T-mobile has been throttling and creating paid fast lanes pretty heavily and I now pay as much in data overage fees to comcast per month as half my total bill.
Are you claiming that T-mobile slowing specific sites or people? Do you have a source for that?
I agree. But that wasn't my take on the claim above, so I asked for the source that this was happening selectively to specific sites, apps, or users. I guess I'll keep waiting.
;@)
If you're hosting something, might be worth upgrading to a business connection, which doesn't have data caps and comes with static ip's and a SLA.
As an aside - I'm personally OK with data caps so long as they don't impact most users (80/20, 90/10 or something like that).
ISP's pay for ingress traffic, so by setting a data cap that impacts only the egregious data hogs, it means they can charge normal users a smaller rate, rather than subsidize a few users by charging everyone more.
What makes you think that? Most everyone will peer with residential ISPs for free. There have even been issues with residential ISPs trying to get paid for ingress traffic, because they control the only network path to their customers which means they can charge monopoly prices to video competitors like Netflix who want to send traffic to their users on that ISP.
> so by setting a data cap that impacts only the egregious data hogs, it means they can charge normal users a smaller rate, rather than subsidize a few users by charging everyone more.
An ISP's costs are dominated by things like staff and trucks and electricity that depend little if at all on how much data someone transfers. None of the other customers are going to get a discount from heavy users using less because there is no meaningful savings there.
The reason for data caps is some combination of anticompetitive practices and price discrimination.
If you tell people they have a data cap, they'll try to minimize usage. Which is to say minimize Netflix, which counts toward the data cap -- but hey look, the ISP's own video service doesn't.
They also assume that if you use a lot of data, you derive a lot of value from internet service, so even if the data hardly costs them anything, the fact that it's valuable to you makes them want you to have to pay more for a business connection.
Both of these are stupid reasons which they only get away with because of the lack of competition.
Residential ISP's are typically Tier 3 or maybe Tier 2 providers, and have to get their bandwidth from either a Tier 2 or Tier 1 provider. These providers definitely charge for traffic to pass into the ISP's network (ingress traffic into an ISP network, egress out of the Tier 1 provider). Without paying that bill, ISP's couldn't exist... and without charging that bill, Tier 1 providers couldn't exist.
Tier 1's peer with other Tier 1's for free because it benefits them and allows them to have connections to other networks that Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers want access to. They make their money charging Tier 2's and 3's for that access.
> because they control the only network path to their customers
Tier 1 providers don't care about residential users. This argument doesn't make any sense.
Comcast got away with charging Netflix for ingress traffic because comcast was going to drop or throttle Netflix traffic. Why? Because suddenly the $50 a month comcast was charging wasn't enough to cover the ingress traffic generated by Netflix content into the ISP's network. The decision was to either charge Comcast customers more, or ask Netflix to subsidize that added expense. This also led Netflix to create the Open Connect boxes they offer for free to ISP's.
> None of the other customers are going to get a discount from heavy users using less
No, but they won't have their bill raised if the ISP can just charge the heavy users more instead.
> but hey look, the ISP's own video service doesn't
This is because the ISP's own video service's traffic originates in-network, therefore costs nothing additional to provide other than the existing infrastructure costs (there's no ingress traffic to pay for). Netflix (and other out-of-network services) costs more, as previously covered. Open Connect can help mitigate this, but then it's on the ISP to rack the server and pay all the other related costs for keeping it running in their data center... something they might not want to do.
Comcast's argument was Netflix was making a ton of profit from streaming content they weren't helping pay to deliver - effectively shifting the delivery cost to the ISP, which was getting stuck with suddenly a bunch of unprofitable residential customers. Asking Netflix to help pay for that ingress traffic burden doesn't seem so outlandish from a network-ops perspective. Either that, or Comcast could have raised everyone's rates... which people probably wouldn't have liked.
A parallel would be making an ecommerce business and expecting packages to be delivered to customers for free. The customer pays for their mailbox already (in taxes or directly with a PO Box), and paid for the package, so they expect it to get delivered. At some point, the delivery company is going to need to charge for the service, since there's a cost associated in making that delivery. Either the customer can pay for the delivery cost too, or the ecommerce company can pay for the delivery cost. Either way... somebody has to pay that cost.
> only get away with because of the lack of competition.
I don't disagree that we need more residential ISP competition in the US.
You're thinking of the small dial-up ISPs from 20 years ago. The likes of Comcast and Verizon are themselves Tier 1 providers. The other Tier 1 providers' customers are predominantly data centers that want transit to the rest of the internet and aren't themselves (as e.g. Google is) Tier 1 networks.
> Tier 1 providers don't care about residential users. This argument doesn't make any sense.
Tier 1 providers sell transit to the whole internet, so they have to care about having a path to all users or their other customers will be displeased about not being able to reach those networks. The only path to users on Comcast is through Comcast, and there are enough of them that people will actually notice if they're missing.
> Comcast got away with charging Netflix for ingress traffic because comcast was going to drop or throttle Netflix traffic.
