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Comment by sadness2 | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; people who use more data have to pay for more data

Not in the UK. I've literally never had an ISP contain about bandwidth, and I use a lot of bandwidth.

Either you’re pretty young or you’ve been lucky. Unlimited broadband was not the norm in the UK around ten years ago.

OFCOM and the ASA banned the use of the word "unlimited" to describe broadband plans with a usage cap, which pretty much killed caps overnight. More recently, they banned "up to" speed claims - the advertised speed must be representative of the actual speed of the majority of users during peak hours. Broadband providers must also offer a guaranteed minimum speed, with the right to cancel the contract without penalty if that speed cannot be achieved.

Can confirm, metered and capped services were the norm, even after ADSL became mainstream.

Especially if you're paying for one of the better services, like Andrews and Arnold etc. They have caps listed on their broadband pages. There have been regular stories where customers have been sent letters about their bandwidth usage even though they're on 'unlimited' plans. The ISPs generally refer to clauses in ToS, which (imho) doesn't mean anything can be 'unlimited'.

I was at Uni around ten years ago (actually it's more like 12, getting old!), I remember we had Sky Broadband (in a flat full of IT students) and seriously abused it. They never complained.

I don't think you use a lot of bandwith, seeing as you never had a complaint.

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.

Was it a complaint? A buddy of mine is on Plusnet, they wrote to him about it but it wasn't a complaint, more just letting him know.

You may be unaware of bandwidth throttling that takes place with a lot of ISPs after you have used a certain amount in a month. One example, up until recently, is virgin media [0]

[0] https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-broadband-traf...

Lots of ISPs do it yet your example is an ISP that stopped doing it?

The US does not have unlimited data on home internet subscription ?

Not everywhere. I always thought data caps were mostly in place in areas with ISP monopoly, but I'm moving to an area where Comcast is the only viable option, and they don't have any cap.

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?

To keep someone from reselling their bandwidth for commercial purposes. Like running lots of servers or starting up a wireless Internet provider and using the residential connection as back-haul/peering.

It's way too slow to do these things. Also the reliability would be terrible. Also a TOS violation anyway.

In France nothing stop me from doing this.

Maybe some/many would use more if they weren't capped?

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