For wireless I'm hanging onto a grandfathered unlimited plan. It doesn't allow tethering though.
There was a short period of time when the old $70/m plan includes unlimited data, which is what I'm using.
How would they even make a distinction? Does Apple comply with carriers in this regard?
If you root the phone, of course, you can just change the tethering APN to the data APN, but I don't believe current versions of either Android or iOS let users do it without rooting, if your carrier has marked it non-editable. An Apple support page notes that you "can only edit or view your APN on your iPhone and iPad if your carrier allows it": https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201699.
I work fully remotely, video chat often, have someone else in the house watching netflix a lot. I stream music while working. I download large software packages often. 1TB is plenty for me.
A terabyte is a reasonable cap I think. If you want more, you can pay for unlimited data as described in the parent post.
Or, just wait 5 more years. Those files you remotely access will be even bigger, your video chats use even more bandwidth as quality increases, and Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
They’re playing the long game here. They put these data caps in place realizing full well that 90% of people won’t hit them today but in 5-10 years when 90% of customers do hit the caps they’ll cry out about how the caps have been in place for years and were never an issue. You’re playing right into their hand.
If you have a family of screen-locked people never leaving home and constantly consuming more input that their senses can possibly absorb, maybe it's OK to pay a little more than 95-99% of households do?
Even if the per-person usage is normla or healthy, why should my sigle-person usage subsidize your 4-person usage?
> Or, just wait 5 more years.
When caps are higher? Comcat has been raising caps over time, from 300GB/month to 1TB/month so far.
> Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
Why would Netflix do that? It is epensive for them for 0 value for 95+% of consumers who have neiether the TVs nor the living rooms nor the eyes nor the content information to perceive 4K content.
Also, why would they continue to increase caps? For the first time in their history the cable companies are losing video subscribers like crazy and they’re losing them to over-the-top services. They’re going to keep datacaps right where they are and use them to recapture that lost revenue rather than actually attempt to fix the issues consumers have with bundled channels and linear programming.
You do bring an interesting point about having tiers. Currently there aren’t any tiers. There’s the ‘normal’ rate capped at 1 TB and it’s already pretty high IMHO without constantly fighting for an intro rate and then there’s the unlimited rate for nearly double. I just don’t think if you want to play the tiered game that your ‘normal’ rate should be capped at what an average household can be expected to routinely consume.
In the end it doesn’t matter what consumers want or are willing to pay for though because as we all know broadband is at best a duopoly for the vast majority of households so you just get what you get. And that’s whatever XFINITY (maybe they won’t realize it’s still the same shitty Comcast!) decides you get.
I am just going to go off netflix's GB/hour figures. 3GB/hour for HD or 7GB/hour for 4k.
If you refuse to watch in 4k then you won't touch your cap because you are looking at 360-450gb/month.
However if you have bought a tv in the last few years it is likely a 4k tv because why not. Mine was a 55" smart tv for $350 about 2 years ago. Ive seen 4k tv's for under $200.
4k puts those numbers to 840-1050gb/month.
For 1 person. Now imagine a family that does not always watch the same thing.
1TB is designed to be a cap that is more than enough for anybody EXCEPT a cord cutter. If you decide to go with a streaming only tv plan kiss your bandwidth goodby.
* Hitman 2 - 104GB
* Elder Scrolls Online - 103GB
* Halo 5 - 99GB
* Forza 7 - 99GB
* Destiny 2 - 89GB
* Quantum Break - 160GB (including episodes which you would otherwise have to stream)
And it's pulling 34GB in updates (two games: 27GB + 7GB) without me even knowing (without explicitly checking). A single game using 10% of my cap is not reasonable IMO.
I’ve played some new games with amazing graphics. But 100GB? Is it mostly hi-res textures?
GTA V on last gen was notorious for reading off the optical disk and HDD simultaniously to spend less time moving things around in memory.
Disk failures are a major reason for performance degradation on consoles and why putting SSDs into consoles is a very good idea.
Microsoft supports per-region download slices, but I don't think many publishers take advantage of that because Sony and Nintendo don't support it.
I dont understand why y'all are downvoting this; it's an honest question.
The HDD bloat really stuck out to me when I looked at the upcoming WoW Classic Requirements - the current game requires 70 GB of space, but Classic requires 5GB. All games, even old ones trying to stay modern, require a huge amount of space.
Object encapsulation made physical.
The PS3 (Emotion Engine) and Nintendo DS (GBA cart slot) are the only consoles I'm aware of that have hardware only for backwards compatibility (although some games used the cart slot for pseudo-peripherals, such as rumble support or a guitar "grip").
Of course, it's silly for me to think 5-70 GB in 15 years is a huge jump. Doom 1 (1993) was 2.3 MB, and Doom 3 in 2004 required 2.2 GB.
Also, things other than my Xbox Ones use bandwidth. They are just the largest single consumer of it.
