Netflix’s biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs
latimes.com
latimes.com
A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single person household.
I haven't seen more recent studies on this, but as of 2014, U.S. providers were less overprovisioned than ones in Europe: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3352
> During peak hours, U.S. actual download speeds were 96% of what was advertised, compared to Europe where consumers received only 74% of advertised download speeds. The U.S. also fared better in terms of latency and packet loss.
The report you link to is unfortunately also woefully outdated, it's from 2014 using data from 2011.
This sounds like a cynical take on their motives but is actually just buying into the narrative the ISPs have pushed that these caps are because the bits are limited and caps introduce fairness.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/comcast-says-it-...
In actuality Comcast has outright said it's a business decision, not a technological one, and at&t said uverse had no need for caps unlike their old dsl network and then added them anyways.
It's rent seeking, plain and simple. The exact same way that the extra cable fees go up multiple times a year outside the advertised contract price and uncorrelated with inflation, government requirements or broadcast carriage fees.
And then they spin it as fairness for the heaviest users to pay more and justify it as only 1 in 20 people have to pay it anyways, so, hey, don't worry about it.
Comcast doesn't consider local(ish) providers as competition, this really only applies to Verizon etc.
I called Comcast to complain and try and avoid paying the ETF (it was at $180 because I signed a 2 year contract) with some kind of benefit: remove my data cap, drop my rate, something. They wouldn't budge an inch. Told me I was already getting a promotional price from them and that the data cap (which I'd already hit 2 out of their 3 grace overages) was non-negotiable.
Switched to the alternative provider, and I can't be happier. Looking forward to Comcast dropping their rates and/or data cap, but I'm hoping that I never have to be their customer ever again.
I discovered when I had someone's son staying at my house that watching Netflix all day at maximum quality settings will burn through that in a little over 3 weeks. Approximately 3GB an hour is consumed.
The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality.
Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.
No, it's not. Published cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers, prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)
Shirley you mean capped but unlimited broadband. At least the throttling will be unlimited. Maybe the caps will be unlimited too. And the excuses. And mysterious service outages.
Let's not beat around the bush. The FCC as a whole is not doing this. Republicans, who form a majority of the FCC's voting body, are. Elections have consequences.
Final Fantasy XV is the biggest I've seen, 100GB recommended on Steam. No doubt there's even bigger.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/gears-of-war-4/9nblggh4pbb...
I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that.
I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
I have found that forcing the PS4 to use CloudFlare’s DNS speeds up downloads by an order of magnitude, though, which is nice - updates that used to take an hour or more now downloads in <10 minutes.
Sure, that’s an extreme example, and that’s not going to be every single day (Sony only pushes game updates on Tuesdays, for instance), but you can see how easy it would be for a two-person household to eat through 10% of our monthly bandwidth in a single day - and we don’t even have kids with their own devices consuming their own media!
Note also that data caps don't exist in many places in the US either. For example, Comcast has no data caps here in Maryland. Verizon will only start bugging you if you hit 10TB+ several months in a row.
The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does not have data caps is because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for seven years when trying to buy other companies.
I dont understand why y'all are downvoting this; it's an honest question.
The HDD bloat really stuck out to me when I looked at the upcoming WoW Classic Requirements - the current game requires 70 GB of space, but Classic requires 5GB. All games, even old ones trying to stay modern, require a huge amount of space.
Of course, it's silly for me to think 5-70 GB in 15 years is a huge jump. Doom 1 (1993) was 2.3 MB, and Doom 3 in 2004 required 2.2 GB.
Object encapsulation made physical.
The PS3 (Emotion Engine) and Nintendo DS (GBA cart slot) are the only consoles I'm aware of that have hardware only for backwards compatibility (although some games used the cart slot for pseudo-peripherals, such as rumble support or a guitar "grip").
Also, things other than my Xbox Ones use bandwidth. They are just the largest single consumer of it.
I’ve played some new games with amazing graphics. But 100GB? Is it mostly hi-res textures?
GTA V on last gen was notorious for reading off the optical disk and HDD simultaniously to spend less time moving things around in memory.
Disk failures are a major reason for performance degradation on consoles and why putting SSDs into consoles is a very good idea.
Microsoft supports per-region download slices, but I don't think many publishers take advantage of that because Sony and Nintendo don't support it.
edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach it, seems completely reasonable to me.
Back when I had Comcast, that bug cost me $200. Thanks Microsoft.
It's a good reminder that our bugs have real world implications.
You are paying for residential Internet service. The number of people who would legitimately need to transfer more than 1 TB per month over a residential Internet connection is vanishingly small. Bandwidth, particularly during high-demand hours, costs money. It is not fair for other users to subsidize your extreme usage scenario (since it is an axiom that all costs borne by the ISP are passed on to customers). It is far more fair that you, the extreme outlier, pays more.
It's called innovation and progress, thank God you are able to be corrected and change your thoughts as with your approach we'll never get anywhere
Try streaming 4k and get back to me, or is 140p "good enough"?
If it were equivalent, you could take any random person's 100 or 200 or 400 mbps service that has a 1 TB per month cap and replace it with 3 mbps uncapped and they would not care.
As someone currently on 400 mbps plan with a 1 TB cap, I can assure you that I would care, and would strenuously object to any such replacement.
