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This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.

endisneigh 3y ago
Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
    - vorpalhex 3y ago
      Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one. The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality across the customer population. Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
        throitallaway 3y ago
        > There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        You misunderstand the model. They don't pay ISPs, they offer the appliance for free to the ISP for colocation, reducing the upstream networking costs. AWS egress being extortionate is a distinct issue. The cost to the ISP in the rack (cooling, power, space) is immaterial considering the transfer savings (not only opex, but reduced capex from needing to oversize network gear or specific ports for peak streaming consumption) over the life of the relationship. If you want to learn more, lurk on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list. It is common to monitor AS traffic flows to understand whether you can offload with CDN appliance relationships or how to improve your network architecture (which networks to peer to directly or which internet exchanges [IXs] to meetup at). These agreements sometimes happen at a bar over beers during NANOG events. Call Verizon and ask them how much a 1Gbps circuit is. Consider why Comcast built their own national backbone. Also, some important history to remember. Fast.com measures your speeds to Netflix servers because some ISPs wanted to charge their customers and Netflix for that transfer (or to upgrade peering points) because of the revenue destruction from cable customers fleeing for streaming (net neutrality debate). https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Norton_Peering101_v0_N45.pdf https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Nor... (Peering 101, Bill Norton [Equinix cofounder], NANOG 45) https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-Wave-Of-Massive-Disruption-To-The-U.S.-Peering-Ecosystem.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-W... (Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.7)) https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html ("The Internet Peering Playbook") https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit... ("How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit") https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-comcast-became-a-powerful-and-controversial-part-of-the-internet-backbone/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-c... ("How Comcast became a powerful—and controversial—part of the Internet backbone") https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036163652-How-much-does-the-appliance-cost-my-organization- https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600361636... > How much does the appliance cost my organization? > Appliances, including replacement appliances, are provided to qualifying ISPs at no charge when used within the terms of the license agreements.
  - atomicnumber3 3y ago
    Also, when caps are implemented, they're ridiculously expensive and limited, especially in an age of streaming video. Expensive comically beyond any reasonable conception of the actual marginal cost of transiting the traffic. Also - just look at LTE operators. They're also no-cap at this point (though subject to QoS at certain breakpoints, but they're typically reasonable breakpoints ime?). And that's in a SIGNIFICANTLY more capital intensive market - you have most of the concerns with terrestrial fiber, plus the joy of having to own RF spectrum and maintain towers etc. So I think no-caps-and-required-speed requirements would just make sense and be required to keep ISPs from trying to backtrack on being forcibly dragged into the modern area like balky calves.
    - Szpadel 3y ago
      I think that the issue is lack of competition. on mobile market it's easy to switch operator to any from multiple nation wide ones. for cable ISP AFAIK in US there is usually one. (in my central european country there is at least 3 ISP available ans AFAIK fibers to building are in some way rented to internet providers (?))
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    In principle caps help with oversubscribing. If you want to use a 10GBit/s uplink to serve 5000 people with 100MBit/s each, you won't saturate your uplink nearly as often if you add a data cap. Of course that's not all that different from restricting bandwidth, just that you are restricting average bandwidth while allowing for some burst. Still violates the spirit of having fast bandwidth, unless the caps are quite generous.
    - NotSammyHagar 3y ago
      They do help push people to use less, but for places like Comcast I see data caps as just a revenue stream increaser. The entire company strategy seems to follow this approach.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Yes and no, depending on your plant build out you might have great interplant connectivity - 10G between each switch, 10G to the router, but the extraplant connections still cost and have bandwidth limits. So if you only use 2 gbps total during peak, you may not need to upgrade your plant to support higher speeds but you will have to pay more to your upstream provider to support it. This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything running. But now that we are offering packages higher than 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up. If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and packages we allow people to use.