You're not gonna hit that easily with normal consumer use
edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach it, seems completely reasonable to me.
If it were equivalent, you could take any random person's 100 or 200 or 400 mbps service that has a 1 TB per month cap and replace it with 3 mbps uncapped and they would not care.
As someone currently on 400 mbps plan with a 1 TB cap, I can assure you that I would care, and would strenuously object to any such replacement.
I don't have 400 mbps so that I can download more than I could when I had slower plans. I have 400 mbps so I don't have to wait as long for downloads to finish.
You are paying for residential Internet service. The number of people who would legitimately need to transfer more than 1 TB per month over a residential Internet connection is vanishingly small. Bandwidth, particularly during high-demand hours, costs money. It is not fair for other users to subsidize your extreme usage scenario (since it is an axiom that all costs borne by the ISP are passed on to customers). It is far more fair that you, the extreme outlier, pays more.
It's called innovation and progress, thank God you are able to be corrected and change your thoughts as with your approach we'll never get anywhere
Try streaming 4k and get back to me, or is 140p "good enough"?
1080p: 370-740 Hours @30fps, 246-494 Hours @60fps
1440p (2K): 171-370 Hours @30fps, 123-247 Hours @60fps
2160p (4K): 65-171 Hours @30fps, 44-111 Hours @60fps
With my tendencies to watch a lot of video content, I myself easily hit over 1.5TB of data consumption each month. Luckily my ISP doesn't do any data caps so I don't have to worry.
The real world of data is generally billed at the 95th percentile of traffic consumption, usually with a commit to buy a certain amount of traffic. So you pay for a specific rate of data, the vendor provisions equipment to handle the agreed upon rate, and then you can do traffic at that rate forever. If you go over your rate, you talk to your vendor.
I don't know of any equipment whose natural operation is to handle a certain amount of traffic, then shut down until the next billing cycle comes around. Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things. They're not, it's just a money grab.
I'm not sure that's even true. I'd expect power consumption as well as 'wear and tear' to be less, and possibly significantly so, at idle versus continuous use.
> Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
Some people will definitely test the limits of anything that's supposedly unlimited. I imagine you're partially correct but I suspect data caps are the most comprehensible product attribute for ISPs to limit the relevant costs.
> If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things.
I'd imagine that'd be an even harder sell than congestion pricing for motor vehicle traffic. It is mostly just a 'fact' of the world that almost everyone is going to want bandwidth at the same times. The costs of transitioning to any other arrangement are considerable. And Netflix is probably the player most able to adjust. I'm not sure if they still do, but they did at one time host a lot of their content in ISP data centers.
Data caps are a poor tool for handling congestion. They're a great tool for frightening people into keeping their load low(and costs for the provider down), or for sucking more money out of people. They don't do a damn thing for immediate load.
Me? I have Comcast business class -- they guarantee me a specific bit rate and I can nail it up at that rate all month long and they don't care. For folks not paying for this service class, Comcast has bandwidth reservation and all the anti-congestion tools they need, they just don't use them -- they get more money out of people's behavior towards data caps.
Back when I had Comcast, that bug cost me $200. Thanks Microsoft.
It's a good reminder that our bugs have real world implications.
And assuming that the only thing that internet is used for is netflix then that's roughly then you're looking at 5780 minutes of video. (or, 50 movies, or 125~ episodes of your favourite netflix-length tv show)
I'm not sure if that's a lot or not, I suspect it's not, but I'm a heavy netflix user so I might be a shitty reference.
Nonetheless, those are the numbers.
To me, that seems pretty darned reasonable considering we're talking about 4k.
Even if you do, you should bear your share of the more beefy infrastructure needed to support that, instead of expecting Joe who only uses the internet once a day to check his email to subsidize you.
It is not, though.
https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...
https://www.comcasttechnologysolutions.com/our-portfolio/who...
On occasion, if you are an important enough customer, they'll give you peering for free - https://www.xfinity.com/peering . But they'd rather sell you Paid Peering (for obvious reasons)
Generally speaking ISPs don't pay anything for peering. (Unless they are smaller/local ISPs/WISPs or similar, who have to purchase backhaul or upstream to be able to offer service.)
It's complete bullshit and there's no practical reason for it beyond fucking over customers.
1. pay out the ass for the service i need
2. not have internet in 2019
oh boy oh golly i sure do have some reasonable choices here don't i
I mean it sucks when a company has so much leverage over you because you need what they're selling but you're not entitled to cheap high speed internet. You would have a case if you had no means to get internet access at all but that really isn't the case here.
Like this thread is hilarious because a bunch of hackers whose lives are on the internet and are deriving probably thousands of dollars of value from their high speed internet connection are mad when ISPs realize this and charge more appropriately.
The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does not have data caps is because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for seven years when trying to buy other companies.