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Comment by ar0 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I am often wondering: wouldn't it maybe be better to have a provider that has clear data limits in place (and reasonable charges for exceeding them) but otherwise provides full, unrestricted, unmonitored high-speed connectivity including IPv6 for server usage instead of having an apparently "unlimited" connection with lots of throttling, filtering, "best effort" and peering games of chicken? After all, "unlimited" is not really unlimited (moving bits does require physical materials which are limited) and primarily means that low data users subsidize high data users.

Now, don't get me wrong: from what I have read, Comcast seems to be a prime example of the second kind of ISP and they are implementing data caps, so yes this would make me try to switch as well. But dismissing data caps in general seems not to be the right approach for me.

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> After all, "unlimited" is not really unlimited (moving bits does require physical materials which are limited) and primarily means that low data users subsidize high data users.

The "low data users subsidize high data users" thing is widely misunderstood. People imagine that if it wasn't for that one guy in a hundred, instead of paying $49.99/month that one guy would be paying $99.99/month and everybody else would be paying $15/month. But do the math; the one guy in a hundred would be paying $99.99 and everybody else would still be paying $49.50.

And in practice what happens is that the user whose bill just doubled cuts back their usage. But those people are the early adopters you're shutting down. So nobody can ever build a service that requires above average data because it would blow the user's usage cap; all such services become DOA which means the ISP can forestall upgrades indefinitely. The internet never gets any faster and nothing that requires faster internet ever happens.

You want to be subsidizing that guy, because it isn't that expensive and tomorrow you're going to want the upgrades the money paid for.

There's a long tradition in business that once the price of something drops below a certain point it makes no sense to offer it metered, as the cost of managing that exceeds the income you get from micromanaging it.

It literally makes no sense at all to offer metered data. It doesn't help the consumer, it doesn't help the business, and it doesn't help us as a society. Even if it's not a total dumpster fire that doesn't mean it makes any sense at all.

This is a short term money grab by the worst company in America. That's all.

It's a fairly limited money grab if the cap is beyond the majority of actual usage

Nope, that's how they get you.

They have projected precisely the point at which they can enter the market with a cap high enough that nobody will care today, and over time things like 4K netflix and larger and larger games, with frequent large patches and OS updates will eat that buffer to become pure profit. They will be sticking hard at 1TB, not at 99th percentile. Remember that 4K is 4x the pixels that 1080p is, and HDR adds even more data.

Bingo. This is all about boiling the frog slowly while trying to do so in a way that avoids regulation.

4x the pixels, but "only" 2.3x the data, according to Netflix:

  "High (Best video quality, up to 3 GB per hour 
  for HD and 7 GB per hour for Ultra HD)"

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

7 GB/h is 15 Mb/s. That can't possibly be full quality 4k?

If you're in the UK, you are exactly describing Andrews&Arnold's business:

http://aaisp.net/

Full, unrestricted, unmonitored, uncensored, IPv6-compatible compatibility sold by the gigabyte.

They are honestly fantastic (I'm even using them as my mobile provider - and I don't live in the UK anymore). However, if you use them you'll understand why this model can't go mainstream: It gets expensive pretty fast, especially if you aren't paying attention.

However I will straight up recommend AAISP to the UK HN crowd. If you don't know them, please look into them!

Agree with this. I've been their customer for a number of years and am very happy. Their support, transparency and philosophies are wonderfully refreshing.

I've never really understood how it's OK for ISPs to market contended, capped connections as if they were dedicted leased lines. At what point does contradicting yourself in the small print with 'fair usage policy' and 'up to' become illegal?

I actually have an anecdote about leaving AAISP and going to an 'evil-capped-service'...

AAISP applies time-and-byte-based billing, with higher billing rates in the evening. One buys a number of billing 'units' at the start of the month and these deplete with the calculated usage, if you exceed your purchased units then they add another one and charge you.

Eventually this reached the point where my wife was asking 'how much will it cost to watch this video?' and we were trying to work-out whether it would fit in our purchased allowance, given the time of day, or require a top-up. So it was easier to move to an equally competent ISP ( Goscomb ) who offered various capped tiers, so now she can just look at the usage level and determine whether she can watch a 1.5GB video or wait until next month. There is also less fear about how much my self-hosted services are costing me.

Several months after I migrated-away from AAISP the latter cancelled the underlying broadband service on my line. So they're not infallible, either... and they never did apologise. Thankfully Goscomb fixed the issue and soaked-up any charges from BT, the infrastructure provider.

Well, yeah, that's a metered connection for you and it's what I was talking about: You need to keep it in mind all the time. Or, you need to overprovision in order not to worry about it.

They have a 1TB service now which is very cheap, same as Comcast, so for most people I actually think this problem is solved. Back when I used them, my usage was greater than today and I was ordering only 300GB monthly so it was a pita. Yet look at me still recommending them :)

> So they're not infallible, either... and they never did apologise

Honestly that doesn't sound like them, unless it legitimately wasn't their fault. Ring them. Hell, ring them today and ask for an apology I'm fairly certain you'll get one. They did mess up when I was moving out as well, by turning it off a day early - I gave them a ring and it was fixed in 10 mins, and they did apologize :)

Now today I'm stuck with an ISP that doesn't train its staff on what IPv6 even is. I can't call it about increased latency or 70 disconnects a day without being asked "have you tried turning it off and on again". I can't get transferred to a manager. I can't get a refund despite 4 months of completely unusable service.

I'll take the constant worries of metering over eating meat from a butcher that doesn't know what a cow is.

This is what i've always disliked. I don't mind paying for X data a month - but if i'm going to do that, i want something akin to an SLA.

If they're going to oversell the network[1] and cap my data, what the hell good are they?

Internet is too important to be mis/greedily handled as it currently is. ISPs need to start providing something of an SLA, and we need to start running monitoring tools in user end routers to ensure up time.

[1]: I can only assume this due to speed drops during peak times.

Yep. At work we might use services like EC2 and justify it with "I don't want to pay for resources I'm not using, therefore I will use services that offer me usage-based pricing. Who wants to go back to the dark ages of being charged by the month for a short-lived server, when I could be charged per minute of usage instead?"

And yet, no one can think of any possible justification for implementing a change like this for consumer data usage...

>moving bits does require physical materials which are limited

Physical materials limit concurrent throughput, not monthly transfer. ISPs oversell their throughput and then hope that monthly transfer limits will dissuade users from actually saturating "their" bandwidth too often.

The honest strategy here is to sell much lower throughput links such that everyone gets to saturate theirs 24x7 without causing problems for anyone else.

Such an option might make BitTorrent users happy, but we live in a streaming world now - most consumers seem to want bursts of extremely high bandwidth followed by hours of nothing.

VPS providers have substantially the same problem with RAM, and for a time their approach was to state the baseline and "burstable" RAM of a given price point separately.

There's cost in energy in moving bits around but let's not also kid ourselves that per gig pricing is rational either. There are fixed infrastructure costs and business costs that vastly exceed the energy cost of 1gb vs 10gb. In actuality you would socialize the high infrastructure costs on the backs of larger consumers

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