Hacker News Reader

Comment by oelmekki | Hacker News Reader

I'm not from USA, am I correct to think Comcast is a mobile ISP? If so, this is a non issue : mobile apps can already decide not to do big update when not on wifi, browsers can do the same.

View on HN

That is incorrect. Comcast is the (second?[0]) largest cable ISP in the USA. About 10 years ago, they were calling people saying that they were using too much data, but that was always nebulous and varied greatly. Then they defined a 250 GB cap in 2008, and later, 300 GB. They only recently expanded it to 1TB. Go over it for three months, and Comcast will get very angry.

I'm not sure if the cap is in effect for places with fiber internet (like Verizon FIOS). It wouldn't surprise me, since they've admitted caps are unnecessary.[1]

[0] Charter + Time Warner Cable (after merge) is larger, I think.

[1] https://consumerist.com/2015/11/06/leaked-comcast-doc-admits...

I see, thanks. This sounds quite terrible actually : if internet has any historical impact, the last thing you want is for people to think about "not using too much data". I hope this won't last.

Many big American ISPs are too greedy. Even worse is that most people have no clue how much a gigabyte of data is.

About the time Chairman Wheeler was aiming for net neutrality, he was also looking at data caps and if they were bad. Within a month, Comcast increased theirs to 1 TB. Coincidence?

There's going to be a lot about how 'competitive' ISPs are in the next few years in America now that everything's Republican. But most people have two options: expensive cable ISP that's fast when it wants to be, and slow DSL that's also expensive and not getting better.

Unfortunately Comcast is one of the two companies (along with Verizon) that have monopolized the ISP market in the US. Together they own most of the market, and have agreements to stay out of each others' territories. This affects something like 40% of home Internet customers in the US :(.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com