I don't have 400 mbps so that I can download more than I could when I had slower plans. I have 400 mbps so I don't have to wait as long for downloads to finish.
And assuming that the only thing that internet is used for is netflix then that's roughly then you're looking at 5780 minutes of video. (or, 50 movies, or 125~ episodes of your favourite netflix-length tv show)
I'm not sure if that's a lot or not, I suspect it's not, but I'm a heavy netflix user so I might be a shitty reference.
Nonetheless, those are the numbers.
To me, that seems pretty darned reasonable considering we're talking about 4k.
It is not, though.
https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...
https://www.comcasttechnologysolutions.com/our-portfolio/who...
On occasion, if you are an important enough customer, they'll give you peering for free - https://www.xfinity.com/peering . But they'd rather sell you Paid Peering (for obvious reasons)
Generally speaking ISPs don't pay anything for peering. (Unless they are smaller/local ISPs/WISPs or similar, who have to purchase backhaul or upstream to be able to offer service.)
It's complete bullshit and there's no practical reason for it beyond fucking over customers.
1. pay out the ass for the service i need
2. not have internet in 2019
oh boy oh golly i sure do have some reasonable choices here don't i
I mean it sucks when a company has so much leverage over you because you need what they're selling but you're not entitled to cheap high speed internet. You would have a case if you had no means to get internet access at all but that really isn't the case here.
Like this thread is hilarious because a bunch of hackers whose lives are on the internet and are deriving probably thousands of dollars of value from their high speed internet connection are mad when ISPs realize this and charge more appropriately.
Even if you do, you should bear your share of the more beefy infrastructure needed to support that, instead of expecting Joe who only uses the internet once a day to check his email to subsidize you.
1080p: 370-740 Hours @30fps, 246-494 Hours @60fps
1440p (2K): 171-370 Hours @30fps, 123-247 Hours @60fps
2160p (4K): 65-171 Hours @30fps, 44-111 Hours @60fps
With my tendencies to watch a lot of video content, I myself easily hit over 1.5TB of data consumption each month. Luckily my ISP doesn't do any data caps so I don't have to worry.
The real world of data is generally billed at the 95th percentile of traffic consumption, usually with a commit to buy a certain amount of traffic. So you pay for a specific rate of data, the vendor provisions equipment to handle the agreed upon rate, and then you can do traffic at that rate forever. If you go over your rate, you talk to your vendor.
I don't know of any equipment whose natural operation is to handle a certain amount of traffic, then shut down until the next billing cycle comes around. Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things. They're not, it's just a money grab.
I'm not sure that's even true. I'd expect power consumption as well as 'wear and tear' to be less, and possibly significantly so, at idle versus continuous use.
> Data caps are a measure invented to extract money, not serve customers or packets.
Some people will definitely test the limits of anything that's supposedly unlimited. I imagine you're partially correct but I suspect data caps are the most comprehensible product attribute for ISPs to limit the relevant costs.
> If the cable companies were worried about fairness, they'd really be speaking in terms of bandwidth reservations at peak times and encouraging use during off-peak hours, and similar things.
I'd imagine that'd be an even harder sell than congestion pricing for motor vehicle traffic. It is mostly just a 'fact' of the world that almost everyone is going to want bandwidth at the same times. The costs of transitioning to any other arrangement are considerable. And Netflix is probably the player most able to adjust. I'm not sure if they still do, but they did at one time host a lot of their content in ISP data centers.
Data caps are a poor tool for handling congestion. They're a great tool for frightening people into keeping their load low(and costs for the provider down), or for sucking more money out of people. They don't do a damn thing for immediate load.
Me? I have Comcast business class -- they guarantee me a specific bit rate and I can nail it up at that rate all month long and they don't care. For folks not paying for this service class, Comcast has bandwidth reservation and all the anti-congestion tools they need, they just don't use them -- they get more money out of people's behavior towards data caps.
For wireless I'm hanging onto a grandfathered unlimited plan. It doesn't allow tethering though.
There was a short period of time when the old $70/m plan includes unlimited data, which is what I'm using.
I work fully remotely, video chat often, have someone else in the house watching netflix a lot. I stream music while working. I download large software packages often. 1TB is plenty for me.
A terabyte is a reasonable cap I think. If you want more, you can pay for unlimited data as described in the parent post.
Or, just wait 5 more years. Those files you remotely access will be even bigger, your video chats use even more bandwidth as quality increases, and Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
They’re playing the long game here. They put these data caps in place realizing full well that 90% of people won’t hit them today but in 5-10 years when 90% of customers do hit the caps they’ll cry out about how the caps have been in place for years and were never an issue. You’re playing right into their hand.
If you have a family of screen-locked people never leaving home and constantly consuming more input that their senses can possibly absorb, maybe it's OK to pay a little more than 95-99% of households do?
Even if the per-person usage is normla or healthy, why should my sigle-person usage subsidize your 4-person usage?
> Or, just wait 5 more years.
When caps are higher? Comcat has been raising caps over time, from 300GB/month to 1TB/month so far.
> Netflix defaults to 4K for nearly all content.
Why would Netflix do that? It is epensive for them for 0 value for 95+% of consumers who have neiether the TVs nor the living rooms nor the eyes nor the content information to perceive 4K content.
