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Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.

For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do?

The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Rural communities stuck with 1.5MBps DSL or even slower can't even have 2 kids in school learning virtually.

Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids trying to do school. Most rural internet just won't cut it. I feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit connectivity in this country.

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> Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.

What? I definitely care how fast my internet is regardless of my bandwidth cap. For most people, internet consistency and speed is a more noticeable metric than data caps. Speed effects video/audio call quality, page load times, etc.

Look, i get annoyed at data caps. I've taken multiple comcast employees to task over it. But the idea that speed is irrelevant when caps are present strikes me as pearl clutching.

I have mobile data connection where transfer fluctuates during the day. In the morning 15Mbit during the day 5Mbit and in the evening might go as low as 2Mbit. It mostly works fine but at some point of the day it might just stop working, like 2x a day.

I have 50Gig data cap, I am not annoyed by it because I can control it. I might watch yt on lower resolution or skip netflix binge in the weekend, because I need transfer for work.

What I cannot control is transfer speed and glitches. It totally depends on what other people in mobile network are doing. If they all start streaming at the same time or having meetings, bad luck, have to wait it out. It is not making me angry because I understand it, but it is uncomfortable. Where data cap does not bother me that much.

Going to get better internet soon.

> Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.

My ISP doesn't cap at 1-1.2 TB (CenturyLink, Seattle metro area, "gigabit" service plan). Comcast is often a monopoly, but it isn't the only ISP in the US. Your point is certainly valid for Comcast customers, and in other areas where all ISPs cap at some relatively small amount of 'maxBW x hours'.

Sonic and Google WebPass don't cap either. It might be a Comcast-only thing.

Cox and SuddenLink have caps too. At least for some of their plans. In some cases you can pay extra for unlimited.

Yep, we got WebPass, WaveG, CenturyLink, and Comcast/Xfinity in Seattle area, and only Comcast/Xfinity has any sort of caps. I personally tested both WaveG and Webpass, and neither of them have any caps, just like advertised (been watching Netflix and downloading/uploading tons of stuff, on the order of over 1TB a day, no slowdowns/hidden caps either)

Verizon doesn’t cap, and Comcast doesn’t on most of the east coast.

That's apparently changing in January. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comca...

Caps on Comcast are coming in January.

> Your point is certainly valid for Comcast customers

For $30, you can add unlimited data to your plan. That's not a terrible deal, if you need it.

I'm more bothered by the crappy upload speeds. Fixing that would require switching to a business plan.

But to reiterate what has been stated every where else over and over: for most regions in the US, there are at most 1 provider with usable speeds available, and they get to do whatever they want with their customers.

There are many regions with hardly any competition, and the lucky few areas with 2 or more usually comprise of another high speed provider that changes in lock step with the local #1, and a bunch of smaller providers on DSL or some other old technology.

Wireless is even more capped, high latency, and, thanks to the FCC, can be more privacy invasive or restricted than land line internet.

It's not all roses in the US.

Absolutely. Hence:

> Comcast is often a monopoly

I live in Seattle and we had a Comcast monopoly for something like 15 years until 2017 or 2018. I do not mean to suggest that real competition exists in most places or that anything about the situation in general is rosy.

I really wonder how Starlink is going to shake things up. It’s currently expensive, but a continuously improving service could represent a huge risk to otherwise stagnant ISP’s.

Starlink has a constant density they can't vary, so likely they'll have lots of unused capacity in the rural areas while having lots of used capacity in the urban areas. Thus, they'll likely want to increase the price in urban areas to reduce the number of customers while keeping it cheap in rural areas. Otherwise they have to come up with some other system that keeps customer usage low.

Maybe they'll offer "mobile internet" at a price point somewhere between rural and urban pricing that you can e.g. use in your car. Maybe folks will then hack their parked car and use it as a home uplink, while driving around to keep the "mobile" pricing level.

As for the price in the urban area where density is too big for them to serve everyone, likely it'll be modelled after the price the incumbent ISP has, and be a bit cheaper, but not too cheap as they can't serve everyone in that area. TLDR: nothing much will change.

So in urban areas they likely won't cause any change, but in lightly populated places there will be a big revolution, and people there will be very happy :). At least if Starlink choses to make internet cheap. Maybe they don't want to, and instead want to orient themselves after the local ISP, being significantly cheaper so that almost everyone switches to them, but not being as cheap as they can be. Entirely possible, brings them more money, but is obviously not very nice for customers :).

We'll see a real revolution when we have multiple competing companies in space that try to outbid each other in a fight for market share.

From what I have read they can deploy nearly arbitrarily amounts of satellites with nearly linear cost increases. They can’t really adjust density for specific areas very well, but total bandwidth is highly variable over time. Publicly they have stated 10% of local Internet traffic, in high-density cities as their benchmark, that’s likely an economic not technical limitation based on the percentage of time a satellite spends over dense cities vs rural areas etc.

Anyway, it’s really not a question of total bandwidth so much as any meaningful competition stopping the most egregious abuses. Assuming they can reach even 1/2 that it’s still plenty to provide stiff competition in midsized cities, suburbs, and rural areas which are generally the most problematic areas.

