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A 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,

A 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 ago
I 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.
- gruez 7y ago
  >I 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. Getting to the IX doesn't mean you're home free, though. Your transit providers are also oversubscribed and links further down the chain could get congested.
  - iscoelho 7y ago
    In this case, Comcast is a nearly-Tier-1 transit provider that spends almost $0 on transit outside of interconnect/switchport costs. This argument doesn't really apply. In fact, companies pay them for transit to connect/peer because they can't afford to not. >https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/comcast-is-the-one-who-should-pay-for-network-connections-cogent-claims/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/comcast-is-the-o... >Comcast argued that it could be considered a Tier 1 itself, as less than one percent of its traffic requires transit. >As Comcast's market power continued to increase and consumers had less choice, they actually started demanding payments for connectivity. A larger Comcast will be able to demand even greater payments. As for T-Mobile/ATT, they are Tier 1 providers who again get transit for free. Spectrum is the only resource that is scarce in that scenario. The same rules don't apply to the larger ISPs. This market is not fair.
    - travbrack 7y ago
      Parent comment is talking about link utilization and you’re talking about transit fees. You’re on a different wavelength (pun intended) Bandwidth is finite. Links can become congested.
mindslight 7y ago
This applies for the shared medium of legacy coax, but not the "backbone" in general. Essentially Comcast/Time Warner are camping on the aging asset of the cable TV network, extracting as much as they can until it's obsoleted by fiber (municipal, or competitive, depending on population density). And yes, if you want to fix this, support municipal fiber. 1Gbps symmetric, no caps, no throttling, low ping. Likely for less than you're paying with the incumbents' ridiculous fees and price-jacking/contract games.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Comcast is fiber to the CMTS then its coax the rest of the way (last mile). In my neighborhood they terminate about 4-6 customers per CMTS. BTW, Comcast offers me the lowest ping both Verizon and AT&T backhaul to a city 250mi away.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
timw4mail 7y ago
A data cap has almost nothing to do with congestion. Network congestion is a lot like road traffic, in that it requires the participation of others. A data cap is like trying to reduce traffic by saying that each driver can go only so many miles. If all of a person's data usage is at off-peak times, the data cap is completely useless.
- gruez 7y ago
  You're right, it doesn't. However, that doesn't mean it doesn't achieve its intended goal. If users use less of their internet to avoid hitting the bandwidth cap, it stands to reason that congestion would decrease because overall network usage is down. Of course, it's not perfect as it wrongly penalizes some edge cases. For instance, someone who downloads/uploads terabytes of data, but only on off-peak hours (overnight). That said, I don't see how the competing solutions are better. You could do QoS, but that gets flak because of net neutrality. You could divide the available bandwidth evenly across all users, but that would penalize infrequent users. A gamer who doesn't use much bandwidth most days, but has to download huge patches every month would get the same speed as someone who watches 4K streams every night.
  - greyskull 7y ago
    Throttle speeds after you've reached a very high threshold, maybe only during peak hours to avoid unnecessary underutilization. Why is that not one of your options? This is what T-Mobile does AFAIK (I'm a subscriber but a light user) https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/mydatausage https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/mydatausage
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    I like the idea of throttling speeds during peak times only, and only after a certain amount of daily data use. That way neither low data users or offpeak users are penalised.
    - wbl 7y ago
      We already have that through congestion control!

forkexec 7y ago

I 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.

gruez 7y ago
>I 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. Getting to the IX doesn't mean you're home free, though. Your transit providers are also oversubscribed and links further down the chain could get congested.
- iscoelho 7y ago
  In this case, Comcast is a nearly-Tier-1 transit provider that spends almost $0 on transit outside of interconnect/switchport costs. This argument doesn't really apply. In fact, companies pay them for transit to connect/peer because they can't afford to not. >https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/comcast-is-the-one-who-should-pay-for-network-connections-cogent-claims/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/comcast-is-the-o... >Comcast argued that it could be considered a Tier 1 itself, as less than one percent of its traffic requires transit. >As Comcast's market power continued to increase and consumers had less choice, they actually started demanding payments for connectivity. A larger Comcast will be able to demand even greater payments. As for T-Mobile/ATT, they are Tier 1 providers who again get transit for free. Spectrum is the only resource that is scarce in that scenario. The same rules don't apply to the larger ISPs. This market is not fair.
  - travbrack 7y ago
    Parent comment is talking about link utilization and you’re talking about transit fees. You’re on a different wavelength (pun intended) Bandwidth is finite. Links can become congested.

mindslight 7y ago

This applies for the shared medium of legacy coax, but not the "backbone" in general. Essentially Comcast/Time Warner are camping on the aging asset of the cable TV network, extracting as much as they can until it's obsoleted by fiber (municipal, or competitive, depending on population density). And yes, if you want to fix this, support municipal fiber. 1Gbps symmetric, no caps, no throttling, low ping. Likely for less than you're paying with the incumbents' ridiculous fees and price-jacking/contract games.

o-__-o 7y ago
Comcast is fiber to the CMTS then its coax the rest of the way (last mile). In my neighborhood they terminate about 4-6 customers per CMTS. BTW, Comcast offers me the lowest ping both Verizon and AT&T backhaul to a city 250mi away.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

timw4mail 7y ago

A data cap has almost nothing to do with congestion. Network congestion is a lot like road traffic, in that it requires the participation of others. A data cap is like trying to reduce traffic by saying that each driver can go only so many miles. If all of a person's data usage is at off-peak times, the data cap is completely useless.

gruez 7y ago
You're right, it doesn't. However, that doesn't mean it doesn't achieve its intended goal. If users use less of their internet to avoid hitting the bandwidth cap, it stands to reason that congestion would decrease because overall network usage is down. Of course, it's not perfect as it wrongly penalizes some edge cases. For instance, someone who downloads/uploads terabytes of data, but only on off-peak hours (overnight). That said, I don't see how the competing solutions are better. You could do QoS, but that gets flak because of net neutrality. You could divide the available bandwidth evenly across all users, but that would penalize infrequent users. A gamer who doesn't use much bandwidth most days, but has to download huge patches every month would get the same speed as someone who watches 4K streams every night.
- greyskull 7y ago
  Throttle speeds after you've reached a very high threshold, maybe only during peak hours to avoid unnecessary underutilization. Why is that not one of your options? This is what T-Mobile does AFAIK (I'm a subscriber but a light user) https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/mydatausage https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/mydatausage
- ubercow13 7y ago
  I like the idea of throttling speeds during peak times only, and only after a certain amount of daily data use. That way neither low data users or offpeak users are penalised.
  - wbl 7y ago
    We already have that through congestion control!