Also, why would they continue to increase caps? For the first time in their history the cable companies are losing video subscribers like crazy and they’re losing them to over-the-top services. They’re going to keep datacaps right where they are and use them to recapture that lost revenue rather than actually attempt to fix the issues consumers have with bundled channels and linear programming.
You do bring an interesting point about having tiers. Currently there aren’t any tiers. There’s the ‘normal’ rate capped at 1 TB and it’s already pretty high IMHO without constantly fighting for an intro rate and then there’s the unlimited rate for nearly double. I just don’t think if you want to play the tiered game that your ‘normal’ rate should be capped at what an average household can be expected to routinely consume.
In the end it doesn’t matter what consumers want or are willing to pay for though because as we all know broadband is at best a duopoly for the vast majority of households so you just get what you get. And that’s whatever XFINITY (maybe they won’t realize it’s still the same shitty Comcast!) decides you get.
I am just going to go off netflix's GB/hour figures. 3GB/hour for HD or 7GB/hour for 4k.
If you refuse to watch in 4k then you won't touch your cap because you are looking at 360-450gb/month.
However if you have bought a tv in the last few years it is likely a 4k tv because why not. Mine was a 55" smart tv for $350 about 2 years ago. Ive seen 4k tv's for under $200.
4k puts those numbers to 840-1050gb/month.
For 1 person. Now imagine a family that does not always watch the same thing.
1TB is designed to be a cap that is more than enough for anybody EXCEPT a cord cutter. If you decide to go with a streaming only tv plan kiss your bandwidth goodby.
* Hitman 2 - 104GB
* Elder Scrolls Online - 103GB
* Halo 5 - 99GB
* Forza 7 - 99GB
* Destiny 2 - 89GB
* Quantum Break - 160GB (including episodes which you would otherwise have to stream)
And it's pulling 34GB in updates (two games: 27GB + 7GB) without me even knowing (without explicitly checking). A single game using 10% of my cap is not reasonable IMO.
How would they even make a distinction? Does Apple comply with carriers in this regard?
If you root the phone, of course, you can just change the tethering APN to the data APN, but I don't believe current versions of either Android or iOS let users do it without rooting, if your carrier has marked it non-editable. An Apple support page notes that you "can only edit or view your APN on your iPhone and iPad if your carrier allows it": https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201699.
You're not gonna hit that easily with normal consumer use
The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple, and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services.
In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook googling" for Angolans.
It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things.
- edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil: Mobile internet plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook, while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator (ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.
It's a giant bucket of 'it depends'. If the CDN network serving the content has placed hardware within the ISPs network, it's likely a non-issue. This was a major issue before folks like Netflix started moving their CDNs closer to the customer. You might have a hard time finding the articles, but I recommend looking at the pissing match Level 3 and Verizon got into years back.
>it would happen if caps existed or not
I'm not convinced. You are essentially arguing that scarcity of a resource has no affect on consumption.
To my mind the question would be "if an ISP has network with a fixed capacity, do their monthly operating costs differ between a month where they consistently utilize 50% of that capacity compared to another month where they utilize 80%?"
I suspect the cost to the ISP is the same in either case: they have purchased the equipment and bandwidth to support the network and those costs are fixed, regardless of how much of that bandwidth they are actually using. If that is true, this idea that there is only so much data per month to go around and if you use more then your neighbor then you should be charged more money would be fundamentally dishonest.
(1) This is overly simplistic; these are individually-negotiated B2B contracts, so details vary widely.
Based on this article, I suspect that ISPs like Comcast and Charter are not extending their backbone to handle growing internet traffic. It seems they are charging exorbitant fees to discourage increased usage instead (in this article, the subscriber canceled their Hulu account and lowered the resolution of video supplied by Netflix).
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
If there is truly demand for unmetered internet someone will step in and fill the void. Some ISPs also use total transfer as a way to discriminate between business internet and residential internet.
Having a bandwidth cap is basically the ISP punishing you for contending too often.
That said, assuming the ISP wants to keep an average speed higher than the minimum their contention ratio would offer, people who download a lot would have a greater impact on that, and could therefore cause the ISP to have to invest in more hardware and back-haul.
The counter is that the ISP isn't upgrading their network anyway, they're just juicing the market by charging some people more.
Most ISPs are constantly upgrading parts of their network. Earlier this spring AT&T came through my complex and installed fiber in every apartment. Average broadband speeds have increased significantly over the last decade, and for that to have happened significant network upgrades would have to have taken place.
Not sure if at a noticeable level, but I keep wondering: aren't there costs that are directly proportional to the amount of data transferred? Flipping bits costs energy, both at the level of fundamental physics and (more importantly) at the level of engineering - all the electric and optical signals aren't free, and packet processing isn't either. E.g. I'd expect my power bill to be larger if my Raspberry Pi saturated the network by streaming /dev/urandom than it would be if it was sitting idle.
But aside that, I think that beyond the "we can charge you for data because you can", the per-data-transferred costs come from the overprovisioning ISPs do. The fraction of the advertised to actually supported bandwidth per user they can get away with is dependent on average amount of traffic users generate.
I was so sad when I had to move further north where there's only Cox.
