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Comment by alexkiritz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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