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Comcast and T-Mobile upgrade everyone to unlimited data for next 60 days
- jsjddbbwj 7y agoA lot of this going on in Spain right now. Higher data caps for mobile connections (landlines have no data caps here), and some ISPs that have a TV service have opened it up for free.
- pkaye 7y agoThose comments are gold: >AT&T was willing to tap into their Strategic Packet Reserve yesterday and now Comcast has to follow suit. Let those extremely rare and finite in number packets flow!
- dkdk8283 7y agoSounds like some grade B bullshit.
- cjhopman 7y agoChill and maybe take it slower so you understand things better. The previous post was simply quoting a (rather amusing) joke that appeared in the comments.
- spsful 7y agoI hope I don't sound stupid but could you explain the joke? Edit: a word
- wideasleep1 7y agoATT is mostly saturated in urban areas particularly, making 'unlimited for all' a worse proposition.
- mbreese 7y agoThat wasn’t the joke... this was about data caps on home internet.
- washadjeffmad 7y agoThe joke is implying that the reason ISPs employ data caps is because packets are a finite resource. They're not, and the practice makes about as much sense as buying your internet by the minute.
- oasisbob 7y agoOr the opposite, that available capacity is a limited resource, which "necessitates" data caps to maintain performance during peak periods. It's still illogical, just not as illogical as claiming a communication medium offers unlimited bandwidth.
- bogomipz 7y agoThe joke is a reference to the strategic petroleum reservers in the US: "The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is an emergency fuel storage of petroleum maintained underground in Louisiana and Texas by the United States Department of Energy (DOE). It is the largest emergency supply in the world, with the capacity to hold up to 727 million barrels (115,600,000 m3)."[1] The comment is satirically suggesting the telecom industry has similar reservers for such emergencies. These carriers are notoriously stingy and known for their data caps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
- caseysoftware 7y agoWhile the US's Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the most well known, Canada's Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve is way more amusing and fascination especially after they had a massive theft. It was a fluid situation but they caught the sticky fingered thieves and delivered sweet sweet justice. Ref: https://business.time.com/2012/12/24/why-does-canada-have-a-maple-syrup-cartel/ https://business.time.com/2012/12/24/why-does-canada-have-a-...
- bogomipz 7y agoThat's not a national reserve though as it's maintained by and only serves the interests of a cartel of private producers in Quebec.
- saagarjha 7y agoThe US also has a helium reserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
- imglorp 7y agoImagine what the world world be like if all hotspots were open all the time.
- jacobsenscott 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:10,000_most_common_passwords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:10,000_most_common_p...
- inopinatus 7y ago1. Oversubscribed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons 2. Less safe. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/88853/are-open-wireless-networks-unencrypted https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/88853/are-open-...
- acdha 7y agoLess safe is less true than it was back when that answer was written: a LOT of traffic has gone TLS-only and the operating systems most people use are secure by default. Yes, there’s always a chance of an exploit but these days I’d be more worried about what links people are clicking on rather than where they’re sitting. Congestion is also an interesting challenge: in some cases that’s a problem (imagine having an AP next to a school) but since the hardware limits have gone to substantially we’re probably at a threshold point where geographic separation is enough to avoid that problem for a large fraction of places. The public library has open WiFi but there are only so many people who are going to camp out there.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago> in some cases that’s a problem (imagine having an AP next to a school) Really it's the opposite. You put an AP next to a school and it gets the whole school's traffic off the cell tower and onto a local high bandwidth coax/fiber network. You save a ton of wireless spectrum by having low power wifi APs everywhere instead of needing high power cell towers. (And obviously in that case the school itself would be the best candidate to be operating the open APs instead of or in addition to whoever lives next door.) You don't really get a tragedy of the commons either, because the range is so short. You could go to any given place and find open wireless, but the best way to get a good signal in your own home is to have your own AP. The exception would be high density housing where you're actually close enough to share, but then you do just that -- have all the neighbors chip in to get a really fast connection and share it. You can keep it open to the public as long as the other neighbors pay their share, which is cheaper for each of them than paying for a whole connection themselves as would happen if they defect and cause you to stop offering it. Or, more realistically, in those situations HOAs or landlords could install the AP and pass on the cost as fees/rent.
- dylz 7y agoIs xfinitywifi open yet? I'm still getting a payment prompt.
- ukyrgf 7y agoAnd I'm still seeing a big fat XXX/1024GB usage meter when I log into my AT&T account.
- olyjohn 7y agoEasy for them to do because it costs them nothing. VPNs use so little bandwidth. What a joke to get some good PR, and sad they are exploiting this pandemic.
- orborde 7y agoWould you prefer that the companies involved did nothing instead of taking this costless action?
- cultus 7y agoWe should all be thankful for these scraps we have been generously given.
- koolba 7y agoYes as maybe it’d draw attention to the absurdity of the limits vs advertised speeds. It’s similar to the security theater at airports. I personally dislike the entire TSA precheck concept specifically because it works so well. The lack of pain for frequent travelers has kept the entire system from being replaced with what’s now the TSA precheck process.
- lwansbrough 7y ago“Yes” is a purity test answer.
- takeda 7y agoThey did it for self preservation. To not repeat the situation where firemen run into Verizon limits which triggered a bad PR.
