4 ms·
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
by 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 agoYou'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 agoThrottle 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 agoI 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 agoWe already have that through congestion control!