This is my point. They have the ability to drop or throttle Netflix traffic and there is nothing Netflix can do about it other than to pay them the danegeld, because they control the only network path to those users.
> Why? Because suddenly the $50 a month comcast was charging wasn't enough to cover the ingress traffic generated by Netflix content into the ISP's network. The decision was to either charge Comcast customers more, or ask Netflix to subsidize that added expense.
They didn't have to pay anything for ingress traffic from Netflix because their transit provider at the time was willing to peer with Comcast for free.
> This also led Netflix to create the Open Connect boxes they offer for free to ISP's.
Netflix was willing to offer them for free but Comcast wanted to be paid to use them. How does that make any sense if Comcast's problem was legitimately the amount they had to pay to other networks for ingress traffic?
> No, but they won't have their bill raised if the ISP can just charge the heavy users more instead.
There isn't anything there to raise the bill for since the additional usage has insignificant cost, and there aren't enough heavy users for that amortized amount to be real money on everybody else's bill even if it didn't.
> Comcast's argument was Netflix was making a ton of profit from streaming content they weren't helping pay to deliver - effectively shifting the delivery cost to the ISP, which was getting stuck with suddenly a bunch of unprofitable residential customers.
Each endpoint's ISP is responsible for carrying traffic to a mutually agreed upon peering exchange where it's handed off to the other endpoint's ISP. Netflix will basically peer with anybody at any peering exchange for free. Carrying the traffic from there to the other endpoint is what the customer is paying Comcast for. Comcast was double dipping, trying to get paid twice for carrying the same traffic. Or get an unfair advantage over a competitor for video services.
> A parallel would be making an ecommerce business and expecting packages to be delivered to customers for free.
A parallel would be Amazon paying FedEx to deliver packages and then discovering that Walmart had bought 20 million apartment units with doormen and was refusing to accept Amazon packages to the residents of those apartment buildings unless they paid Walmart for the privilege.
I was using steadily 600-700GB of data a month on my gigabit plan. It suddenly spiked to 2TB - from what I could tell there was no change in behavior, my ubiquiti gear wasn't showing this amount of usage. This went on and used up my two 'courtesy' months of overages forcing me to pay the extra money to remove the cap.
A month after paying this my usage amounts dropped back down to where they were before.
The gigabit services works well, but I find the cap hard to accept without any ability to question it.
Fair enough - but also in fairness, your electric utility provides about as much (which is also frustrating when you're trying to figure out why your bill went up 25% one month).
I personally run a mikrotik router which tracks my usage too, so I have a reference to double check against and could wage a good argument with evidence that I didn't use the data they claim.
Not everyone can do that though... but perhaps standard routers should come with these features now-days.
So do my water and gas companies.
My ISP provides the total I used in a month, at the end of the month. That's it.
Let us know how that works out for you. My guess?
"We can waive this month as a courtesy, but we can't use your router as evidence".
That would be the goal.
It’s not worth my time to argue with them and there are no other gigabit options.
Given the recent emergence of high-definition video streamed to every home, it seems like three times that probably wouldn't be enough.
EDIT: Capitalization error, mbps > MBps.
Ya, but you didn't do that. 1TB pushed at a constant 1Mbps, would take 88 days... 4TB taking nearly an entire year.
4TB at a constant 100Mbps takes 3.5 days. It is a HUGE amount of data.
> recent emergence of high-definition video streamed to every home
Netflix claims about 3GB per hour of HD content streamed[1]. So if you were to stream 24 hours a day for an entire 30 day month, you'd barely peak over 2TB. That's 24 hours a day for 30 days straight - something nobody is doing.
A data cap of 3TB is simply not a problem for almost everybody. If you're running torrents, or hosting files, then ya - you might have issues. But then why should I pay comcast more every month to subsidize your non-normal usage?
Ah, I see. mbps v. MBps. Capitalization error!
Also, you're arguing against the past point which is fine because I messed up the capitalization (though the point still holds, because I wasn't doing anything abnormal; it was a two person household with a game console), but not against present use-cases:
4k 24fps video for Netflix is 7GB, and 1080p 24fps video is over 3GB/hr (HD is 720p). How many TVs are you aware of that are under 1080p? A house that has two people regularly watching Netflix in it on a modern data connection seems like it'd blow through that cap pretty quickly.
Why should Comcast be able to sell you a data connection you can't actually use? Caps are only a thing because Comcast oversells every connection.
what is should be forbidden would be to advertise an unlimited plan and then post-facto soft ban users that actually test the unlimited description, or deprioritize connection to expensive services (like YouTube, Netflix or torrents)
It's not impossible, but it certainly isn't blowing through the cap quickly.
The caps are a thing because Comcast pays for ingress traffic into their network (they pay other providers from which the data comes from). At a point, you cost them more than you pay for. Which is where they charge you an overage.
