Centurylink to begin imposing 1TB cap on gigabit fiber service | Hacker News Reader

Centurylink to begin imposing 1TB cap on gigabit fiber service

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28 pointsunlimitedint30 comments

I live in Eastern Europe and I have gigabit ftth at the price of $12 per month. I guess that the US free market is just not as free. WTH.

The telecom market in the US is dominated by a handful of large companies, there is virtually no competition.

I live in New Zealand and I have a wide choice fo gigabit ISPs but only one city-owned physical network. I would pay $66 USD.

A free market certainly has an effect on price, but so does regulations, population density etc.

In my case I can only get gigabit due to huge government subsidies to build out the network, and for international outgoing data only two fiber optic cables (one to Australia, one to the USA).

The guys here are using the old telephony channels and infrastructure. The old state monopoly definitely helped building the infra once, but not sure what else is needed. Back in the nineties the government didn't have an idea what internet is and people just did it.

TBH, due to consolidation of the market, the big telecom customers are worse and we are no longer in the top 10 of the world for speed/price ranking, but if you find a small provider, they actually care to provide you with decent service. Especially for NZ, isn't the population density high enough? Always thought that two islands are not that much space for few million people.

> Especially for NZ, isn't the population density high enough? Always thought that two islands are not that much space for few million people.

We are ranked 166th by population density and our cities are usually small and almost always spread out.

Cox has been doing this for years. I can't say I'm surprised. What recourse do consumers actually have? Appealing to the FCC?

Not under this administration.

Nobody has done more for the internet providers than this administration.

https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/monthly-plans

India got on the gigabit bandwagon but sadly its still stupid. The highest plan shows 1Gbps with a whopping 6.6 tb data.

So around 13 hours of fully saturating your connection? How is that truly unlimited? They now call it "commercial usage policy". Wtf.

What is the point in offering internet and then fup ? I understand for lower plans to push you to higher plans but what about the highest plan?

It seems very reasonable to me. I have a 150Mbit connection with a 1TB cap, but I can hardly touch 400GB at worst. I have a 4k TV that is definitely streaming 4k/1080 content for 4-5 hours daily, our work laptops are always on, connected to VPN and almost always running a couple of RDPs. Phones are connected and syncing all pics and videos over to onedrive.

I'm out of ideas to increase my usage. The only way I can think of that would saturate a 1Gbit connection is if you are hosting websites and services from your home, which is definitely not the purpose for the Jio home connection.

You're probably streaming a majority 1080 content. 5 hours × 7GB/HR @ 4k × 30 days/mo is 1050GB.

Get an xbox one with a 500gb get and actively play the new cod, pubg, fortnite, destiny 2, forza horizons 4, forza motorsport 7, halo mcc, and due to the drive limits you can blow past your cap in one rotation, per month. Add in pc gaming and a switch, and a ps5 to play with your friends on different platforms and boom 2-10tb/mo easy.

I regularly blow past 1TB without even thinking about it. 10TB/mo will probably be a good new limit until 8K tvs breach the $1k mark.

my question exactly. jio in india as i linked has their highest plan with a data cap of 6.6tb at 1 gbps.

lowest is 3.3tb and highest has 6.6tb. thats it?

No. I am paying for a 100 Mbps as well as a 300 Mbps connection and my usage is around 800-1.5 depending on the number of users at home. my argument is, why put the limitation? why do they decide what purpose of a home connection is? BTW, i am running one home as well as an enterprise connection with jio but enterprise connection has more cost, less speed and less data. that makes no sense other than they are forcing me to pay more for same stuff.

besides, as a home user, if i am paying maximum "THEY" are offering, why the limitation? as world has already come to realize, data caps are total bs so why enforce them even on their highest plan?

I live in a small rural town (30k people) that has a major research University. We have multiple fiber links due to the railroad and university, yet our ISPs are beyond shit. Unless you live in the "new" neighborhoods it's all old copper coax or old phone line DSL. No company is going to pay to put in the last mile of pipe for a town of this size. Anyway, it's about $40 / month with tax for 30 MB down and 5 up. Abysmal.

That is not universally true. We just started a new ISP and built fiber to 1300 customers. It took government grants to make it possible but it is happening throughout the country. Local electric co-ops are building fiber at breakneck pace.

Oh, I know it's not universally true. There are groups who are getting it done!

It's just not happening in my town, and many others.

Yeah.. this is going to backfire quickly.

Why do American ISPs hate their subscribers?

Because subscribers have no other choices. Captive markets are fun to abuse.

Yep this makes sense. Hell will freeze over when communities are able to get federal/state funding to run their own municipal fiber as an alternative to big telcos.

I worked for an ISP at the time a city tried that.

Rather than fix our infrastructure they spent millions holding up/preventing the city from laying fiber.

sad

Sadly not likely. Most of their customers have no other choices.

Lets hope starlink lives up to the hype and brings more options!

I want to believe it will but it seems like more of a rural play ... maybe that ends up being just stage 1 but it is really not clear to me how well this scales as far as competition in other places goes.

So you can exhaust your monthly data in 2 hours and 14 minutes of fully using your connection?

That's exactly how I wanted to word it.

We really need new satellite ISPs (Starlink/Amazon Kuiper) or local WISP (Monkeybrain). I honestly think municipal ISP are the way to go. Unfortunately, it outlawed in over 20 states (which blows my mind).

Why are these limits imposed on consumers and not the major players allowing consumers to waste data like that?

Like instagram does not need databases of 8MB images for everyones collage. Youtube doesn't need 4k even now for some dweeb doing a tech review.

If they forcefully throttled entities, which then trickled down to consumers, the ISPs wouldn't have to extort consumers to help pay for everyone else's selfish vanity.

Or what if ISPs just charged what it takes to deliver internet without artificial limits, and then delivered just that? It's not like we don't know how to transfer vast amounts of data, or like we didn't predict the rise in traffic.

I'm not necessarily against having a cheaper plan with a traffic cap, and a more expensive plan that's unlimited. But just throttling data providers isn't the solution

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