    - musha68k 3y ago
      It’s true that smaller ISPs have their challenges, but the cost for both interplant and extraplant connections has been generally decreasing. Economies of scale and peering agreements can mitigate many of these costs.
      - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        True, we connect our main ISP pipe to an internet exchange for that reason. It's also interesting to see how the industry is adopting pluggables for a lot of newer deployments because depending on what you need, there's a lot of flexibility now compared to even 5 years ago.
  - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    > Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) Aren't we effectively arguing CapEx versus OpEx? Sure, an ISP's OpEx is tiny. But CapEx is huge, especially when you've got an old neighborhood that's all wired up with copper and you gotta replace it all with fiber going into the house.
- ehPReth 3y ago
  once the infrastructure is there does each byte/gigabyte really have an intrinsic cost? isn't more about the bytes per second and not the bytes total?
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    There’s more to running an isp than simply plumbing electricity.
    - ehPReth 3y ago
      sure, but is your 'profit' to be made in.. charging per byte consumed/sent? it just feels... gougey? I had to live under an ISP that charged something on the order of $10+/GB after a certain amount and after they were forced to offer unlimited internet it was an actual breath of fresh air just to be able to use the internet and not worry about literally everything in the house, or if I could update my OS, or play this game, or watch this Netflix show, etc. i'm honestly curious. why not a standard margin on your 'per second' allowances (100/100Mbps, etc) or other 'addon' services? why should someone with a ring doorbell (or a homekit secure video whatever) be punished over someone who doesn't?
  - cortesoft 3y ago
    Sure, but the argument for caps is that it reduces overall demand and therefore peak consumption, and peak consumption is what the ISPs actually have to pay for.
    - ehPReth 3y ago
      hmm, spitballing here but if they were really suffering could they not offer a package with lower speeds during peak? (while slowly using some of their profit to re-invest in infrastructure?)
- kvakvs 3y ago
  Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises, salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees, to have a profitable business one must have those costs covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost is the same.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    This is patently false. Given optics can only support so many people at a given latency and bandwidth.
- guhidalg 3y ago
  Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.
  - spiznnx 3y ago
    If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a certain speed to the network. Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB (Comcast is charging 20x that).
    - guhidalg 3y ago
      1c/GB would be a decent rate for home data transfer in 2023, but where would you set the free limit? For reference, at my house I have a 1Gbps line and it looks like in 48 hours I have downloaded 1TB of data (looking at the number of received bytes my AT&T device is reporting). Am I normal? I don't know, but AT&T does...
      - spiznnx 3y ago
        I think that's rather high compared to average, considering the standard cap for Comcast Xfinity residential is 1.2TiB per month, and they claim only "a very small percentage" of their customers use more. I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay more.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        1TB in 48 hours is absolutely not a normal residential connection usage. The average US residential customer uses a bit over 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the time. https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-half-terabyte https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-hal...
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Bits that go unused have no value. Caps on numbers of bits in a billing cycle don't make sense. While it isn't exactly pure artificial scarcity, it's darn close. A retail ISP already has to have some fair share mechanisms for peak use times. That leaves very very little usefulness in monthly caps.
- musha68k 3y ago
  Peering agreements at internet exchanges make additional bandwidth very cheap to provide and infra costs are spread over years and many users, further reducing ongoing costs.. Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the internet successful in the first place.
- paxys 3y ago
  They already charge for bandwidth. People pay more for 500mpbs than 50mbps. We are talking about total monthly data caps, which have nothing to do with bandwidth.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    False. A month is a discrete amount of time that yields a potential maximum amount of data downloaded, this amount is clearly related to the bandwidth provided, hence caps. To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself literally is a function of the transmission material and infrastructure, which also isn’t free…
    - paxys 3y ago
      I have a 500 Mbps connection with a 1TB data cap, both pretty standard numbers in the US. If I used the connection at its advertised speeds, I would exhaust my monthly limit in about 4 hours. So no, that relationship is non-existent. The data cap math instead is "99% of our users use < 1TB, so we will charge the rest more because we can".
