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Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is usually one terabyte. There’s a long list of them at https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps , the biggest offenders being AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Viasat (which, yes, is satellite Internet), and Comcast (a.k.a. XFINITY).

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.

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With AT&T Fiber - 1000Mbps up/down for $100/mo - you get unlimited data. The slower plans are capped at 1TB, but you can add unlimited for $30/mo (or pay exorbitant overages).

For wireless I'm hanging onto a grandfathered unlimited plan. It doesn't allow tethering though.

The $100/month 1Gbps plan used to be $70/month and ATT just includes the additional $30 to make it unlimited.

There was a short period of time when the old $70/m plan includes unlimited data, which is what I'm using.

Just as a counterpoint to some of the people talking about how they use far more than a terabyte per month:

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.

That’s great. You state you have two people in your household. Have a couple of kids and add several more devices that play games, download apps and updates, stream hours of video, and get to download ever increasing ads. I bet that 1 TB wouldn’t be very adequate anymore.

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.

came to say this. you might not think a 1TB cap is onerous now...

Even the highest-bitrate 4K streaming takes 90hours/month.

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.

Your 90 hours/month figure is only 3 hours/day. It doesn’t exactly take a ‘screen-locked’ household to consume 3 hours/day. I would imagine most households with any number of kids greater than 0 easily consume more than that.

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.

So the average hours of tv watched per person in the us is 4 or 5 depending on what study you go by.

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.

The cord cutter who watches everything in 4k?

A big thing you're missing is games. I've just looked at my Xbox One:

* 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.

4K video too, which is only going to grow. And maybe cloud game streaming like xCloud/Stadia.

Funny how the only comment expressing lack of dissatisfaction is down voted

> It doesn't allow tethering though.

How would they even make a distinction? Does Apple comply with carriers in this regard?

Yes, both Android and iOS respect carrier policies for this. There's a carrier-configuration bundle loaded from the carrier which can set a bunch of things, including the access point names (APNs) for data. The carrier can choose to set separate APNs for mobile data and tethered data, and can choose whether to lock those settings or make them user-editable.

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.

Not sure if this is still the case but in some areas Comcast used to limit the cap to 100gb unless you bundled TV with your internet plan, then it went up to 1tb.

that should be considered predatory and illegal.

This is still the case in the Houston Tx area. I am paying 50 extra bucks to have "unlimited" internets because kids. We averaged 7 days before our 1TB was used each month.

Are all of your kids simultaneously streaming hours of video every day?

It is extremely easy to use 100GB in a month. I have trouble staying below 1TB of usage. Some Xbox One games are over 100GB by themselves.

Do you download 10 new games every month?

I dont understand why y'all are downvoting this; it's an honest question.

Pretty sure AAA games can get up to like 50GB.

Believe this guy, he's the 7th top gamer.

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.

I've been thinking about this, then it dawned on me that the current live game has everything in WoW classic, and then everything in every expansion after it. The amount of video and high resolution textures in the current version of the game dwarf the original.

Absolutely true.

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.

Happens in hardware too: the way Sony made the PS2 compatible with the previous PS ("PS 1") was simply to place an entire first ten playstation on a corner of the PCB. Cheaper and more compatible than writing an emulation mode.

Object encapsulation made physical.

The emulation there was actually a happy accident -- the MIPS processor of the original PlayStation was repurposed as the sound chip for the PS2. Sony realized during development that they could take advantage of the hardware for backwards compatibility for minimal cost.

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").

The GBA is another example: native games run on a 32-bit ARM processor, but it also includes a Z80 for backwards compatibility with older Game Boy models.

IIRC, the 3DS puts itself into a DS hardware mode when playing those games. It even has a GBA hardware mode, although Nintendo only used this for the "Ambassador" games they gave to early adopters of the console.

My Ark folder is sitting at 192GB at the moment. I only have the official maps at that. And there are 2 more maps coming out.

We recently started using XBox Gamepass which is a small monthly fee to get access to a fairly large variety of games (all digitally downloaded) and our bandwidth usage exploded b/c there's no extra charge to pull down 5 games that maybe looked interesting but that you would never pay full price for.