- dillondoyle 7y agoseems like there might be increases in total traffic [1] from more streaming. Not sure if Netflix has released numbers, though that wouldn't be as much of a burden to ISPs given their colocated 'open connect' https://blog.cloudflare.com/covid-19-impacts-on-internet-traffic-seattle-italy-and-south-korea/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/covid-19-impacts-on-internet-tra...
- dudul 7y agobut... but... don't they enforce this data cap to protect their infrastructure? I don't get it! What's gonna happen to their infrastructure if they do that??!!
- drtillberg 7y agoIt's too bad that Comcast chose to have inferior upload speeds, about 6Mbps on standard plans in my region, no matter whether it's 100Mbps down or 1,000Mbps down. When we're talking work from home, online learning, video conferencing, upload speed matters. Comcast tries to bury the upload number, I'm kind of surprised to see it printed in this article, and when I realized the reality I thought there must be some mistake. There is no option for a higher upload speed at less than $300/mo, which pays for a full fiber. It's great to have an option but too bad Comcast chose to make their service inflexibly inferior in this way.
- milankragujevic 7y agoThat's kind of standard with DOCSIS. You can't have a lot of upload speed due to the available bandwidth for upload channels.
- coryrc 7y agoThe balance of upload and download is configurable.
- lawnchair_larry 7y agoNot if you already have a legacy cable television network it isn’t.
- milankragujevic 7y agoYes, by lowering the download speed, at least on DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS 3.0 supports up to 8 upload channels for a total speed of 216 Mbps (on 6.4 MHz per channel). That's shared for all users on the CMTS, which could be a lot, depending on the setup. For comparison, on EuroDOCSIS 3.0, with 32 channels the total download speed is 1600 Mbps for all users, and on DOCSIS 3.0 it's 1216 Mbps. DOCSIS 3.1 allows for multiple OFDMA upload channels which can allow for up to 2 Gbps shared upload speed capacity, and DOCSIS 4.0 allows for symmetric 10/10 Gbps shared capacity with an undefined split DS:US (you can have the same number of channels). It uses extended RF spectrum in the cable and also needs new amplifiers and splitters.
- peterwwillis 7y agoA lot of people moaning about how the data caps are unnecessary don't seem to understand how bandwidth works. If you get fiber or high-speed cable to your home, yes, you may have a buttload of potential bandwidth. If everyone in a large metro area tried to use all 1Gbps of their bandwidth at once, connections for many of them would crawl to about the speed of a 48.8 modem. There simply isn't enough backbone capacity for everyone to use all potential bandwidth all the time. But besides just not having enough raw capacity, the closer you get to reaching capacity, the more knock-on effects from buffer overruns and collisions and retries and latency and all sorts of shit start to cause connections to slow further. In order to keep speeds faster near capacity, you are forced to use traffic shaping to artificially squeeze capacity in order to make it not seem dog-slow, and falling into an unusable tailspin. The caps are there to keep people within practical, usable limits, to prevent knock-on effects on edges of the network more vulnerable to bandwidth problems. To reduce that possibility they'd have to invest more money in unprofitable sections of infrastructure. Charging you more for bandwidth is effectively a way for them to not invest, because if they did invest, they would subsequently charge you more money to cover it. The caps basically artificially lower your own bill by getting you to choose to use less data. It's the choice of "do we piss them off with higher prices or worse service?" Do they want to charge you more? Of course. Do they know most people won't use more than 1TB of data per month? Of course; they have trending usage metrics, they do a calculation, and this is what works to balance what people want with what they need, and how the provider can afford to pay for maintaining it all. If they weren't absolutely enormous multi-headed-hydra conglomerates, service would be cheaper, better quality, and faster. But they're enormous, and as such they are inefficient, and as such, very expensive for what you get. If you want better service, lobby your local government to make municipal internet legal, because local private providers will never be able to compete.
- forkexec 7y agoI don't think you understand what oversubscription means, tiered network topologies' links increase in performance nearer to the IX, and that someone, usually the large ISP themselves, often owns the network all the way to the IX. Cable internet providers in the US get away with extreme oversubscription in certain low avg bandwidth areas and don't publish these details as required in other countries.
- iNeal 7y agoAny word on people already paying the $50 for no data-cap on Comcast? Should I remove it for 2 months or did they say they'd waive it?
- techntoke 7y agoI'm sure they'll gladly take your money. I got a notification that I was approaching my limit just yesterday.
- brrrrr1 7y agoafter this cov thing has surfaced the many, many, many issues the us has, i realise that europeans may not have the same kind of startups, or glory, but instead we have our health and systems to rely on. stay safe and let us know if you need help, as your government and president have failed.
- zaroth 7y agoSo sanctimonious. The most. More than any other.
- wideasleep1 7y agoThey had me at 'systems'.
- flak48 7y agoObligatory 'we've had unlimited 4g data for $8/month in India since 2016' comment. Feels good to be first world at something
- unnouinceput 7y agoWelcome fellow Americans to the normal citizens that don't even know the words "data cap". Wish you stay longer then 2 months in this club. Personally I am member of this club for over 2 decades (as is my entire country btw).
- craftyguy 7y agoGood for you. We know the government-sponsored ISP monopolies/duopolies here suck. It's incredibly naive to think that this fact is lost on us.