporations would give up their free money piggy bank is untethered from reality" Bandwidth is absolutely not free, to suggest that carriers Ops and Capex somehow represents a 'free money piggy bank' is actually untethered from reality. There are possibly some alterations that could be made, but it's basically false to suggest that their product is detached from underlying cost.
- Scoundreller 7y agoIf your usage is outside of the 95th percentile, ya, it’s free. Not using it is just a waste because you’ll never get it back. You can’t bank spectrum.
- jariel 7y agoWho said anything about costs at the margin, i.e. 95th percentile? You've just 'moved the goalposts' across the field :) Bandwidth is a commodity like anything else and has underlying structural costs - it's far from free in any sense of the word. Even at the 95th percentile, as you say, there's no guarantee that there's unused bandwidth at all.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWe’re talking about caps. As in, gb/month that residential users are often subjected to.
- sidibe 7y agoThey seem to have plenty of capacity, no issues in Bay Area despite many more people WFH or working less and streaming more.
- maerF0x0 7y agopersonally my work uses nearly no bandwidth. a little Stackoverflow here and there. probably peaks with video calls. Certainly doesnt use even close to 4k streaming netflix.
- jotm 7y agoOne can only hope. I absolutely loved Three UK for their unlimited 4G, it was my only Internet provider.
- draw_down 7y agoIn a crisis like this, the organizations providing services people rely upon are the ones with leverage. Not their customers.
- listsfrin 7y agoIt's a great time to increase prices if you ask me.
- mdszy 7y agoGood thing nobody's asking you then.
- listsfrin 7y agoNobody's asking you either.
- justwalt 7y agoDo you think it’s a good time to increase prices?
- mdszy 7y agoI enjoy how you edited this from "Did anyone ask you?" No. Why the hell would the time of a disaster be a good time to increase prices for people who rely on these services. Go away.
- justwalt 7y agoLol, no, I asked you this question because the other guy said "Did anyone ask you?" That way you could answer yes to him. It looks like he deleted his comment.
- amitport 7y agoThis will probably only change through regulation. The only way you'll get regulation is by making politicians view this as very good PR for themselves. (This is what happened in Israel, though it's rare to see such effectiveness here)
- partiallypro 7y agoVerizon hasn't even waived data caps for wireless, so I doubt it.
- sys_64738 7y agoWe'd get free electricity and gas too then. Not gonna happen.
- pmlnr 7y agoElectricity should happen though with enough renewables.
- Apocryphon 7y agoTurns out "disaster socialism" is a real concept: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/disaster-socialism-will-coronavirus-crisis-finally-change-how-americans-see-the-safety-net-will-bunch/ar-BB116bRX https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/disaster-socialism...
- jedberg 7y agoThe difference is that with gas and electric, there is an increased cost to the utility to deliver more electricity and gas. With bandwidth there is almost no additional cost to deliver more bandwidth. Yes in aggregate they need to upgrade their equipment, but if they just got rid of data caps tomorrow, they would incur almost no extra cost. If electricity and gas suddenly became fixed cost, the cost to the utilities would go up dramatically.
- rsynnott 7y ago> With bandwidth there is almost no additional cost to deliver more bandwidth Depends how awful your infrastructure is. The big ISP in Ireland was still using microwave links as backhaul for ADSL until at least 2012 or so (in one particularly ridiculous case, a whole village only had 8Mbit/sec backhaul), and I believe there are still some developed countries where that kind of setup is common. Interestingly, back in the mid noughties, said ISP either gave ADSL customers a 20GB cap or no cap, depending on if their local exchange had a fibre backhaul. To confuse the issue, they referred to the latter as "fibre powered broadband".
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- seanmccann 7y agoI called Comcast and had 2 options. Pay $50/month for unlimited or pay $25/mo for unlimited, but I would have to forgo using my own modem/router and use theirs. Decided to just pay the $50, but we'll see what happens. I could see them increasing the cap or forgiving overages for a few months.
- alerighi 7y agoYou must maybe use their modem (how they can check it I don't know, maybe they don't give you the configuration parameters for the network?) but you always have the possibility to add your own router after it and basically use their modem/router as a simple modem. It's what I did in my country before they made illegal for ISPs to force you to use their modem/router, simply used the modem/router of the provider as a modem, forwarding all the ports to my own router that I used to do actual routing, WiFi access point and all other stuff that a router does.
- vict00ms 7y agoThey also charge you a monthly fee for using their modem.
- monocasa 7y agoThey waive that in a lot of cases, as they're trying to build out their network of xfinitywifi hotspots you see everywhere. I still ran my own modem, but it's a point to keep in mind.