I have about 150 games downloaded to my primary console. Not all of them are that big, but a good number of them are huge. Looking at my firewall logs, it's pulled down 400GB in the last 30 days. I've only installed one new game in that time. Updates for huge games can also be huge.

Also, things other than my Xbox Ones use bandwidth. They are just the largest single consumer of it.

I can't really relate; I barely use 10 GB per month, but then again I don't stream lots of video or play video games.

100GB... amazing. How far we have come from the day when a enjoyable game fit on 2-3 3.5” floppy disks. :)

I’ve played some new games with amazing graphics. But 100GB? Is it mostly hi-res textures?

That, and other resources tend to get compressed less as bandwidth and storage becomes cheaper overall. Less compression means less load on already underpowered console hardware and more importantly, less memory used, high end games tend to max out their IO and outright memory map things straight from the disk.

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.

Uncompressed audio is apparently a huge portion of the storage footprint of modern games.

Uncompressed, multi-language audio so publishers can ship one disc in all regions.

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.

Microsofts own Gears of War 4 is 133GB.

My first commercial game would fit in the icon of one of my current company's games . . .

We have 7 people in the house and I can breakdown the usage like this: Mac sync between 5 machines (this was surprising to me) Instagram/social(I thought YouTube would be 2nd place) YouTube Netflix

might be cheaper to let a stack of blu-rays loop.

I can’t imagine many people use Viasat to watch Netflix when satellite TV exists. Satellite based ISPs are the only ones with a legitimate reason to impose data caps.

Surprised Wave Broadband isn't on the list. They didn't tell me about their cap, but were happy to charge hundreds in overages until I noticed the discrepancy.

Fortunately, CenturyLink explicitly exempts their gigabit service from the cap. Hoping that never changes, but it's a good step.

Anecdata: I have CenturyLink gigabit fiber service with no data cap for $80/mo.

Not a big fan of caps as a concept, but 1 TB is quite high.

You're not gonna hit that easily with normal consumer use

A cap of 1 TB seems completely reasonable to me.

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.

And yet it does not seem reasonable to me.

That's about 140 hours of 4K streaming. That's a lot for a single person, but not a lot for a family with multiple devices, especially if you throw in some 50 GB games in there.

Or Microsoft Onedrive being stuck in an eternal upload/download loop.

Back when I had Comcast, that bug cost me $200. Thanks Microsoft.

I've had a mobile podcast app decide to start re-download all my podcasts off WiFi, even though I had it set to download only over WiFi.

It's a good reminder that our bugs have real world implications.

I would say 5TB is reasonable. If a 4K movie is 100GB. then over 30 days is 3TB of usage. If 1 person per day watches a 4k movie and the household of ~1-5 people does other things as well, 5TB should be sufficient. I think that is a stretch and my gut says yeah, 1TB is good, but I already upload/download 10-20GB per day at work so 5TB seems more reasonable for an upper bound.

It’s not even remotely. It’s equivalent to 3 mbps. It’s not a technological limit. It’s only imposed to extract more money and discourage streaming. It sets the country back technologically. It also discourages content creators from jumping to 4K.

My fastest speed I've measured at my place (Oz) is 1gbps, but due to latency and jitter it's generally much worse. There's a large disconnect happening in tech, where infrastructure isn't keeping up in all countries with what the tech companies are providing. Ironically, ISPs here do sell unlimited plans.

Not sure what you mean by "It’s equivalent to 3 mbps". Are you, like, streaming a video of an eagle nest 24/7?

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.

Maybe 20 years ago we had the same comment "who needs 1gb? You can fit everything in a floppy!".

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"?

The problem is that underprovisioning uses some statistical average that will fail on special situations. Content streaming is so common now that there are peak hours where almost everyone is streaming video. If ISPs need to have that use case in mind, it should be possible for them to sustain that demand 24/7. If they don't do that, it's for one of two reasons. Either they can't sustain peak demand and they are trying to disincentivize usage, or they can handle a heavy demand but want to charge extra for off-peak bandwitdh usage, thus earning money for an already amortized infrastructure.

People don't buy home internet to max out their connection 100% of the time. It does not make sense for the capacity to be designed for 100% load from 100% of the customers 100% of the time, otherwise you'd price out most of your subscribers. Ergo, you're never going to get it unless you pay some pretty high rates. Even many datacenter connections are billed on some bandwidth percentile billing and not always max link speed as often connections are fairly bursty.