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        Or more accurately, to disincentive excessive use. They don’t need a cap to simply charge you more money, they’ve been doing that just fine with or without caps.
        paxys 3y ago
        That would be a valid argument if they defined "excessive" based on infrastructure limits rather than a demand curve and market research.
        endisneigh 3y ago
        All prices are based on “demand curve and market research” so I’m not sure what your point is.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  "It's weird that none of the so-called experts agree with me. The problem is clearly with their understanding of the space, not mine."
staringback 3y ago
So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?
- voakbasda 3y ago
  Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
    - superb_dev 3y ago
      Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        You already are charged by every road you drive on, just not explicitly or proportionally.
      - NegativeLatency 3y ago
        I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it would allow me to go where I'm going faster. Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.
phantom784 3y ago
Or at least require that uncapped tiers be available.
notyourwork 3y ago
And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.
- AussieWog93 3y ago
  That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?
  - epx 3y ago
    AFAIK, PON (Passive Optical Network) has inherent reasons to be asymetric
    - wmf 3y ago
      Not really. I'm sure asymmetric PON is cheaper but there are plenty of symmetric EPON modes.
  - paxys 3y ago
    The technical reason is that by restricting upload speed they can offer a higher download speed, and that is what most users care about.
    - andersa 3y ago
      This is nonsense. Fiber cables are always capable of the same speed in both directions at once. The actual reason is so they can sell you an overpriced "business" plan if you need upload speeds from the current decade.
      - paxys 3y ago
        A very small part of the country is connected by fiber, and fiber connections are always symmetrical. The vast majority of consumers still get internet via coax cables, and bandwidth is very much an issue on those.
jjcm 3y ago
I'm actually on the opposite side of this. I wish there were more metered options available for data, especially for wireless options. I'd love to see an offering that has a low monthly connection fee (i.e. $1-5), along with a sensible price per GB option (i.e. double the cost of transit so there are decent margins on this, but isn't something crazy like $10/gb). Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e. Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will result in more profit for the company. The desires of the customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster and more stable internet leads to better customer experience and more profit. One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed bandwidth, leading to "up to 100mbps" type connections where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know both the customer and provider have aligned desires.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Yes, metering is the rational thing to do. But caps are different and don't work the same.
- stefan_ 3y ago
  Well twice the price of transit is .. NaN? Data isn't generally charged in bits.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  It makes no sense to price wireless data based on IP transit costs. IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a penny. It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any terrestrial network. In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat data is $18. How many price points do you need in between? Heck, international 4G/5G data roaming fees are capped at $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.
IdiranVibe 3y ago
It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same
- criddell 3y ago
  It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested. My home internet has no data caps.
  - thayne 3y ago
    I don't know about other ISPs, but Xfinity/Comcast residential internet has a data cap of 1TB/month, regardless of the bandwidth tier you pay for. Although you can pay a (substantial) fee to remove that data cap.
    - SoylentYellow 3y ago
      Removing the Xfinity data cap would increase my bill by 60%. It is outrageous.
    - mjrpes 3y ago
      Comcast Business has no data cap and so might be an option
- ls612 3y ago
  For residential internet most people have no data cap and those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my desktop according to Windows.
  - callalex 3y ago
    1TB/mo is not “very large” since you can get that kind of data allocation on a $2-4/mo server.
callalex 3y ago
They should also require the ISP to use a reasonable method to count the amount of data if there is a data cap. No matter how I count the data in and out of my gateway running OpenWRT, Comcast/Xfinity consistently counts and charges me for at least 20% more data with no discernible reason why. I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up scale that only benefits them.
kstrauser 3y ago
I wish ISPs were required to advertise the number of seconds you're allowed to use their service at full speed. Ooh, a gigabit pipe with a terabyte cap? You're allowed to use it for 3 hours per month before throttling or extra charges kick in. I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is insanity.