Seems more than fair to me - I pay currently $49.99 a month for 150Mbps connection with a 3TB cap (I'm aware they offer different rates, speeds, and caps in different areas).
I do not want to pay more than $49.99 just because someone else in my area constantly uses 10TB each month - that person should pay more, not me.
Actually, in some cases, Comcast gets paid FOR it.
https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...
They started charging Netflix (or threatened to deprioritize or drop Netflix traffic) because Netflix traffic to Comcast customers starting making Comcast customers unprofitable.
Comcast does pay for ingress traffic. They are not a Tier 1 provider and do not peer with other Tier 1 providers - bits flowing in cost money. They either had to charge Comcast customers more per month, or get Netflix to subsidize the ingress traffic costs from their service.
This ultimately led to Netflix making the Open Connect boxes and offering them for free to ISP's as a way to mitigate the ingress costs. (this is why ISP provided video services don't have this problem - their traffic originates in-network and doesn't cost them anything additional to provide, fair or not)
Unless we're going to change how the 3 Tier provider system works and who gets to charge who for ingress traffic - I don't see this changing anytime soon. Unless you want to regulate our way into doubling your monthly Comcast bill... I sure don't.
I am a single person but I host my personal non-business website from home and participate in as many peer to peer distributed and federated protocols as I can. I also do watch a bit of video media. My usage isn't only bursty, it's a steady 100-200 KB/s 24/7 up with bursts down on top.
I contacted Comcast Business two times over the last 2 years, the most recent just last week. If you want a business 100/10 account then it is $156/mo with a 2 year contract (do not believe their promotional lies). If you move away to an area without service you have to pay 75% of the remaining contract. If you have your own modem they charge you a fee more than twice the fee for renting their modem.
Frankly, it's insulting.
They also put your house on a difference circuit from everyone else in your neighborhood, which has a cost - which explains the ETF if you move away.
In your case, perhaps it's cheaper to get a $2.50/month VPS from Vultr instead of paying all these fees? You get a static IP to, and don't have to play DynamicDNS games.
The rep I talked to and the price I gave $156/mo does not include a static IP. That was something like $10/mo more.
Sure, the firmware they tftp to my modem will be different but it's not giving me dedicated RF bandwidth on the exact same RF hardware path that existed before I got the firmware. It's the same uplink channels. This can be confirmed by using a splitter, attenuator, and looking at the RF signals directly in the frequency domain over time with an with a software defined radio (see: http://superkuh.com/pictures/docsis3_cable_ziggo_2017-10-08-...).
You can do a traceroute and see the reverse-dns names of the hops you go through too.
Also remember, TCP has 8Mb of overhead per 100Mb, so you'll get maximum theoretical speed of 92Mbps on a 100Mbps line.
So to reach that number, I guess you're talking about 60 bytes of headers for each 1500 byte data packet, then again for an ACK packet?
That's partly or entirely wrong in multiple ways.
First, the combined IP+TCP header is only that big for IPv6 connections.
Second, under general circumstances an ACK is only sent for every other packet, halving that bandwidth.
Third, that 100Mb is going to be for one direction, so the ACK traffic going the other way doesn't affect it at all.
Typical overhead is generally 3%, not 8%.
- Netflix in 4K (7 GB/hour), 2 hours per weekday on 2 screens. That's 560 GB in a 4-week month.
- Google Stadia in 4K (35 GB/hour), 2 hours per week on 2 screens. That's 560 GB in a 4-week month.
Bam, 1,120 GB/month.
Also, 3TB is not huge for a family, especially in the age of 4K streams.
Either way, I don't want to subsidize the guy torrenting Blue-Rays and pushing 10TB a month when I'm only using 1TB.
It wouldn't though - at least for most major residential ISP's. They oversubscribe the connections, knowing full well not everybody will use the connection at the same time, and even when they are - they won't be using the maximum at once.
A minor example would be bringing a single 100Mbps connection into a small building and selling 12 x 10Mbps connections. It's one of they ways they can, yes, make a profit and also offer the bandwidth at reasonable costs.
Dedicated bandwidth is expensive. Think of your old-school T1's and your typical business class connection. You pay a lot for having that bandwidth reserved for your use alone. And majority of the time you aren't using it... and when you do use it, you use very little of it at once. Debating on HN doesn't take 1Gbps... so it goes unused. Residential users prefer lower costs vs. dedicated bandwidth.
> The data caps exist solely so they can squeeze people for money beyond what they actually need to maintain the network
Yes and no. You seem to be tip-toeing around the municipality-run ISP argument - which is a fair argument to have (although I'm concerned a city can maintain this network long-term and keep it as good as a for-profit company). There's no problem with an ISP charging customers more for the connection than the ISP pays to provide it. That's the incentive to run the network in the first place - let alone spend millions building it out.
I don't think data caps are bad so long as they don't impact "normal" use. Normal as being defined perhaps by the 95th percentile of use or something. The remaining users should be obligated to pay for their usage so that the ISP isn't forced to spread that costs onto other customers - that's simply not fair.