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Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

> I've seen people from the US complain about data caps on regular internet for a while

This isn't a thing in the US. You've seen Canadians complain.

Ah, yeah as I said I've not had experience with this myself. The complaining has mostly been on various games forums in relation to physical vs digital games discussions and day 1 patches. It seems to be primarily comcast customers though which is why I thought it was in the US.

Yes it is. Comcast has a 1TB a month soft limit. You get 2 months of free overages within a certain period of time (12-18 months IIRC), after that they charge you extra. You can argue that 1TB is a lot and not really a limit, but it does exist.

Only in certain states. I have Comcast in NJ and there’s no cap. I have been above 2 TB almost every month for well over a year.

1TB a month is considered a lot?

That’s only around 34GB per day..

What would be considered enough? I don’t know how I’d use 3TB a month. 2 TB is a lot too to me and everyone I know. I’m sure it’s not a lot to some people especially people on here. But I would guess for the vast majority of people, at least 95%, 1 TB is sufficient. And 2 TB is sufficient for 99%+ of people.

Thanks for the answer!

I feel like I should state that I’m against all data caps. Where I live we don’t have data caps on home connections and it’s somewhat affordable to get unlimited LTE SIM’s (about €80/US$90).

I don’t see why there should be a limit. Connections are usually sold in different tiers which are advertised with a bandwidth speed. If something is advertised as having 100Mbps then I should be able to use that connection continuously 24/7 with that speed or a close approximation at least. So it depends on the advertised speed. For 100Mbps that would come out to roughly 60TB/month.

But in no way should it be 1TB in my opinion. It’s trivial to reach that especially because many connections aren’t used by a single person. 4k content is available and should be able to be consumed without having to worry about hitting caps. A family of four can easily hit 3-5TB whereas a single person might need less.

I agree that you should be able to use more than 1 TB. But in practice right now, what, 1% at most of households use more than 1 TB a month? I think reddit and HN are against this, but at that point I’d think charging a reasonable price for more than 1 TB of bandwidth would make sense. At least right now without 4K being widely available and consumed.

Actually I'm fairly sure that Charter, due to an agreement with the FCC that expires in the early 2020s, is the only major provider in the US without at least a soft cap. Comcast in particular is infamous for their low caps.

Verizon does not have an official limit on Fios. There is a story about them warning someone a few years ago who was using 7TB / month (which really is a massive amount of data). I can't really think of legal consumer usage that would get up that high. A redditor posted about keeping up 20TB/month usage without getting a warning a year ago.

I wonder if Comcast does soft caps in certain states for legal or business reasons.

I have Comcast in NJ and there’s no cap as far as I can tell. I have been above 2 TB almost every month for a while.

It absolutely is "a thing" in the US, depending on ISP.

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