It’s not even remotely. It’s equivalent to 3 mbps. It’s not a technological limit. It’s only imposed to extract more money and discourage streaming. It sets the country back technologically. It also discourages content creators from jumping to 4K.

People don't buy home internet to max out their connection 100% of the time. It does not make sense for the capacity to be designed for 100% load from 100% of the customers 100% of the time, otherwise you'd price out most of your subscribers. Ergo, you're never going to get it unless you pay some pretty high rates. Even many datacenter connections are billed on some bandwidth percentile billing and not always max link speed as often connections are fairly bursty.

It's true. All home internet (and business internet!) connections are oversold. If you're going to max it out 24/7 you need a dedicated fiber line.

My fastest speed I've measured at my place (Oz) is 1gbps, but due to latency and jitter it's generally much worse. There's a large disconnect happening in tech, where infrastructure isn't keeping up in all countries with what the tech companies are providing. Ironically, ISPs here do sell unlimited plans.

> It’s equivalent to 3 mbps

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.

Not sure what you mean by "It’s equivalent to 3 mbps". Are you, like, streaming a video of an eagle nest 24/7?

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.

The problem is that underprovisioning uses some statistical average that will fail on special situations. Content streaming is so common now that there are peak hours where almost everyone is streaming video. If ISPs need to have that use case in mind, it should be possible for them to sustain that demand 24/7. If they don't do that, it's for one of two reasons. Either they can't sustain peak demand and they are trying to disincentivize usage, or they can handle a heavy demand but want to charge extra for off-peak bandwitdh usage, thus earning money for an already amortized infrastructure.

Maybe 20 years ago we had the same comment "who needs 1gb? You can fit everything in a floppy!".

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"?

I agree for a single person streaming 1080p and lower. However, the move to 4K and HDR are causing data consumption rates to rise to the point where 1TB isn't sustainable, especially if you have family sharing the same network and streaming at the same time. Here's how long you it takes to stream 1TB of video with Youtube's various resolutions/bitrates/framerates:

  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

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702

1080p streaming on other services will reach the 1TB cap much quicker. YouTube compression is much more intense than Netflix compression, depending on the show: Netflix picks optimal compression parameters based on the type of show or movie you're watching.

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.

Okay, make it 4 TB. My point is, ISPs imposing a cap is reasonable and a way to get the outliers to pay for more of the hardware/personnel required to service their extreme bandwidth requirements.

Note that for an ISP a 1 TB of data doesn't even cost a dollar. It's unreasonable to ask even a $1 for a TB of overages.

Why have a cap at all? It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.

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.

> It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.

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.

Wear and tear is generally not an issue with network equipment. You buy it, you run it until it depreciates or breaks or becomes too much trouble, you replace it. I've never heard an argument of "don't run that thing too hard, it'll shorten its life". (If you do hear this, it's usually a sign of inadequate cooling).

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.

I think data caps might be the best business tool for ISPs offering services to consumers. After learning about how business Internet services are sold and priced, it's not so surprising that they're more 'rational'.

Those guaranteed rate agreements are tens of times more expensive than consumer internet connections. The whole reason why consumer internet connections are so much cheaper is that they're based on the premise that most people will have bursty behavior. (Download a 25MB facebook page at 400 mbps then idle.) For such usages, it's far better to let everyone achieve high burst rates sometimes, and then implement policies to discourage streaming at high rates all the time, then to limit everyone to the maximum guaranteed bandwidth the network can handle.

That's about 140 hours of 4K streaming. That's a lot for a single person, but not a lot for a family with multiple devices, especially if you throw in some 50 GB games in there.

Or Microsoft Onedrive being stuck in an eternal upload/download loop.

Back when I had Comcast, that bug cost me $200. Thanks Microsoft.

I've had a mobile podcast app decide to start re-download all my podcasts off WiFi, even though I had it set to download only over WiFi.

It's a good reminder that our bugs have real world implications.

I would say 5TB is reasonable. If a 4K movie is 100GB. then over 30 days is 3TB of usage. If 1 person per day watches a 4k movie and the household of ~1-5 people does other things as well, 5TB should be sufficient. I think that is a stretch and my gut says yeah, 1TB is good, but I already upload/download 10-20GB per day at work so 5TB seems more reasonable for an upper bound.

Assuming x264 encoded 4k data @ 173.47MiB/minute (size of this 1 minute file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvEVNBZjcn4)

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.

By some back of the napkin math, that's at least 30% of an entire months worth of free time for someone employed full time.

To me, that seems pretty darned reasonable considering we're talking about 4k.

with the addition of family members, that isn't a lot.

Having a cap thats equivalent to downloading say, 20 modern AAA games sounds reasonable to you? In the most technologically advanced and wealthy society in human history? In the nation that played perhaps the largest role in pioneering and establishing the Internet? Seriously?

Yes. Do you download a game every day or something?

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 was a way to compare the size of that data. Either way, I’m paying for a speed, and the Internet companies can more than support that level of data in major cities. With the amount of subsidies this kind of infrastructure gets, it’s absolute bootlicking to defend a cap as low as 1TB.

Doesn't to me when they use our tax dollars to expand their infrastructure to the most profitable places then leave last mile loops to the customers to pay and constantly reneg on they're contractual agreements with zero repercussions.

I'm really loving that fiber that was laid everywhere after we gave them 400 billion in tax dollars. Oh wait...

640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone

And yet it does not seem reasonable to me.

A cap of 1 TB per day seems completely reasonable to me, too. For mobile plans. At home I expect to not be capped and I'm not and everything is well.

I'd be ok with that if it was actually causing problems for the ISP.

It is not, though.

ISPs are charged directly for peering.

ISPs charge for peering, they don't pay for it, they get paid for it.

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.)

I've gone over mine, quite easily.

It's complete bullshit and there's no practical reason for it beyond fucking over customers.

The practical reason is that the people who use more data are exactly the people who are willing to pay more for internet service. Can't really fault a company for squeezing the customers that have proven themselves more dependent on internet service.

Why should I pay more just because a company thinks I can or would be willing to? I'm not willing to.

Then don't? Prove them wrong!

ah yes i'll just go ahead and choose between my two options

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

That's exactly my point. You'll pay out the ass because the service is that valuable to you and the alternatives -- using public internet, cellular, satellite, becoming your own ISP, paying another provider the build-out costs to run a line to your house, or just going without -- are worse.

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.

My home internet makes me approximately $0 in revenue ever.