How do data caps help with that though? People are still going to use most of their internet during peek hours, because...well, those are the times people use the internet the most, by definition.
It's like trying to combat rush hour traffic problems by limiting the number of times people can use a highway. People are still going to use it during rush hour, they just are going to avoid using the highway during non-rush hour periods, which accomplishes nothing.
In the UK most ISPs will instead perform traffic shaping where they will slow down your connection during peak times after a certain small amount of data transfer. This still seems to be disliked by consumers just the same.
In Australia the bandwidth caps used to be specifically set up with a different peak and off-peak cap to help with this even more.
You send 1gbit across the link. Does the power consumption increase appreciably?
The Internet at scale is just that but larger. Perhaps there are 50 switches/routers between you and your destination.
The issue comes about when you have a 10gbit bottleneck and customers want to send 15.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7eyg/wikipedia-zero-fac...
I can accept that it would be better for the health of the internet as a whole to give people full access or not at all. But it cannot be exploitative to give something of value for free to someone, just because that someone wants something more/something else.
Free stuff distorts markets. It's important to be cognizant of this providing aid.
One of the (many) criticisms of Nestle is that they went to 3rd-world countries and gave new mothers free supplies of bottled formula. Then after the mothers switched to formula and stopped lactating, they took away the free milk offer and forced them to pay out the nose for a life-essential product that their bodies would have otherwise produced naturally.
Just like with Nestle, giving away limited Internet that can only access Facebook/Wikipedia has the effect of forcing those services to become critical architecture. It denies nations the autonomy to decide how their own networks should be run, and puts them at a massive disadvantage when competing on those networks or building their own services.
In exchange for giving away access to their product (and only their product) for free, Facebook gets a monopoly-level stranglehold on how information is transmitted across those regions -- and that's not just bad for the Internet as a whole, it's bad for the countries and their citizens.
I agree it could be on the national interest of a country to forbid nestle formula given like that (or, for that matter, basic internet given by facebook). Also, the nestle case seems more clearly exploitative to me, because they meant to deprive women of something by giving them the formula.
the more data you have to transfer the more bandwidth you need to have available to be able to offer some desired throughput to your customers
edit: I found it here[0].
> The idea of this project is to tunnel Internet traffic through Facebook chat (packets are sent as base64), the main component is tuntap and also the Google's Gumbo parser which does the interaction with Facebook (login, send/receive messages, etc.).
Bandwidth is strongly correlated to total transmitted data, as the amount of time in a day isn’t changing any time soon. It may be reasonable to offer some kind of off-peak pricing for customers that can time-shift their internet needs, but the complexity is apparently not worth the benefits.
In particular, if the usage over time of a high-data customer generally looks like a scaled version of the same chart as a low-data customer, there won’t be much effective difference in the two models, and consumers understand quantity billing much easier than bandwidth-percentile billing, which is how the wholesale market is priced.
"Data used between the hours of 11pm and 9am do not count against your data cap." Not difficult to understand, cell phone companies used to do it all the time with minutes.
(Times made up, adjust for real-world peek.)
Personally, I think it's relatively obvious that data caps on cable internet connections are not related to the cost of service.
They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago).
The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.
Data caps allow ISPs to run oversubscribed networks, which are very profitable. If you're streaming 24/7, then that bandwidth isn't available to sell to your neighbor. In that sense, cost is indeed directly related to amount of data transferred.
The real world cost of a TB of data is basically the cost of the energy moving it, which is increasingly cheap.
I say this without knowing too much about it; but I do know the cable line is separate from the power line... so the cable company needs to drive the bits through the coaxial with their own electricity, correct?
A long, sustain, high bitrate seems like that would use more, no?
Just speculating...
I put a directory into a multi-volume .7z archive (sliced into 200 MiB chunks, their per-file limit), upload the chunks through their API (solving a simple captcha every 5-10 GiB), and that's it.
I believe I've read about people in Philippines (?) using Facebook for sharing files using a similar process.
I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business. The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.
That's not how statistical multiplexing works.
If it was some sort of a natural law that shipping 1 byte cost $x on the margin, then the PSTN never would have survived the shift to unmetered long distance service. Somehow ISPs have been making big profits selling unmetered internet service during a period of hypergrowth. How is it possible that they didn't go broke during this process?
The real story here is that "power user" is a proxy for "cord cutter". If a residential user downloads 1TB per month, then they're a thoroughgoing "over the top" video consumer. The traffic patterns are different for streamers vs. pirates, but it's still people watching TV and not paying cableco for the privilege.
They're just doing price discrimination, rolling out bandwidth caps with punitive fees for violations, and waiting for the 4K frog to boil. Roll it forward, and you're back in the world of all you can eat at a higher price point. Cablecos don't really have to care how you split your bill between internet and video, as long as ARPU stays in the $70-$100 range. "Dumb pipes" are higher margin than cable channels, and don't need contract renegotiations with steely-eyed squeezers like Disney.
Let DIS roll their price increases out directly to consumers with their streaming channels, while you just sitting there running a toll road. It's like a regulated natural monopoly, without the burden of appropriate regulation. This is a nice business.
> If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs, look at the price of the business plans.
The premium there is for uptime guarantees, better service, and a certain amount of legislative corruption (without which no discussion of telco/cableco practices would be complete). They are allowed to discriminate between commercial & residential customers, and refuse residential service to commercial addresses.