- wtallis 7y agoIf it's providing a WiFi hotspot, then it's their router that you're using, not just their modem.
- monocasa 7y agoThey give you a combo router and modem by default when you run their modems (for the reason given above). The WAN port is just a downstream port for the internal router. I don't think there's a way to disable the router itself in most cases these days, just some of the services it provides.
- woah 7y agoThe concept that data caps are somehow uniquely unjust is dumb. Bandwidth is a scarce resource, like seats on a train. Nobody gets mad that the train company charges per ride instead of only selling monthly passes. Be mad that your ISP has a monopoly and charges too much. Don’t be mad about a pricing scheme that is completely reasonable if the prices involved are fair.
- fortyseven 7y agoCompletely disagree. There are software solutions for bandwidth issues, such as throttling, that don't require putting the burden on customers.
- robcohen 7y agoI would agree with you if there were evidence to support your claim, but there is not. Actually there is evidence to the contrary. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/cable-companies-make-97-margin-on.html?amp https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/cable-companies-make-9... The truth is fiber bandwidth is cheap.
- listsfrin 7y agoThere's lots of evidence that internet is cheap. Too bad we don't have those ISPs to provide it. Have you ever thought how hard it is to dig a 50m hole in the ground to put fiber in it?
- monocasa 7y agoAfter we the taxpayers paid them $400B to cover that expense, and the telecomms pocketed it, I have the world's smallest violin to play for this particular argument. https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-fiber-optic-internet/ https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-...
- to11mtm 7y agoI have thought about that problem a -lot-, actually. It used to be my job; determine the best route from a cost standpoint, draw it up, and then convince everyone to let you do it. (And thus began my love for LISP...) You don't dig 50m into the ground, unless you were referring to the length and not the depth. But if you did mean depth, I've done designs where the dig depth was under 4 feet. Usually this involved either special products for purpose (Look up Vertical Deflecting Conduit) or literally just a straight trench along a state highway. (Not gonna comment on the security of that practice...) But if you meant 50m in distance off the backbone, you're right. because that last 50M to a residence -is- the hard part in a lot of cases. That's why one of the things negotiated in a lot of franchise agreements (which range between a permission to build all the way to a locally sanctioned monopoly) includes is a 'minimum homes passed per mile'. Which basically states that if a route passes at least X homes in Y distance, the Cable co cannot charge a prospective customer for the buildout to their residence. Doing the 'last mile' is the most expensive part of any network. One might start to ask if this is part of why these Cable cos are so hyped on the 5G; It makes it possible for 'fringe' customers to still be offered wireless products. What the Tele/Cable cos did with all of that federal grant money in the early 2000s and with the stimulus packages resulting from the 2008 recession was build up their backbone structure substantially. Many of the projects I did were designed to specs along the lines of 'Go up to the next 48 count interval, then double that.' So if we needed 28 fibers to feed a system, we'd put 96 in the ground in that case.) Which means that rather than use that stimulus money to build out more of those last miles, in most cases it instead went into revenue stream of fiber leasing. Many of the projects I worked on involved Cable companies leasing that dark fiber they built up to the cell carriers for capacity in the rollout to 4G. Bonus points because in most cases they weren't even doing any multiplexing on the fiber (something that could be done by adding additional equipment but not having to replace any fiber.)
- mdasen 7y agoI think that data caps aren't a good solution simply because they don't have a good connection with network capacity. Many wireless carriers have started doing "deprioritization" after a certain amount of usage which is a lot more consumer friendly. If the network has capacity, heavy users see no difference in their connection. If the network is capacity constrained, it favors lighter users so that they get their money's worth. My school did this when I was an undergrad. The top 100 users on campus often used more than half the bandwidth. That was fine and the school was more than happy for them to use the internet heavily - the connection had already been paid for, might as well have it used. However, the school did put them at a lower priority when there was congestion. Most of the heavy users didn't even notice. I'm really hopeful that wireless technologies will improve competition over the next decade. If three wireless companies can provide home broadband competition in the future, we won't be beholden to the single provider that most of us deal with now. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all bought a bunch of millimeter wave spectrum in the latest auction (in addition to their current holdings). T-Mobile is gearing up for a big home broadband push. They're hoping to have 9.5M home broadband customers in the next three years which would probably make them the third largest after Comcast and Charter who have around 26-27M I believe (and around double Fios' customer base). Having even a little competition would mean that they'd have to compete for my business rather than being able to hike prices every year.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoT-mobile deprioritizes down to 2G speeds which makes web browsing nearly unusable.
