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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

What are the data caps? How many GB of up and down traffic?

Here in Norway only mobile data is capped. ADSL and fibre are effectively unlimited. As far as I know this is generally the case in Europe.

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Here in the US, my Comcast internet connection comes with a 1TB (up and down combined, i think) per month cap. If you go over they give you a warning the first few times, then charge some outrageous amount per gigabyte that you go over. If you ask them how much for an uncapped connection, they will lie to you and claim that option does not exist. Only after blowing the cap a few times will they admit that they will remove the cap for an _additional_ $50/mo.

This is the only ISP that services my house in a residential area of Seattle.

Even working from home I think would have trouble blowing through 1TB in a month. How many hours of video conferencing would that cover? Initial Google search says about 4hrs/GB, so 4000hrs/TB, or over 5 months of nonstop video conferencing?

Video conferencing is not the only thing people do with their residential internet.

It's the most data intensive thing I can imagine that fits with working from home due to Covid-19.

Obviously if you're hosting a website from your home server you can go above that, but why would you do that instead of using a real host and ssh-ing in, which wouldn't even register against 1TB?

You’re assuming that nobody has a job that requires transferring large files on a regular basis.

Why do those files have to be transferred to your home? Can't you use ssh/remote desktop to connect to your office desktop and work with them there?

You’re assuming again that everyone has a laptop for home and a desktop at work (rare in my experience).

I haven't had an office desktop in around a decade. I have a laptop which I'm currently using at home.

AutoCAD over local NFS chokes, I can't imagine trying to run it over VDI.

Some things are just IO and processor intensive, and for those, having the data be local is a much more efficient process overall.

> AutoCAD over local NFS chokes, I can't imagine trying to run it over VDI.

VDI lets the “desktop” actually running the software potentially be more local to the storage than local NFS, even though both are more distant from the end-user, so I don't see the problem.

OT: what determines network speed for an AWS EC2 instance? I work from home, and occasionally need to scp a large file from one of our instances at AWS.

I've never managed to get that to go faster than 15-20 Mbps.

I routinely deal with large docker images, deployments, sometimes VM stuff, video files, model files. 20-30TB a month is considered a good month.

Remote desktop is also a consistent ~50-70Mbps per screen to have readable text while actively working on something (not using RDP/VNC).

I have a five person household that includes three teenagers. They stream a lot, and my oldest plays X Box games where installing a game can eat 100GB. We run perilously close to the 1TB cap each month.

From a WFH perspective, downloading, updating, and uploading big Docker containers and other big packages can be bandwidth heavy. My work laptop also has online backup software that continually pushes new files back to the cloud, and that's bandwidth heavy as well.

Comcast advertises very clearly that unlimited is an additional $50/m: https://dataplan.xfinity.com/unlimited/

When I signed up for internet, I asked the representative for unlimited data because I was aware of this option. The representative flat out denied that it existed and refused to even tell me the price for such a thing.

It's a relatively new option. It may have actually not existed back when you signed up, or the rep just didn't know about it. Either way, I don't see why they'd want to hide it, because a consistent $50/month fee is much better than a large overage charge here and there that may or may not actually be paid.

> that may or may not actually be paid

It'll be paid. Most of their customers don't have any other choice but to pay it. (Otherwise, most of them already wouldn't be their customers, after all.)

>that may or may not actually be paid.

Please tell me, how do I avoid paying overage fees? I have zero moral qualms about defrauding Comcast to the maximum possible extent.

1. Look into their xFi Advantage plan. It's a something like $15/month add-on to the internet plans that adds various monitoring (and security?) features that you probably do not care about, and adds unlimited data.

The catch? Only available if you rent an xFi router/modem from them, which is something like $10-12/month. (It might also only be available if you have 300 Mbps or faster service).

Still, $15+$12 < $50, so it is a cheaper way to get unlimited than going for the $50/month unlimited add on with your own modem.

I believe you can put the xFi Advantage router/modem into bridge mode if you want to use your own router.

2. When doing anything with your Comcast service, go to an Xfinity store or a Comcast service center in person to deal with it rather than talking to customer service on the phone.

I've done this several times, and always got someone who could effectively deal with whatever my issue was.

Same here in Algiers, Algeria. Mobile is prepaid. You buy 60GB for 10€. It expires after a month. The bandwidth sucks, though. Sometimes you have 20Mbps, sometimes it's faster to take a plane and get your data in a hard drive, which is something I have considered when I had to download a dataset of 60GB and it was taking forever. The data holder was in France. We didn't have ADSL in the office yet.

Mobile in the US is closer to $15-25/GB for hotspot data. Damn.

Depends where you are. A number of Irish ISPs have soft caps, though they're usually of the "we reserve the right to throttle if you go over this" type, not "we will charge you a euro per GB if you go over this".

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