Just looking at Biz service vs home and assuming that's because of unlimited bandwidth is 1:1, there's more going on there that's different between the two.
You can get gigabit fiber throughout Asia and Europe for as low as $20 a month with no cap. There is no "discount" for fast connections in the US. The ISP cartel price gouges the whole country and because of their regional monopolies have no incentive to invest in actually having the provisioning to support the speeds they advertise.
The ISP needs to build infrastructure to support peak instantaneous load. If the current network is at 50% capacity and I turn on Netflix there's basically no cost to the ISP, even if I've already used my 1TB of data for the month. If they are at 95% capacity then things start to matter a lot more.
If the ISPs were interested in fair pricing, they should offer pricing like the power companies these days, charging more during the day/evening and less during the night when less people are generating traffic. You should be throttled during the afternoon when everyone else is on or pay for the "fast lane".
But they don't operate like that, because $, making them the bad guys.
I mean, there's a physical limitation to how much data a given amount of cable can transfer at any time. Some of bandwidth caps are likely to prevent people from streaming as much data as they can 24/7 otherwise considerably more cable would have to be run, not unlike adding more pipes when more housing additions are added to an area (think of Sim City when you'd need to add more water infrastructure when you'd have more buildings).
Data usage is actually increasing at a mind-boggling rate, there are plenty of good articles about this on the internet.
If we look at Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
We see in 2000 1.008 EB of IP traffic, in 2010 it jumps to 241.812 EB, 2017 jumps to 1,464 EB!
Mobile traffic went from 86.412 EB in 2016 to 144 EB in 2017!!!
(those above numbers are taken from Cisco whitepapers cited in the Wiki entry)
Ericcson has a good one here about mobile data increase:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/mobility-report/future-mobile-da...
If you look at the numbers you see that at the current growth rates, there really is a valid reason to limit data usage as much as possible by providers via datacaps. While their current cabling can likely handle the demand, they're almost certainly going to reach a point in the near future where they simply can't deploy cable enough to keep up with the annual increases.
If the data is coming from outside the ISPs network, it might be on a paid connection. Although I think it's less popular today, it was common for paid connections to be billed based on the physical capacity as well as the amount of transfer (95th percentile billing used to be ubiquitous).
Within the ISPs network, or on unpaid connections, the marginal cost per byte is discontinuous: most of the time it's so low it's probably hard to measure, but when you hit the capacity of a link, the cost can be high to increase capacity.
An ISP, especially a residential ISP is not expected to have capacity for all its users to transit data across the internet at the full speed of the last mile connections at all time. There is oversubscription, and it's ok and reasonable. To the extent that someone is using a residential connection at full speed all day every day, that's not really reasonable, and they should be in a different account type. However, ISPs play a large part in this: they should make this more clear, their data caps should be sized to bandwidth, they should offer transfer rate capping in case of overage, and the overage fees should be more reasonable.
The only exception is if you peer and have a bilateral agreement, in which case you pay nothing anyway.
If the ISP you worked at used other ISPs (tier 2 or 3) as upstreams then yeah, you get the same service as business class internet (flat rate for a capped link speed) but once you're one of the big boys it's absolutely metered and charged by usage.
What data caps kill are peer to peer services, self hosting, and anything where people actually participate in the internet rather than acting as consumers only. It's part of the ongoing push to make the internet into another television where people all use the same centralized services and never interact with each other directly.
Phone usage has made this even worse since smartphone network connectivity is not real internet connectivity. There people have learned to accept data caps (which make sense given the limited actual frequency bandwidth available for radio in free space). But also they've learned to accept the inability to host servers, use ports, or do anything other than HTTP/S. The ISPs have seen this and are now copying the violations that wireless telcos have brought in.
Time -- or better, demand-- based rates would make a lot more sense than caps for that purpose.
If you note most cellular data caps ignore the providers own services or various partners (like youtube). I'm not saying that the cellular rate structure has nothing to do with the limitations of the last mile physical medium, but it would be an error to assume it has too much to do with it either.
But don't people already pay more for higher bandwidth connections?
Because the sponsors of the bills and authors of the clauses used to work for the same ISPs and were functionally writing blank checks of taxpayer money to their old employers and present campaign donors.
Its why the FCC is almost wholly staffed by board members or C level management of big telecom.
Thus the situation in this article: they subscriber purchases a 4K television and chooses a higher bandwidth cable internet plan. They do not realize that they are only paying to use the same fixed amount of data up more quickly.
I wonder if we'll eventually see companies like Netflix and Disney pressure cable companies to drop these bandwidth caps. In this article the subscriber cancels their Hulu account and turns down the Netflix video quality, directly costing Hulu money and devaluing their 4K television.
To be more precise, they stress download speed. Comcast’s 1Tb plan has upload speeds of 30Mbps
One exception may be content creators, who quickly become aware of this fact once they try uploading their first YouTube video.
In any case, although Comcast (and others) may advertise / stress download speeds, that information is really easy to look up for anyone who is interested [0], and is probably shown somewhere along the checkout path.
Your speed tier determines how much of the shared bandwidth you're allowed to consume at any given moment.
Your data tier determines how much total data you're allowed to transfer.