endisneigh 3y ago

Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.

entropicdrifter 3y ago
Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one. The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality across the customer population. Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
      - throitallaway 3y ago
        > There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        You misunderstand the model. They don't pay ISPs, they offer the appliance for free to the ISP for colocation, reducing the upstream networking costs. AWS egress being extortionate is a distinct issue. The cost to the ISP in the rack (cooling, power, space) is immaterial considering the transfer savings (not only opex, but reduced capex from needing to oversize network gear or specific ports for peak streaming consumption) over the life of the relationship. If you want to learn more, lurk on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list. It is common to monitor AS traffic flows to understand whether you can offload with CDN appliance relationships or how to improve your network architecture (which networks to peer to directly or which internet exchanges [IXs] to meetup at). These agreements sometimes happen at a bar over beers during NANOG events. Call Verizon and ask them how much a 1Gbps circuit is. Consider why Comcast built their own national backbone. Also, some important history to remember. Fast.com measures your speeds to Netflix servers because some ISPs wanted to charge their customers and Netflix for that transfer (or to upgrade peering points) because of the revenue destruction from cable customers fleeing for streaming (net neutrality debate). https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Norton_Peering101_v0_N45.pdf https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Nor... (Peering 101, Bill Norton [Equinix cofounder], NANOG 45) https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-Wave-Of-Massive-Disruption-To-The-U.S.-Peering-Ecosystem.html https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-Next-W... (Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.7)) https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html ("The Internet Peering Playbook") https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-transit... ("How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit") https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-comcast-became-a-powerful-and-controversial-part-of-the-internet-backbone/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-c... ("How Comcast became a powerful—and controversial—part of the Internet backbone") https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036163652-How-much-does-the-appliance-cost-my-organization- https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600361636... > How much does the appliance cost my organization? > Appliances, including replacement appliances, are provided to qualifying ISPs at no charge when used within the terms of the license agreements.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Also, when caps are implemented, they're ridiculously expensive and limited, especially in an age of streaming video. Expensive comically beyond any reasonable conception of the actual marginal cost of transiting the traffic. Also - just look at LTE operators. They're also no-cap at this point (though subject to QoS at certain breakpoints, but they're typically reasonable breakpoints ime?). And that's in a SIGNIFICANTLY more capital intensive market - you have most of the concerns with terrestrial fiber, plus the joy of having to own RF spectrum and maintain towers etc. So I think no-caps-and-required-speed requirements would just make sense and be required to keep ISPs from trying to backtrack on being forcibly dragged into the modern area like balky calves.
  - Szpadel 3y ago
    I think that the issue is lack of competition. on mobile market it's easy to switch operator to any from multiple nation wide ones. for cable ISP AFAIK in US there is usually one. (in my central european country there is at least 3 ISP available ans AFAIK fibers to building are in some way rented to internet providers (?))
- wongarsu 3y ago
  In principle caps help with oversubscribing. If you want to use a 10GBit/s uplink to serve 5000 people with 100MBit/s each, you won't saturate your uplink nearly as often if you add a data cap. Of course that's not all that different from restricting bandwidth, just that you are restricting average bandwidth while allowing for some burst. Still violates the spirit of having fast bandwidth, unless the caps are quite generous.
  - NotSammyHagar 3y ago
    They do help push people to use less, but for places like Comcast I see data caps as just a revenue stream increaser. The entire company strategy seems to follow this approach.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Yes and no, depending on your plant build out you might have great interplant connectivity - 10G between each switch, 10G to the router, but the extraplant connections still cost and have bandwidth limits. So if you only use 2 gbps total during peak, you may not need to upgrade your plant to support higher speeds but you will have to pay more to your upstream provider to support it. This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything running. But now that we are offering packages higher than 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up. If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and packages we allow people to use.
  - musha68k 3y ago
