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A 1 gigabit connection represents 384 Terrabytes of data over a month. You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. The questi

A 1 gigabit connection represents 384 Terrabytes of data over a month. You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges. Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic. Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an excessive data user consume? Certainly not 10x as you surmise, they are only one user. Just look at their pricing for the answer, I can pay 50% more for unlimited data which means it costs them at most 50% more (certainly less since this is a scheme to earn more revenue). On the topic of provisioning residential is hugely under provisioned as a cost cutting measure. This isn't all bad as there is never a time where everyone wants all their bandwidth. But blaming slow downs on high bandwidth users is silly when no one bothers to track capacity in these situations. The reality is they just throttle you to keep bandwidth evenly split during high traffic time (as they should, everyone should share the bottlenecked line equally). Which resolved any capacity problems as much as they care to. Bandwidth caps have always been a charge that isn't technically a charge and nothing more.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally... Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.
- josephg 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections. The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth. The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-doesnt-mean-unlimited-usage/ https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...) If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
  - Guvante 3y ago
    I don't mind paying for bandwidth. I mind paying well in excess of 1,000x what that bandwidth costs. Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion. You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take. So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year. Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth. Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte. Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte. Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally... Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.

josephg 3y ago
I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections. The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth. The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-doesnt-mean-unlimited-usage/ https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...) If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
- Guvante 3y ago
  I don't mind paying for bandwidth. I mind paying well in excess of 1,000x what that bandwidth costs. Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion. You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take. So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year. Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth. Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte. Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte. Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.