These numbers become related at the edges but in the middle can be picked somewhat independently. Very few people need 24/7 full-tilt internet so it makes sense to buy more point-in-time bandwidth while keeping your data tier low.
Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a $40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.
You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G (probably more if you had a high gain antenna).
Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.
That 20 Mbit/s driving across remote areas probably wouldn't even hold true for Switzerland.
But yes, overall I'd say the US definitely has worse home internet infrastructure (though it's unfortunately still not as bad as some other developed countries).
Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries.
- Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people.
- Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people.
- The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people.
Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population
It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.
We're not talking about the outback.
The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.
And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile.
Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak.
Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.
The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.
You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"
- EU land area is 1,728,193 square miles with 508 million people
In the US at scale I think it would be around $5,000/month. That gives you peak capacity of 3PB but you can’t expect anything like perfect utilization.
With a bit of hand-waving I would guess your provider’s transit cost is on the order of $3-5/TB/month...
Even if EU geography brings this down to $1/TB/month, they are losing money on you. I seriously doubt it’s going to be on the order of $0.10/TB/month for transit.
Contrast this with AWS bandwidth costs in Europe!
AWS is what bandwidth costs look like when it’s a profit center.
I would certainly expect residential lines, with the extreme overhead of operating the service, to be priced closer to AWS rates than to baseline commercial transit rates.
In the UK my ISP (which has excellent service but a small customer base, so it has actual quotas, not a faux "unlimited" service with some hidden usage policies) charges £45 pcm for the cheapest 200GB quota and £55 pcm for 2TB quota. So that means 1.8TB of quota comes to £10 pcm end user cost (ie that has their profit and taxes baked in). Maybe much less difference than you realised.
I currently live in Germany where the internet is a bit worse but still much better compared to the US. I get 500/100 here with no cap for $40 per month.
Interestingly, the 1TB cap is exactly what ISPs use to plan for and calculate their percentile-billed upstream commitments, as a 1TB cap corresponds to a sustained 3Mbps usage.
For what it's worth, T-Mobile did this with Binge-On: https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-video
There was a poster on HN who said that his little small non profit was able to fill out a form and be zero rated.
Charging based on traffic that leaves the ISP doesn't seem anti nuetrality to me. Charging based on specific peering arrangements does.
That’s why I’m thinking there should be some kind of tiering where I get unlimited 50 mbps (still ok for round the clock 4K) and also N terabytes at the 200mbps for those occasional big downloads.
My current broadband is 500mbit without data caps, but I suspect that if I do use 500mbit 24/7 for long then they’d start throttling of contacting me. I’d be happier with a model with public caps than one with secret caps and throttling. It could be that I really do have a true 500mbit no-cap subscription, I don’t know!
I listen to 80 something podcasts, most of which are weekly if not daily, and watch 2-3 hours of YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on Weekdays and probably 20 hours on the weekend and never come close to hitting the cap.
According to this article https://www.androidcentral.com/how-much-data-does-streaming-... Netflix 4k is 7.2gb an hour, if you have a 1TB Comcast cap and they're counting that as 1000gb you should be fine for at east 130 hours (giving an allowance for phone/app/os updates and random browsing).
Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance. https://www.experienceuhd.com/blog/can-human-eye-see-differe...
Not sure how that is relevant to my comment, but the 2017 nominal median income per capita was $31,786 in the United States. That means even a $650 television is more than a week's gross pay for as much as 40% of the US population.
Most of us are quite content with even 720p too and just because something is 'under $1000' doesn't mean you need to replace a perfectly functional television.
I've got a 55" 4K at a viewing distance of maybe 6', tops, if you're leaning waaaaay back on the couch, and can only barely tell the difference. A good 1080p source (high bitrate h264 or h265, or a normal ol' 1080p bluray) looks a hell of a lot better than Netflix's 4k. HDR matters a ton more than 4k itself does, as far as how good something looks.
[EDIT] and what really matters is having semi-decent speakers in a somewhat-OK 5.1 layout, with a proper receiver. I'd drop to 720p on the picture before I'd give that up.
You can find a non-capped (at least in theory) plan everywhere if you pay enough of course.
For movies/tv shows/games we probably spend few TB a month.
I had never heard about such thing until now, it's ridiculous to have cap and I'm so glad that I don't have to live in such a place.
lets say a month is 30 days, a day 24 hours, an hour 3600 seconds, then a month is 2.592 Ms.
so an "unlimited" plan at say 1Gbps is actually always upper limited at 2592 Tb (bit) per month or 324 TB (byte) per month
I think governments should ban the "unlimited" names and force the ISP's to simply state actual limits or variable limit calculations if dependent on congestion. Here in belgium we have instead some vague "reasonable usage" policy...
There's one fundamental difference: there's no risk of exceeding that implied "data cap" derived from the speed cap.
I’d say the shift to more unlimited offerings happened about 5 years ago.
"Called the "Xfinity Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan," the cap restricts the amount of data you consume in your home to 1TB per month regardless of the speed of your plan. Comcast claims 99 percent of customers use less than 1TB per month, but it does now offer an unlimited option for $50 more per month"
https://www.att.com/help/internet/usage.html
* - they don't say it on that page, but obviously there is some mechanism by which AT&T would stop you from using the full symmetric 1Gbps constantly.
