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I think the reason why people hate caps is because there is nonobvious how much data you have used or even are currently using at any moment. Sure you can typic

by esrauch 15y ago

I think the reason why people hate caps is because there is nonobvious how much data you have used or even are currently using at any moment. Sure you can typically log in and discover how much you have used but that workflow is well beyond what the average consumer is willing to do, even if they are technologically aware enough to know to do so. This, combined with borderline draconian pricing schemes, makes for horror stories where someone had a $30/month plan and they end up getting charged $300 for using 2x their rate. When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00. Electricity or water utilities are billed generally flat per-usage, the pricing schemes that come with bandwidth caps are not. So you paid $30 for X amount of data, which should indicate that the cost per data is $30/X, but if you use Y amount of data you have no idea what the price of it will be; it depends on your historical usage (and that of your teenage kid or neighbor who was on your open wifi or ...) Bandwidth caps are a perfectly reasonable concept; higher usage actually does cost the company more to provide. But it is simply not the case that sending 1000 texts costs the company $10 but sending 2000 texts costs the company $100. It seems extremely likely to me that the plans are deliberately obtuse so that they can fleece customers of their money without any way of the user knowing until very far after the fact. ISPs easily could redirect users to a page that says "You have used your quota for the month, would you like to continue at our per-byte rate of XXXX?" and block all their traffic until the user sees the page in the browser and click yes. I'm fairly certain that anyone who actually uses a capped plan would greatly prefer having the choice. They do not do this because they don't actually care about overages, they are being underhanded to trick people into using an expensive service without their knowledge.

ams6110 15y ago
When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00. If you are a commercial customer, you actually might. Often times big consumers will have tiered rates based on time of day or caps that trigger punitive rates when they are exceeded.
- halostatue 15y ago
  Not just big customers. Here in Toronto (not in Shaw's jurisdiction, but if Shaw isn't slapped hard on this very soon, Rogers and Bell will do the same), we have Time-Of-Usage rates with smart meters. Our usage is still fairly predictable because there's three time bands, but we pay 5.9c/kWh at low price, 8.9c/kWh at mid price, and 10.7c/kWh at high price (http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential/smartmeters/Pages/TOURates.aspx http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential...).
  - lutorm 15y ago
    Same in California, with PG&E we had an gas & electricity rate that increased quite steeply if you went beyond "normal household" amounts.
- esrauch 15y ago
  That is interesting; I was aware of day/night variable rates but not punitive usage caps. I suspect that even in places that have them, the punitive caps 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the original per-watt usage rate like they are with text message caps. Perhaps it is just me, but I have heard many instances of people getting charged 10x as much as their base plan for data overages, and I've never heard someone complain about power overages (though I have heard people complain about getting a higher bill than they original expected because they were loose with their power usage across the whole month).

by esrauch 15y ago

ams6110 15y ago

When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00. If you are a commercial customer, you actually might. Often times big consumers will have tiered rates based on time of day or caps that trigger punitive rates when they are exceeded.

halostatue 15y ago
Not just big customers. Here in Toronto (not in Shaw's jurisdiction, but if Shaw isn't slapped hard on this very soon, Rogers and Bell will do the same), we have Time-Of-Usage rates with smart meters. Our usage is still fairly predictable because there's three time bands, but we pay 5.9c/kWh at low price, 8.9c/kWh at mid price, and 10.7c/kWh at high price (http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential/smartmeters/Pages/TOURates.aspx http://www.torontohydro.com/sites/electricsystem/residential...).
- lutorm 15y ago
  Same in California, with PG&E we had an gas & electricity rate that increased quite steeply if you went beyond "normal household" amounts.
esrauch 15y ago
That is interesting; I was aware of day/night variable rates but not punitive usage caps. I suspect that even in places that have them, the punitive caps 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the original per-watt usage rate like they are with text message caps. Perhaps it is just me, but I have heard many instances of people getting charged 10x as much as their base plan for data overages, and I've never heard someone complain about power overages (though I have heard people complain about getting a higher bill than they original expected because they were loose with their power usage across the whole month).