It's true. All home internet (and business internet!) connections are oversold. If you're going to max it out 24/7 you need a dedicated fiber line.

> It’s equivalent to 3 mbps

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.

640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone

Assuming x264 encoded 4k data @ 173.47MiB/minute (size of this 1 minute file: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvEVNBZjcn4)

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.

By some back of the napkin math, that's at least 30% of an entire months worth of free time for someone employed full time.

To me, that seems pretty darned reasonable considering we're talking about 4k.

with the addition of family members, that isn't a lot.

I'd be ok with that if it was actually causing problems for the ISP.

It is not, though.

ISPs are charged directly for peering.

ISPs charge for peering, they don't pay for it, they get paid for it.

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.)

I've gone over mine, quite easily.

It's complete bullshit and there's no practical reason for it beyond fucking over customers.

The practical reason is that the people who use more data are exactly the people who are willing to pay more for internet service. Can't really fault a company for squeezing the customers that have proven themselves more dependent on internet service.

Why should I pay more just because a company thinks I can or would be willing to? I'm not willing to.

Then don't? Prove them wrong!

ah yes i'll just go ahead and choose between my two options

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

That's exactly my point. You'll pay out the ass because the service is that valuable to you and the alternatives -- using public internet, cellular, satellite, becoming your own ISP, paying another provider the build-out costs to run a line to your house, or just going without -- are worse.

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.

My home internet makes me approximately $0 in revenue ever.

Having a cap thats equivalent to downloading say, 20 modern AAA games sounds reasonable to you? In the most technologically advanced and wealthy society in human history? In the nation that played perhaps the largest role in pioneering and establishing the Internet? Seriously?

Yes. Do you download a game every day or something?

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.

It was a way to compare the size of that data. Either way, I’m paying for a speed, and the Internet companies can more than support that level of data in major cities. With the amount of subsidies this kind of infrastructure gets, it’s absolute bootlicking to defend a cap as low as 1TB.

I agree for a single person streaming 1080p and lower. However, the move to 4K and HDR are causing data consumption rates to rise to the point where 1TB isn't sustainable, especially if you have family sharing the same network and streaming at the same time. Here's how long you it takes to stream 1TB of video with Youtube's various resolutions/bitrates/framerates:

  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

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702

Okay, make it 4 TB. My point is, ISPs imposing a cap is reasonable and a way to get the outliers to pay for more of the hardware/personnel required to service their extreme bandwidth requirements.

Note that for an ISP a 1 TB of data doesn't even cost a dollar. It's unreasonable to ask even a $1 for a TB of overages.

1080p streaming on other services will reach the 1TB cap much quicker. YouTube compression is much more intense than Netflix compression, depending on the show: Netflix picks optimal compression parameters based on the type of show or movie you're watching.

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.

Doesn't to me when they use our tax dollars to expand their infrastructure to the most profitable places then leave last mile loops to the customers to pay and constantly reneg on they're contractual agreements with zero repercussions.

I'm really loving that fiber that was laid everywhere after we gave them 400 billion in tax dollars. Oh wait...

A cap of 1 TB per day seems completely reasonable to me, too. For mobile plans. At home I expect to not be capped and I'm not and everything is well.

Why have a cap at all? It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.

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.

> It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle.

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.

Wear and tear is generally not an issue with network equipment. You buy it, you run it until it depreciates or breaks or becomes too much trouble, you replace it. I've never heard an argument of "don't run that thing too hard, it'll shorten its life". (If you do hear this, it's usually a sign of inadequate cooling).

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.

I think data caps might be the best business tool for ISPs offering services to consumers. After learning about how business Internet services are sold and priced, it's not so surprising that they're more 'rational'.

Those guaranteed rate agreements are tens of times more expensive than consumer internet connections. The whole reason why consumer internet connections are so much cheaper is that they're based on the premise that most people will have bursty behavior. (Download a 25MB facebook page at 400 mbps then idle.) For such usages, it's far better to let everyone achieve high burst rates sometimes, and then implement policies to discourage streaming at high rates all the time, then to limit everyone to the maximum guaranteed bandwidth the network can handle.

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