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Comment by datainplace | Hacker News Reader

Stupid question, but my Mom lives in a really rural area. Pays quite a bit for internet and is charged by the MB. Can we ask Microsoft to pay for their bandwidth usage?

Since upgrading to Windows 10 she's been hit with $200 in overages.

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I worked at an ISP that charges as much as $25/GB for usage, and has tiny monthly usage caps (as low at 10GB/mo) and there is no other choice for our customers.

Every time a large iOS, MacOS or Windows update goes live, we can literally see the difference in the overages people pay. It's a big problem that lots of people don't understand.

Now you will also see the uplink usage go up, potentially much higher, since Windows 10 is torrenting updates from client machines without asking the user.

This seems to be one of the real costs of upgrading to the latest version of Windows. In this case your mom has to pay the bills, but in general I'm curious how long will it take for ISPs to launch a solid campaign against Microsoft, like they did with Netflix.

How is this a real cost, is there an estimate of how many bytes are sent and received and at what interval? If it was anywhere in the thousands of megabytes regularly, maybe that's the real cost but that's just an assumption.

Not quite sure what is your point here. The amount of megabytes transferred each month does not have to be any particular fixed number to become a burden for the user, or the ISP. We can see that at least in one case (and probably many more) such a cost can exceed $200. All of this without user's consent.

Microsoft, please get your stuff together. Hire some privacy aware people.

I finally saw the bill. From the moment she started downloading Windows 10 to the moment I told her to shut the internet off, she used 20 gigs. That's ridiculous. And there is only one computer in the house. No other devices use internet.

So, are you going to continue supporting Microsoft by installing Windows 7, or are you going to put your mom on an easy linux distro like ElementaryOS [0] or Kubuntu? [1]

0. http://elementary.io 1. http://www.kubuntu.org/

I'd like to switch but she uses Quicken and a few things that won't switch over.

So yes, you are continuing to support Microsoft.

It hasn't even been out that long, so what kind of data amount are we talking about? Century Links 1Gbps has told multiple friends, and friends of friends that they absolutely enforce the 250GB/month limit. That's 33.33 minutes @ 1Gbps before you've hit the cap. That's untenable. XBox games are hitting 100GB each. And now the OS is pushing and pulling maybe 10% of this cap? Umm, yeah, good luck with that.

I'm sure phoning home only uses a small amount of data. But downloading the update and then sharing the update with others is where I think she got in trouble. Sharing is now turned off and the data is starting to normalize.

I know I won't get any money back. But I wonder how many other people ended up paying more for Windows 10 by downloading it then had they been able to purchase it on a DVD.

mobile providers in australia bill in 1MB minimum sessions (with quite short session times) that would add up pretty quickly with these wonderful backend connections.

I imagine how awesome Win10 will be on mobile devices with paid internet...

Did she set the connection as "metered"? I know some things stop then.

The $200 is likely from the automatic updates, which were pretty big. How much extra in MB was it?

It's likely from the automatic _sharing_ of automatic updates.

I think at this point she's has closer to a gig of data. Honestly the only thing I can think is that the download itself plus seeding it to other computers nearby got her to that number. But that's a guess.

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