You can put a lot of satellites into the sky, but spectrum puts an upper limit onto bandwidth. Eventually you'll probably adapt directed motorized antennae, but those are way more complicated. Internet traffic is increasing dramatically around the globe, sooner or later we'll hit the limit. In the long term, only fiber can serve the bandwidth needs.

Their already using phased-array antenna that can be steered to point in different directions without physical movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array.

At most their aimed to maximize the amount of viable sky not individual satellites. It’s not going to scale to infinite satellites, but 10x their current target should be viable.

I can choose from Cox and CenturyLink in my area, both have a 1TB cap here.

Thanks. Edited my original comment to clarify that the cap/no-cap status of CenturyLink may be local to my metro, or related to my particular internet plan.

> For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data

Uh, no? Regular web browsing, email, SAAS, video calls, streaming, gaming – all greatly benefit from faster speeds. Data caps are terrible, sure, but saying better internet is otherwise pointless is stupid.

Fine, I am your new ISP, your speed is now 10X and your data cap is 100 MB, enjoy!

> Who cares? With everything capped at 1 or 1.2TB of transfer per month, there's no point to having internet any faster.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. At least some well-known providers allow you to add an "unlimited" option to your internet plan.

> The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet.

That's a difficult problem to solve. There has to be incentives for corporations to bother laying infrastructure. When municipalities try to pitch in and do it themselves, they get shot down by the same players.

I guess the only viable option near term is Starlink.

I worked for a small time WISP for a while, partially servicing a town of ~10,000 (but mostly not because of interference) and large swathes of the rural surrounding areas. He was heavily harrassed by police for various nitpick infractions regarding the equipment on his truck and where things were placed and whatnot, things that the local power company and AT&T blatantly violated with regularity without repercussion. He was also met with resistance from the city board/mayor, who were trying to require some regulatory fees that they (come to find out) didn't even have on the books. I think the only reason his business survived this stupid pushback is because he is former law enforcement.

I care; caps do suck but given the choice I'd rather have double the speed at half the transfer cap. To be clear, by double the speed I mean half the latency between requesting a resource and page load, which is a significant amount of my usage pattern.

If something (like uploading a backup or streaming a movie) is going to run for a long time, I don't care how fast the average speed is as long as it's enough to stream 1080p.

But if my next task demands some info from a 20MB datasheet that I don't have locally, I want that to load as fast as possible. And I'm not going to do that 25,000 times a month.

> For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do?

It saves a lot of time. Having a new update/game or sharing large files in minutes instead of hours matters. Why not just start download earlier? Foresight on a long timescale takes a lot of brainpower and is pretty stressful because cost of miss is high. I will start this download and go get water is a whole lot better than I will queue this update and and it will be done in the morning.

Also there's not much foresight you can apply when an online game gets a required updated 5 min before you want to play it. And these days it's only going to get more common.

4K movie seeking on consumer devices can be dramatically faster when you increase from 50mbit/s to 400mbit/s, even though you'll still download just as much movie as you would on either speed. We're talking the difference between 5-10 seconds of buffering and beginning playback immediately. Video game updates also accelerate dramatically, allowing more efficient use of free time.

Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882

Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area.

Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.

For most people, more speed is about reducing wait time rather than transferring more data.

Agreed, average speed is generally a pointless metric with it comes to actual usage for many people. We are one of those rural families and we have to have both a 3Mbit DSL connection and a 4Mbit Satellite connection just to make sure that at least one service works well enough so we can work. We can't wait for Starlink to be available and will happily pay nearly any amount to have it if it means that I can kill 2 different really bad services.

1 TB per month works out to 3 MBps sustained over the entire month.

Your kid downloads 2 modern games and now you are at 50% of that limit

What would the cost be to provide “high speed” internet to rural areas? And what % would we need to cover? 95? 99?

Starlink will cost "over $10B" to build and will cover essentially the whole world. The FCC is getting ready to award $16B in rural broadband subsidies just for 10M people.

Does that data cap mean that I can DoS any infrastructure hosted on your ISP simply by sending 1.2TB of junk?

When web pages are 10s of MBs today, faster Internet speeds are absolutely not all about being able to transfer more than a terabyte in a month.

Also, the US having “shit Internet” is contradicted by TFA. It shows we have faster Internet than the big European countries. Only a handful of small, rich European countries—which are the size of states like Maryland—are faster.

> The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet.

Infrastructure isn't free and while it's hilariously embarrassing to have slow speeds in "rural cities" (i.e. actual cities that just don't happen to be on the coast) simply due to capitalism doing it's worst - living in the middle of no where is an expense on society.

It falls into the same camp as people who live in hurricane areas - the government bailing you out once so you can move is a fine idea (and the government needs to be providing sufficient funds for these people to actually relocate) but living in remote areas and living coastally in the south east come with lots of benefits to you... and costs for everyone else.

I am A-OK with folks who insist on living in the middle of nowhere paying for it.

Oh I'm going to add a big old caveat for people who were forcefully relocated - if you're living on Rosebud Indian Reservation then relocation really isn't an option.

You do realize that roughly 100% of your food comes from those rural areas that you so casually throw away as an expense on society?

Add to that, telecom companies have been collecting additional "fees" from every user for decades that was supposed to go for expanding infrastructure and never has been.

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