Even though most are "unlimited" nowadays, they're still under a fair usage policy which means that if you download too much (usually 1TB+), you will get a call to explain why you download so much or you'll have your internet speed reduced.
My local cable internet ISP:
https://www.cogeco.ca/en/internet/packages
The packages under $100CAD/mo have data caps under 200GB.
Currently using a 33GB Daytime + 33GB Nighttime plan(Total 66GB month) for $9.5
$80/month; 1 TB included, +$50 for unlimited
Would people be happy with
$130/month; $50 discount available if you stay within 1TB
or what about
$80/month†; †pricing includes $50 discount for staying within 1TB
They don't bother wording it nicer because they don't have to. There's no competition.
Unlimited internet has been a welcome respite from the inconsistent and unfair pricing of mobile data plans. Seeing that change without an explanation feels wrong.
I can imagine ISPs responding with "Here's your explanation: our infrastructure isn't built out to have everyone downloading 1TB/mo and if you want that you need to pay for it"
To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.
So I'm personally upset over this because it's a nickel-and-diming false choice between paying even more than our already-overpriced bills, or watching your quality of service decrease because a greedy company decided not to keep up with an eminently reasonable change in standards of quality.
So are you upset by the fact you can't get unlimited internet for a reasonable price, or that the ISP advertised $80 month and you had to pay $130? If it's the latter than it's purely a framing issue.
>To whatever extent that's true, it's because of an ISP oligopoly and active lobbying measures that prevent creative solutions that might improve quality/decrease costs.
That seems entirely orthogonal to having bandwidth caps. To the company and society as a whole, having crappy service and gouging 90% of the users for $100/month and 10% of your users for $150/month is the same as having crappy service and gouging all of your users for $105/month. If anything the first option is "fairer" because users that use the service less pay less.
You're right that bandwidth caps aren't my main complaint about ISPs, but overall displeasure with internet service is relevant to the bandwidth cap discussion because bandwidth caps are a feature that contributes to that displeasure.
Fairly or not, I blame ISPs for taking us from "A world where everyone pays $50/mo" to "A world where everyone pays $80/mo". Now they're trying to turn that world into a world where you have the choice between $100/mo and $150/mo. There's a fairness question to be discussed (I personally think it's not unreasonable to have society-wide, fast, affordable, unlimited internet be the default) but there's also a value decrease there that deserves just as much attention as the fairness question. That decrease (and not the fairness issue) is where my frustration is directed.
Instead, you pay $80/month, plus a $200 penalty for each additional terabyte. You have to prepay $50/month to avoid the risk of a penalty. Comcast would rather make a bunch of money selling insurance, than put a fair price on data.
Because the pricing model isn't reflective of the real costs associated with the business its blatantly price gouging and exploitative and they can only get away with it because they have no competition because they bought out politicians to guarantee it so. Its a systemic disaster dumpster-fire mess than private citizens can't do jack about besides move to the ~2% of the country with competitive or public ISPs.
Basically every service provider in every industry uses the same "extra fees" model over "discount". From mobility networks to drycleaners to restaurants. Customers just aren't used to seeing things the other way around, and will immediately balk at the sight of higher initial prices.
How? I have a 4K TV (and a couple of 1080), I work from home, my wife streams all day, and my torrents are always seeding, and have a gigabit line (with unlimited data).
I only average about 500GB a month, and my peak was 772GB.
I guess the only thing I don't do on a regular basis is play games.
Don't get me wrong, the caps are just rent seeking and also totally unfair (how come watching Comcast on Demand doesn't count against the cap but Netflix does, even though both come from servers on Comcast's network?), but it blows my mind that people can actually hit that 1TB cap.
Hats off to y'all.
A 1080p movie will be 2-4GB/hr.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-netflix-...
Am I missing something here? Am I overestimating the costs of bandwidth, does the Netflix/CDN edge serves inside of the ISP network lower it dramatically?
So yea, you could frame this in terms of rationality, but since when was rationality the sole basis of ethics, and since when have ethics become irrelevant to human life?
Paying for data transferred does not. Data isn't limited like water or electricity.
There ought to be a law that advertising a plan as "unlimited" is disallowed if there is a cap.
Currently there are two companies, Shaw (cable) and Telus (fibre to the home), and some smaller ISPs that use either Shaw cables or Telus DSL.
Internet pricing here tends to look like $20-35 CAD per month on the low end up to about $110 for a high end fibre symmetrical connection, with most plans coming in around $50-75 if you play the "bounce from ISP to ISP every few months" game. Data cap costs appear to look reasonable on most plans and you can get them without caps.
> Cable executives prefer not to call them caps, referring instead to “data plans” and saying it’s a matter of fairness. People who use more bandwidth should pay more, they say, especially since capacity isn’t unlimited
If any internet provider or cell provider offered reasonable pay per GB data rates without an unreasonable minimum monthly usage charge, I would be all over it. Google Phi is probably by far the closest thing I've ever seen, but Comcast & Verizon are absolutely not willing to let me pay only for what I use, so it's very funny to hear rationalizing quotes about "fairness".
For comparison, about $140/month with fees for 200/20 business, where consumer gigabit/80 is about $90/month iirc. Business gigabit is like $300/mo (f that).