- mdasen 7y agoThat isn't true anymore. In the old days of limited data plans, they would throttle customers to 2G speeds after their allotment was used. Today, they deprioritize which simply slows speeds when there is network congestion in the area.
- morpheuskafka 7y agoI have a T-Mobile plan with 5GB of "unlimited data" and it goes down to 256kbps when the data is used up. As I learned the hard way, there is no way to buy more data or restart the billing cycle earlier no matter how much you are willing to pay.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoWhat are the data caps? How many GB of up and down traffic? Here in Norway only mobile data is capped. ADSL and fibre are effectively unlimited. As far as I know this is generally the case in Europe.
- Jugurtha 7y agoSame here in Algiers, Algeria. Mobile is prepaid. You buy 60GB for 10€. It expires after a month. The bandwidth sucks, though. Sometimes you have 20Mbps, sometimes it's faster to take a plane and get your data in a hard drive, which is something I have considered when I had to download a dataset of 60GB and it was taking forever. The data holder was in France. We didn't have ADSL in the office yet.
- dylz 7y agoMobile in the US is closer to $15-25/GB for hotspot data. Damn.
- markovbot 7y agoHere in the US, my Comcast internet connection comes with a 1TB (up and down combined, i think) per month cap. If you go over they give you a warning the first few times, then charge some outrageous amount per gigabyte that you go over. If you ask them how much for an uncapped connection, they will lie to you and claim that option does not exist. Only after blowing the cap a few times will they admit that they will remove the cap for an _additional_ $50/mo. This is the only ISP that services my house in a residential area of Seattle.
- scarejunba 7y agoThe best way to do data is (connection_fee + usage/MB). That's the most customer-friendly way to do things. It allows customers to alter their usage according to their billing ability. Fixed line usage is probably in the decicents per GB. Wireless is probably in the $8/GB range. All acceptable. I may have the numbers wrong but I think I'm probably in the ballpark.
- iptrans 7y agoYou are pretty close on the numbers. Fixed network bandwidth is centicents per GB, and that’s for wholesale IP transit. Peering bandwidth can be cheaper at scale. For all intents and purposes fixed bandwidth is too cheap to meter on consumer connections. As such a single fixed monthly rate for unlimited usage at the chosen line rate is the appropriate solution. Also the most consumer friendly way. In regulated markets, wholesale costs for a GB of wireless traffic is less than $3. Here you can argue for billing by usage, but there are markets with true unlimited wireless services, and they do just fine.
- scarejunba 7y agoAh neat. That's cool. I like that. It could also be like fixed below usage and per GB above to mirror the costs. Essentially, small enough that a normal consumer won't see a problem but your torrent 24x7 guy is paying his dues. I have gigabit fibre here in SF and if I ran at full tilt I'm doing 100 MB/s × 3600 s/hr × 0.01 cents / GB × 0.01 GB / MB = 36 cents / hr. And that's $260 on traffic per month. I think it's fine to pay that in overages if you're using at full tilt. I totally get the advantage of not worrying about that. I prefer my unlimited which just has a soft limit but I'd prefer to pay for what I use without subsidizing the 0.01 percentile customer. I'm also a big fan of traffic shaping for wireless because honestly my WhatsApp message is probably more important than my YouTube video. Pause the latter to send the former. Every time. The real tragedy is that we don't have the attention (physically) to be able to auction instantaneous spectrum bandwidth.
- iptrans 7y agoYou dropped a zero. There are 1000 MB in a GB, so your cost of running a Gbps line at full tilt is more like 3.6 cents per hour. In other words, bill everybody a dollar per month for bandwidth and worry about it only if average usage per subscriber goes over 10 TB per month.
- maerF0x0 7y agoI've often thought there should be like an optional slowlane and fastlane for downloads. Last night I downloaded a 20GB game and it nearly pinned my internet connection and downloaded in about 20 mins. But I knew i wasnt going to play if for several hours and there would be no reason to "brownout" my neighbors. I want fast internet when i want it. But also see a time and place for "download this, eventually"
- Darkphibre 7y agoThis should be possible client-side... You just negotiate the TCP ACKs to have a slower response rate, essentially self-throttling the quality of the connection.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoOneDrive and SyncThing allow you to set a max transfer speed, so it's definitely possible. OneDrive in particular will absolutely kill my network if it's not throttled (I have slow 10/1mbps DSL). It took a while for us to figure that out; for months we were randomly experiencing terrible Internet speeds. I don't even bother with OneDrive anymore because our Internet is so slow that stuff was always syncing. I use SyncThing between my phone, laptop, and desktop instead, which can sync over the local network.
