Comcast to impose home internet data cap of 1.2TB in more than a dozen US states

If the hardware is made in china, the companies can get it for probably cheaper than anywhere in the world. Also the labor in china is dramatically cheaper. Is there a union of telecom workers in China? Of course China internet is going to be cheaper. That doesn't mean there should be such a difference between USA and China prices, but not surprised there is some, nor would I expect it to be the same or cheaper in the US. US has higher impute costs. As a pct of income of avg person what is internet access in China vs US?

This of course leave aside the what constitutes the internet you get in China vs USA

Presumably they mean 5% of their customers use at least that much – some of them much more.

Higher prices per kWh after some limit is a regulatory tool to drive down energy use.

There's no regulatory reason to drive down data use. Given that, the 1st data allotment should include the cost of the last mile connection, and any subsequent data allotments should be significantly lower cost, closer to incremental transit costs (which aren't very much). Commercial internet connections are often billed at a monthly fee based on the interconnect type, and then a per Mbps fee for 95 percentile usage.

Most residential customers don't really want that though, they just want an unmetered connection that works, with a monthly price they can count on; and one where the more they pay per month, the faster it goes, and the more stuff they can do. A flat cap set across all of the tiers doesn't make sense. And how are consumers expected to control all of their devices to make sure they don't download hundreds of gigs of updates overnight?

> Why should we subsidize those who download tens or hundreds of TBs?

Why should those who download tens or hundreds of TBs subsidize the rest of the people?

End-user equipment, underground cables, and ISP's routers ports are the same regardless on the bandwidth. Construction work is expensive, you need American people to lay cables in American soil, can't outsource to India.

Compared to these costs, bandwidth is borderline free, even in the long run.

This comment was posted two minutes ago and it's already showing up as grey to me. It's a shame, because what was said has merit, even though the conclusion might not be appealing to the average HN reader.

eg.

>Why should we subsidize those who download tens or hundreds of TBs?

Consumer internet is oversubscribed. By using 10x as much bandwidth as everyone else, you are effectively getting your internet connection subsidized by everyone else.

A reasonably high cap like this doesn’t seem completely unreasonable. But where the cap is set, who it applies to, when it’s updated and when it comes into effect are more important than the number of TBs.

For instance, setting it at 1.2 TB today seems fine, but in 10 years that won’t be nearly enough, but will Comcast update it? Or just push ‘heavy’ user to their ‘prosumer’ plans.

It’s similar in financial regulation. Transactions over $10,000 must be reported for KYC/AML purposes. Sounds fine when it was implemented, but now it seems very low.

It wouldn’t take much to future proof decisions like this, by default. Inflate by 10% per year, or some other metric. And the lack of such features hints at the fixed amount being the feature.

Subsidi-what??? You do realize transfer in bulk is peanuts? $55/month is more than whole dedicated i7/SSD server with unmetered 1GBit at Hetzner.

Your internet plan is already pay for what you use: you pay for a given rate of data transfer and your ISP maintains the infrastructure to provide you that rate. The cable you need for 50 Mb/s costs exactly the same whether you use it 2 hours per day or 20. Anyone downloading 100 TB in a month is already paying a hefty premium for the (at bare minimum) 370 Mb/s they need to achieve that download.

For electricity, in part you are paying for the infrastructure, but you are also paying for the fuel that's being consumed by the powerplant. If comcast charged per GB of data that it hosted, that would be fine (and hosting providers do exactly that without complaint), but Comcast's costs don't vary with the amount you download.

In the extreme, costs do scale to some degree with duty cycle - a line with lower capacity can service more people so long as they don't use it at the same time, and technically sending a packet through causes some infinitesimally tiny wear and tear. In practice though, a data cap doesn't stop multiple people from doing their 1.2 TB download all at the same time, and the reduced lifetime of components is a rounding error compared to the variability just from their manufacture.

You might find this comment thread, which discusses that same analogy, interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17426607

i had a pay per use plan more than a decade ago. i liked it because the competition all had capped plans that cost the same as my pay-per use would if i reached that cap. and if i didn't, then i paid less. the service also allowed me to set my own cap so that i would not accidentally go over a chosen spending limit (and it allowed me to change the cap at any time)

>That means if you're a heavy downloader, you should seriously consider switching to DSL.

Don't DSL connections also come with caps?

Vote with your wallet, switch providers if you can. If you can’t, put the time into spinning up a coop or muni fiber ISP in your community (or a locally owned for profit ISP even). Failing all else, StarLink.

https://muninetworks.org/content/muni-fiber-models-fact-shee...

https://startyourownisp.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910

I mean, I'm not a fan of the charge either, but proactively buying the unlimited data plan is only dozens of dollars more, not hundreds.

https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data

It’s not even a wink-wink. In many states, for example, Connecticut[1], the territory of each. cable provider is regulated by the state. There’s only a few tiny spots that have an overbuild of another provider. The state claims that DSL is competition, but let’s be real, 12mbps DSL is no longer competitive.

[1]: https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/PURA/Cable/VideoProviderServic...

If they really want to align incentives it makes sense to switch to time-of-use based pricing like electricity providers have done. Since most of the cost is building infrastructure to support peak traffic, suggesting that consumers shift their usage pattern to be off-peak would be a notable cost benefit.

The obvious problem besides the added complexity for users is that I suspect there is relatively little "background" traffic usage. Almost all of it is people watching streaming video or interactive downloads. I doubt things like software updates that can be scheduled add up to much.

It would be interesting though. I wonder if it would lead to services promoting their download options more (example auto-download likely videos every morning).

That would make sense if ISPs' costs veried per GB like a power suppliers costs vary per kWh. But they don't really. 99% of the cost of them is running the initial fibre/copper and then maintaining it. Until you reach the limit of the infrastructure, the cost per extra GB is basucally nothing.

They should also charge reasonable wholesale rates in that case if you remove the monopolization of the last mile. In other countries this is actually how it works already, the underlying cabling is municipal, you just pick an ISP to transit over it.

Comcast charges $0.20/GB for coaxial. Verizon charges $10/GB for LTE. My actual cost for hosting side projects is below $0.50 per 1 TB. It is unreasonable if they are going to fuck with your traffic, tamper with your HTTP payloads and inject scripts into them, deprioritize certain data and still charge multiple orders of magnitude more per GB.

The variable cost of bandwidth is orders of magnitude lower than electricity. I suspect this subsidy is much lower than you might think.

Quality of service is also not correlated with usage. packet loss, queuing and dropped connections result in higher usage and are directly the fault of the ISP. they can oversell a region and under provision and then charge excessive bandwidth fees because of it.

The electric company charges per kWh because it costs money to generate that kWh of electricity.