    It’s true that smaller ISPs have their challenges, but the cost for both interplant and extraplant connections has been generally decreasing. Economies of scale and peering agreements can mitigate many of these costs.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      True, we connect our main ISP pipe to an internet exchange for that reason. It's also interesting to see how the industry is adopting pluggables for a lot of newer deployments because depending on what you need, there's a lot of flexibility now compared to even 5 years ago.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  > Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) Aren't we effectively arguing CapEx versus OpEx? Sure, an ISP's OpEx is tiny. But CapEx is huge, especially when you've got an old neighborhood that's all wired up with copper and you gotta replace it all with fiber going into the house.
ehPReth 3y ago
once the infrastructure is there does each byte/gigabyte really have an intrinsic cost? isn't more about the bytes per second and not the bytes total?
- endisneigh 3y ago
  There’s more to running an isp than simply plumbing electricity.
  - ehPReth 3y ago
    sure, but is your 'profit' to be made in.. charging per byte consumed/sent? it just feels... gougey? I had to live under an ISP that charged something on the order of $10+/GB after a certain amount and after they were forced to offer unlimited internet it was an actual breath of fresh air just to be able to use the internet and not worry about literally everything in the house, or if I could update my OS, or play this game, or watch this Netflix show, etc. i'm honestly curious. why not a standard margin on your 'per second' allowances (100/100Mbps, etc) or other 'addon' services? why should someone with a ring doorbell (or a homekit secure video whatever) be punished over someone who doesn't?
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Sure, but the argument for caps is that it reduces overall demand and therefore peak consumption, and peak consumption is what the ISPs actually have to pay for.
  - ehPReth 3y ago
    hmm, spitballing here but if they were really suffering could they not offer a package with lower speeds during peak? (while slowly using some of their profit to re-invest in infrastructure?)
kvakvs 3y ago
Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises, salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees, to have a profitable business one must have those costs covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost is the same.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  This is patently false. Given optics can only support so many people at a given latency and bandwidth.
guhidalg 3y ago
Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.
- spiznnx 3y ago
  If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a certain speed to the network. Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB (Comcast is charging 20x that).
  - guhidalg 3y ago
    1c/GB would be a decent rate for home data transfer in 2023, but where would you set the free limit? For reference, at my house I have a 1Gbps line and it looks like in 48 hours I have downloaded 1TB of data (looking at the number of received bytes my AT&T device is reporting). Am I normal? I don't know, but AT&T does...
    - spiznnx 3y ago
      I think that's rather high compared to average, considering the standard cap for Comcast Xfinity residential is 1.2TiB per month, and they claim only "a very small percentage" of their customers use more. I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay more.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      1TB in 48 hours is absolutely not a normal residential connection usage. The average US residential customer uses a bit over 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the time. https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-half-terabyte https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-hal...
Zigurd 3y ago
Bits that go unused have no value. Caps on numbers of bits in a billing cycle don't make sense. While it isn't exactly pure artificial scarcity, it's darn close. A retail ISP already has to have some fair share mechanisms for peak use times. That leaves very very little usefulness in monthly caps.
musha68k 3y ago
Peering agreements at internet exchanges make additional bandwidth very cheap to provide and infra costs are spread over years and many users, further reducing ongoing costs.. Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the internet successful in the first place.
paxys 3y ago
They already charge for bandwidth. People pay more for 500mpbs than 50mbps. We are talking about total monthly data caps, which have nothing to do with bandwidth.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  False. A month is a discrete amount of time that yields a potential maximum amount of data downloaded, this amount is clearly related to the bandwidth provided, hence caps. To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself literally is a function of the transmission material and infrastructure, which also isn’t free…
  - paxys 3y ago
    I have a 500 Mbps connection with a 1TB data cap, both pretty standard numbers in the US. If I used the connection at its advertised speeds, I would exhaust my monthly limit in about 4 hours. So no, that relationship is non-existent. The data cap math instead is "99% of our users use < 1TB, so we will charge the rest more because we can".
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Or more accurately, to disincentive excessive use. They don’t need a cap to simply charge you more money, they’ve been doing that just fine with or without caps.
      - paxys 3y ago
        That would be a valid argument if they defined "excessive" based on infrastructure limits rather than a demand curve and market research.
        endisneigh 3y ago
        All prices are based on “demand curve and market research” so I’m not sure what your point is.
kstrauser 3y ago
"It's weird that none of the so-called experts agree with me. The problem is clearly with their understanding of the space, not mine."