- x__x 7y agoFor those in the eCommerce area, are you seeing more or less consumer spending right now (outside of supplies ie toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizers..)
- cletus 7y ago“Dats caps” have many variations. Americans are used to the version where tricks and ISPs advertise “unlimited” but have arbitrarily defined and enforced caps with no transparency where tut may get throttled, random packets dropped, that sort of thing. Australia OTOH (IMHO) handled this much better. The ACCC (like the FTC/FCC but with teeth and without regulatory capture) said it was false advertising under the Trade Practices Act to say something was “unlimited” if it has soft or hard data caps. What this did in the nascent days of Australia’s broadband was force ISPs to offer an explicit quota that was advertised. It allowed Javier users to pay more and lighter users to pay less. Some hardliners here will rejects even that but non-American ISPs have one big coat and limitation that American ISPs don’t: they have to pay to connect to America. And transpacific bandwidth certainly wasn’t free. Nowadays unlimited is more the norm and it’s actual unlimited too. This is just market maturity as external bandwidth is a lot more plentiful than 10-20 years ago. Of course, the connection speeds still suck but that’s a whole other thing. My point is that companies need to be stopped when they make false claims about “unlimited” or anything else.
- mnm1 7y agoDoubtful. I wfh and have hit Comcast's cap a few times in the past. Radioactive? I have no fucking choice even though less than a mile away in all directions there's century link. The solution is to get a lower speed. I went from 300 to 250 to 200. It's not noticeable. I'd like a gig, but it's just not worth it. This way I pay less too. Fuck Comcast and the monopolies we have here.
- Funes- 7y agoWe should use open-source mesh wireless networks, and do away with ISPs once and for all.
- iptrans 7y agoWireless mesh networks are all fun and games until you try to scale up. First you have to deal with the huge coordination issue of getting everybody in line and on line to actually form a mesh. Then if you actually succeed with that you have to deal with physics, maintenance and upgrades. Most, if not all networks that start as meshes, devolve into centralized networks. Then all you have is another ISP. The root cause to why wireless mesh networks don’t exist in any meaningful way is that traditional ISP networks are more cost effective.
- jimbob45 7y agoI am sympathetic to the ISPs. It's good for the planet and emergency situations when we each use wi-fi instead of using cellular data. However, I think the ISPs simply haven't shown enough creativity in incentivizing users to use available wi-fi networks over cell data. I imagine very few people even know that we should want to prioritize wi-fi.
- kempbellt 7y ago>It's good for the planet and emergency situations when we each use wi-fi instead of using cellular data. How do you figure?
- jimbob45 7y agoEveryone using cell signals takes up that much bandwidth that could otherwise be used for emergency personnel - I'm not saying not to use cell towers, I'm just saying that if you could choose between the two with no penalty on either, wi-fi would be preferable. Also I would think it's far cheaper energy-wise to transmit the signal from my living room to my study rather than beaming the signal from a cell tower miles away. I could be wrong.
- bondolo 7y agoThey had the chance to price data with some relation to their costs and instead chose to squeeze a few customers while providing everyone inferior service. Wireless still needs to have a price associated with usage; usage monopolizes a shared resource, EM spectrum, and there should be a cost for that. For wired or fibre as the CEO of Sonic, Dane Jasper, has always said data is in reality mostly too cheap to bother metering.
- cornishpixels 7y agoWhat? LOL. No it won't. A few providers will lift them temporarily and then go right back to how things were in a couple of months. > the very fact that the limits can be lifted at will or certain high-traffic categories (such as a broadband company’s own streaming TV channels) can be exempted [... proves that] there is definitively enough capacity for the network to be used without those caps Someone doesn't understand how the Internet works.
- jessaustin 7y agoPlease connect the dots here; what you've written is nonsensical without further explanation. The technical argument in TFA is pretty simple: if this traffic level is feasible now, it will also be feasible in a couple of months. If instead you're making a point about how horrible FCC is, then be more explicit about it.
- tzs 7y agoThe cable company's own streaming channels are presumably served from servers on the company's own infrastructure, and the traffic from them to your home does not leave their own infrastructure. So, presumably, that does not count against your internet cap because from the cable company's point of view it is not using the internet. To them, it's part of their intranet.
- jessaustin 7y agoI don't think that's really what we're talking about? Anyway, it's incorrect, because backhaul is cheap. The whole reason we have to deal with Comcast etc. is the many barriers to competition over the "last mile".
- zajio1am 7y agoAre data caps from ISPs still a thing? Where i live, only mobile operators have data caps, regular ISPs ditched that about ten years ago.