On the other hand, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple etc have shifted everything online so they are saving on distribution.
Seems fine to me.
The ISP isn't losing money from offering fiber to New Yorkers. They lose money by paying for infrastructure in less populated areas in middle America. They're trying to make up for that by making urban customers effectively subsidize the Capex the company needs to spend elsewhere
This is a problem in the US and not elsewhere because it's a massive country with people spread all over
The only thing data caps do is ensure that heavy users pay more. The alternative to them, is that Comcast would just raise all customers' bills even more.
In an ideal situation, we'd have pure metered data usage, and pay by the MB, similar to how we pay for electricity or natural gas usage. Then people who barely use it would pay drastically less, and yes, the heaviest users would pay even more.
The ironic part is that local governments usually end up repairing the distortions in the market and externalized costs caused by these monopolies via social programs. The whole thing ends up more socialist with an added layer of inefficiency and graft than just working out a socialist solution up front.
It's a bit myopic to say this only about America.
"Just buy a lower speed" is not feasible since ISPs keep pushing the lower speed that you can get higher and higher. Overselling. If all you get is fibre, here the minimum is usually 100 Mbps, which I evidently don't need. Same about data caps in mobile connections.
Gym memberships work the same way.
I use Google Fi which has no data caps. It costs $10 per GB.
Maybe it's in populated areas where the infrastructure is not that great. It's hard to really grasp the logic since they claim that 98% of their customers never hit the cap. So what's the point?
[0] https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-broadband-traf...
I had a complaint from plusnet that I was in the top 1% of downloaders. I complained back that there will always be a top 1% of downloaders even when you get rid of them as that's how percentages work.
As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap. Isn’t that sort of existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by this quantity of video content.
Internet is like nuclear power. When there's a lot of extra at night they can practically give it away. My ISP does this.
Also I can go through about 400GB a month of Netflix just by having it on in my home office as a sort of ambience.
I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.
I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for 20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays, and he only uses about 100 metres of it.
None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.
Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay-per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.
The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount. It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund the road?
The objectionable parts of data caps are the arbitrary hard cutoffs and massively inflated overage fees. It's crazy that the second TB/month may cost 10x the standard monthly rate with a 1TB cap, especially since most ISPs don't provide any easy way to track or limit the amount used. It should be more linear. Really the bill should have two parts: a small fixed connection fee based on the provisioned peak bandwidth to cover last-mile equipment costs and basic unmetered, contention-free connectivity at perhaps 500kbps, and a charge for data transferred above that limit proportional to the product of data size and priority/weight. Priorities should be set on the CPE side of the link using the DSCP field according to whatever policies the subscriber chooses, with "unmetered" (weight=0) as the default classification for automated background traffic and low-priority/bulk (weight=1) as the default for anything initiated by the user.[1] Higher priority traffic would carry a higher weight in the bandwidth allocation when the link is under contention but would also cost more per MB. For example, if there are 100 subscribers using only bulk traffic and 50 subscribers using only priority-2 traffic on a 1Gbps shared link the available bandwidth (925Mbps after the reservation for "unmetered") would be divided into 200 shares (100 + 2x50) with bulk traffic getting one share (4.6Mbps) per subscriber and priority traffic getting two shares (9.3Mbps). Put another way, 1MB of priority-2 traffic costs twice as much as 1MB of bulk traffic but is delivered in half the time. Of course other priorities/weights are possible, including fractions.
[1] This part would require better interfaces for classifying traffic at the source, since almost everything looks like opaque TLS traffic to the router these days. The router has no concept of whether a human being is waiting for a given transfer to complete, or how much the subscriber (who may not be the end user) is willing to spend to speed up the process. I'd imagine an algorithm based on target speeds and a monthly budget could work reasonably well as an approximation, though, combined with some basic source- and destination-based rules.
With an unlimited plan you're simply paying for the link instead of its utilization.
The network hardware costs money, once it's there there's practically no additional cost per byte transferred.
If he's sticking with UHD content on Netflix then 4-5 hours average per day per account per month would reach Comcast's 1TB monthly data cap.[1]
If there are multiple users on his account (e.g. him and his kids) then you're talking just 1-2 hours of Netflix streaming per person per day per month. The UHD subscription package for Netflix allows streaming on up to four devices simultaneously.
[1] https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle 7GB/hr for UHD content
I find that a lot still.
The natural limit on an ISP is the speed of your connection times 247 usage. The unnatural but obvious second limit is the actual speed of your connection times 247 usage.
Since I own my house, I can have as many people in it as I want, subject to the laws of physics. (My local fire marshal may or may not have something to say about that; I haven't checked.)
Not only early buyers. I'd guess more than half of Model S/X owners have unlimited supercharging.
My 2019 Model S has unlimited supercharging (though it is not transferrable if I sell the car).
If you don't use the Internet much you should pay less for Internet, but you shouldn't be artificially restricted in how fast the Internet works! Throttling is terrible, and the fact that people literally wait for an hour for a Windows update to download because they have cheaper Internet is... kinda dystopian.
We should push ISPs to provide all customers the fastest possible speed their network can do at the time, instead of artificially throttling them, and then charge them for usage.
A gym membership generally costs the same if you go all day everyday or not at all.