This just isn't true, though. The limit for a network provider is peak bandwidth usage. When they sell a 2gbps connection to a customer, that 2gbps connection is not reserved entirely for that customer. It isn't like the total bandwidth an ISP has is 2gbps * N number of customers.

They over-subscribe because they know not every customer is going to be using up that full 2gbps 24/7.

Now, you can argue that an ISP SHOULD provision that way, with the expectation that their customers are going to be using the full connection 24/7, but that would raise the cost per customer a LOT, and I don't think people want to be paying for an ISP that provisions like that. It would be a lot more expensive per customer, and it would end up with a lot of the bandwidth going unused most of the time.

If the average bandwidth used by customers goes up, it will require the ISP to pay for and maintain more circuits and cost more money. We can argue there are better, fairer, ways to limit usage, but it is simply not true that every customer downloading a lot more doesn't cost the ISP more money in the long run.

ISPs face costs for peak usage / level of “playing with the numbers” yes, but economies of scale and exchange agreements reduce these costs significantly. Bandwidth caps not only have a weak financial justification but also run counter to net neutrality.

How do bandwidth costs run counter to net neutrality? (Unless you are talking about certain types of traffic not counting against the caps)

Zero-rating = skewing whole internet playing field, not just stifling small creators; subtly - or not so subtly - influences user behaviour, leading to a constrained experience. Users might feel financially pressured to use certain services, missing out on potentially superior or more diverse options, which goes against the original ethos of the open internet.

Ok, so yeah you are talking about some data not counting against the cap. I agree, that violates net neutrality.

A pure cap that counts all traffic the same wouldn’t be, though.

would it be fair to say that bandwidth is just another product sold like plane tickets?

With the crucial difference that the equivalent of 7/8ths of a a seat is still useful when it comes to bandwidth, especially for home internet.

Yes? But with orders of magnitude more difference. Let’s do a back of the napkin calculation:

Say your ISP gives you 100mbit/s = 1.08TB/day ≈ 30TB/mo. On gigabit that’d be 300TB. While you do have some heavy torrenters they are outliers.

Now I assume everything but TV/movie streaming is a rounding error for average Joe. Netflix says 1-7GB/h depending on quality. Average user watches ~3.2h/day (wtf is wrong with people!) but that’s ~100-700 GB/mo. Now that’s between 0.033%-2.3% of downstream bandwidth.

Of course, people generally watch TV at the same time of day, so it gets more complicated to provision resources. But there’s also no question that pooling bandwidth (over-provisioning) makes sense to reduce costs. The question is more about how much congestion is acceptable, and I wouldn’t trust shitty monopolistic companies to behave. But if you can handle eg Super Bowl or a World Cup final without degradation you’re probably good the rest of the year?

> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB.

That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much lower end equipment.

Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.

> If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it.

But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time, but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously there would be issues. A store advertises next-day shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there would be issues. A house might have 100A power service, but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously there would be issues.

Put another way, what you're proposing is dramatically slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but they're not that profitable. Actual average usage on most lines is probably sub one percent. I just checked my line - my average use is about 300kB/s (for a total of about 800GB per month), or about 0.3% of my speed cap. I'm a heavy user, most people are probably below 0.1% of their speed cap.

If you want every ISP to provision the full bandwidth for every customer, so that their network can handle all their customers using their full bandwidth at the same time, it is going to cost each subscriber a LOT more money or get a lot lower peak bandwidth. I think MOST people would prefer to pay less and be able to use the full speed for a fraction of the time.

If you want to know how much more expensive the connection would be if you expect to use the full bandwidth 24/7, just look at the cost you pay for transit in a datacenter. It is multiples of the cost home consumers pay at a per-bit level.

Most users are best served by being told the speeds they will usually get if they stay within average usage patterns, because that is what most people do.

Yes it would work in any other industry. Users can overload a power grid. Users can overload a telephone network. Users can overload a grocery store. NO industry can deal with critical overload without problems.

> "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.

Go to a grocery store in Florida before a hurricane and try to buy bread.

>> Data packets aren't a limited resource.

No, but bandwidth is. Particularly wireless where you can't just lay down another cable or fiber.

Bandwidth and data caps aren't hand in hand. If I download a COD update that is 100gb right now at 1gbps. or I watch 3gb of netflix a day at 10mbps, i'm still using 100gb. But the bandwidth requirements are very different.

They either have infrastructure that can handle 1gbps per user, and then they have bandwidth available, and data caps are nonsense... or they don't have the infrastructure, and are banking on their service being idle 90% of the time for most users, and this is why after 5 oclock, my internet goes to crap when everyone is getting home and starting to use the internet. And now suddenly Im drastically overpaying for non-broadband internet because my ISP underprovisioned way too much.

This goes back to the point that everyone is making that ISPs shouldn't be able to underprovision to the point that it degrades performance during high usage times.

My ISP saw $800 million in profits on $2 billion in revenue in 2019. That's an AMAZING profit margin. They can afford to not underprovision, and when they don't under provision, then no, bandwidth isn't a limited resource.

> No, but bandwidth is

Which is why they already charge for bandwidth

> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB.

I cannot believe how anyone with a straight face can claim that the infrastructure and maintenance required to serve "n times 1MB" is exactly the same as the costs for "n times 1TB". This is so obviously not the case that I genuinely don't even know how to explain it.

You can serve your thousand subscribers on a dingy Pentium 1 if they're using 1MB, because it adds up to just 1,000MB. You wouldn't be able to serve just a single customer with the same hardware. Never mind the cabling etc.

There is some truth to what you say but Comcast charges me around $1 per gigabyte over my cap. It absolutely does not cost them that much more money to serve me.

Almost certainly not, no. That it's overpriced is of course a different thing. I suspect part of the reason these costs are so high is that they really don't want you to use more data, so they won't have to upgrade the network.