staringback 3y ago

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

voakbasda 3y ago
Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
  - superb_dev 3y ago
    Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      You already are charged by every road you drive on, just not explicitly or proportionally.
    - NegativeLatency 3y ago
      I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it would allow me to go where I'm going faster. Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages driving when there are other better options for some trips.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.

phantom784 3y ago

Or at least require that uncapped tiers be available.

notyourwork 3y ago

And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.

AussieWog93 3y ago
That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?
- epx 3y ago
  AFAIK, PON (Passive Optical Network) has inherent reasons to be asymetric
  - wmf 3y ago
    Not really. I'm sure asymmetric PON is cheaper but there are plenty of symmetric EPON modes.
- paxys 3y ago
  The technical reason is that by restricting upload speed they can offer a higher download speed, and that is what most users care about.
  - andersa 3y ago
    This is nonsense. Fiber cables are always capable of the same speed in both directions at once. The actual reason is so they can sell you an overpriced "business" plan if you need upload speeds from the current decade.
    - paxys 3y ago
      A very small part of the country is connected by fiber, and fiber connections are always symmetrical. The vast majority of consumers still get internet via coax cables, and bandwidth is very much an issue on those.

jjcm 3y ago

I'm actually on the opposite side of this. I wish there were more metered options available for data, especially for wireless options. I'd love to see an offering that has a low monthly connection fee (i.e. $1-5), along with a sensible price per GB option (i.e. double the cost of transit so there are decent margins on this, but isn't something crazy like $10/gb). Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e. Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will result in more profit for the company. The desires of the customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster and more stable internet leads to better customer experience and more profit. One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed bandwidth, leading to "up to 100mbps" type connections where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know both the customer and provider have aligned desires.

elzbardico 3y ago
Yes, metering is the rational thing to do. But caps are different and don't work the same.
stefan_ 3y ago
Well twice the price of transit is .. NaN? Data isn't generally charged in bits.
ftth_finland 3y ago
It makes no sense to price wireless data based on IP transit costs. IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a penny. It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any terrestrial network. In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat data is $18. How many price points do you need in between? Heck, international 4G/5G data roaming fees are capped at $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.

IdiranVibe 3y ago

It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same

criddell 3y ago
It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested. My home internet has no data caps.
- thayne 3y ago
  I don't know about other ISPs, but Xfinity/Comcast residential internet has a data cap of 1TB/month, regardless of the bandwidth tier you pay for. Although you can pay a (substantial) fee to remove that data cap.
  - SoylentYellow 3y ago
    Removing the Xfinity data cap would increase my bill by 60%. It is outrageous.
  - mjrpes 3y ago
    Comcast Business has no data cap and so might be an option
ls612 3y ago
For residential internet most people have no data cap and those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my desktop according to Windows.
- callalex 3y ago
  1TB/mo is not “very large” since you can get that kind of data allocation on a $2-4/mo server.

callalex 3y ago

They should also require the ISP to use a reasonable method to count the amount of data if there is a data cap. No matter how I count the data in and out of my gateway running OpenWRT, Comcast/Xfinity consistently counts and charges me for at least 20% more data with no discernible reason why. I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up scale that only benefits them.

kstrauser 3y ago

I wish ISPs were required to advertise the number of seconds you're allowed to use their service at full speed. Ooh, a gigabit pipe with a terabyte cap? You're allowed to use it for 3 hours per month before throttling or extra charges kick in. I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is insanity.