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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

ISP data caps are a complete scam.

Xfinity offers gigabit connectivity with a 1TB data cap. Which means that if someone was actually using the network at those speeds it would take them 2.2 hours to get through their allotted monthly usage.

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ISPs are buying long and selling short or whatever it is called. They buy transit at some higher priced and fixed (10 Gb/s or whatever) and resell it to users at advertised speeds that are a major fraction of whatever the local uplink is. If you buy at 10 Gb/s and sell at 1 Gb/s you obviously can't sell to more than 10 users without somehow limiting something.

So data caps are a way to isolate the harmful effects of those who use a lot of bandwidth from those who just use it rarely. It's standard market segmentation.

You can pay more and get more, or get a business account.

I mean, you could, but you very much thought you were buying that already because your provider put a lot of effort into leading you to believe that.

I'd only call it a scam when they advertise unlimited and still have caps. Otherwise you are just getting what you agreed and paid for. If you want to pay for a dedicated gigabit line not shared with anyone else, you can, it costs a lot.

It can actually be much cheaper than people might think, you just need to work it out with the business side (and they will correctly allocate for it). You're basically buying a loop to some exchange, and then transit at that exchange.

The reality is nobody is ACTUALLY pushing 1 Gb/s continuous so the expense ain't worth it (the people who are already have it setup).

Data caps existing to prevent network congestion is a myth. Otherwise Xfinity would go down on the 1st of every month when all their users had fresh data allotments and were using the service without any restrictions.

This model is simply an additional revenue stream for ISPs.

I think the cap is intended to drive heavy users to change their behavior or switch to other ISPs.

That would assume everyone hits the caps - I daresay they're high enough that 90% or so of users never hit them (I'm not capped so I don't know) - or they'd offer a good/better/best allocation.

In the end you're trying to find a fair algorithm for "sharing" and any one you pick is going to have some ways in which it's unfair.

> In the end you're trying to find a fair algorithm for "sharing" and any one you pick is going to have some ways in which it's unfair.

This is already done for almost every other wireless carrier with QoS (QCI in this context). No need to cap the heavy users, just de-prioritize them if the spots are too congested. [1][2] (QCI parameters may vary by carrier and region equipment vendor.) I spend most of my month at QCI 9 but I live in a semi-rural area with a high capacity cell pointed at me, so deprioritization doesn't matter for me, I'm harming literally nobody using >1TB/mo. If my town threw some festival and I bogged down, I have the choice of either switching to a deprioritized line or driving to a non-congested cell.

If they really have to hard cap it suggests they are either: 1. assholes or 2. built a poorly designed system that congests at more than the transponder spots.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QoS_Class_Identifier

Oh you can bog down the uplinks for sure - even after you’re off the cell and on the landlines.

Interconnects are getting better and better so fewer and fewer people run into it (and how much video bandwidth never even leaves the carriers local network with Netflix cache servers, etc).

I forgot to mention but it is possible to saturate tower backhaul as well, this is the main secondary point of congestion. It usually sets the max physical throughput for the wireless spectrum on midband and mmwave deployments, however it is still a factor on some rural sites.

I provided consulting for a mobile carrier before. The reason why this doesn't happen is because once you do apply data caps, users often try to "not eat their entire allocation the first day" because otherwise they would lose internet halfway through the month.

The same reason as to why you don't use your entire paycheque at the beginning of each month when it drops.

Granted though, in terms of internet, this is not a detriment (at least not enough) to think you won't have internet by the end of the month. But that'd the thinking behind caps, that people would even out their usage through the month.

Verizon switched from low cap cellular plans (2 GB) to unlimited*. The network is much more congested now that people don't think twice about streaming video.

*The normal plan gets deprioritized after a threshold. The cheap plan is always low priority. The super duper plan is never deprioritized but video throughput is capped.

As a note that type of prioritization would have been prohibited by most net neutrality rules.

Maybe with the 22 billion in net income they raked in in 2021 they could upgrade their gear and give customers what they want.

Very little of the streaming video you describe is off-net for any of the carriers. They run caching servers within their network at major POPs. The network isn't congested because of said video because it's already downsampled content specifically for mobile streaming.

Video streaming on any of these carrier networks consumed by your phone or tablet is curated for mobile devices and doesn't impact their Internet connectivity at all. Very little of that traffic will ever egress the carrier's network. Ultimately the congestion is all oversubscription of the spectrum allocated to the tower you're connecting to.

While I agree with you. It's important to point out not every customer's plan starts at the 1st of the month.

That still doesn’t explain most ISP data caps which are often 0.1% or less of advertised bandwidth over a month.

Instead it’s simply a way to segment the market so ISP’s can charge business customers dramatically higher fees.

Demanding that a home ISP be able to satiate torrent junkies who peg their line 24/7 is not reasonable. That's like half the membership of a gym showing up on the same day and expecting that there be machines available without any delay. Or everyone withdrawing their savings from a bank at the same time without any issues. Or someone claiming on their home insurance every year. Consumer Internet access is shared. If ISPs had to guarantee 100% of line rate they would have to lower the advertised speeds or raise prices to MPLS/DIA prices ($$$ instead of $$).

This is a separate argument from whether some ISPs abuse their monopoly or duopoly position to convert consumer surplus into economic rent.

If you do 1:30th oversubscription the a monthly data cap of 1/30th of your hypothetical bandwidth is fine. That’s easily enough to catch torrent junkies and your network is likely only congested for a small fraction of the day.

However, a bandwidth cap of 1/10,000th or less the hypothetical monthly cap has got nothing to do with how congested your network is.

Isn't 30:1 over-subscription extremely aggressive? ISPs used to use 10:1 but Netflix after dinner became popular and now ratios like 3-5:1 are more typical.

Depends on speeds. People will peg a DSL line for hours watching video, but the vast majority of households don’t download more jumping from 200 Mbps to 1,000 Mbps.

Netflix pretty much solved that by colocating their caches at the ISPs. Netflix itself shouldn't be an issue for any reasonable size ISP these days. Edit: Just realised after writing this that it may actually be an issue for starlink - they're in a different position here. I wonder if satellite links will force multicast of some sort to make a return for customers.

Now I’m imaging satellites with Netflix caches shoved in them.

(I wonder if Netflix is even a majority of streaming anymore)

As speeds get higher oversubscription gets higher too, just from a practical standpoint. They dropped 1Gb/s fiber to the entire town and I doubt we have multiple terabits of uplink.

This is nothing but absolute bullshit. That's not how a network works and you know it.

-- sorry, sorry, impetuous. I'm simply tired of the bandwidth apologists. Data caps are 100% theft of service.

> They buy transit at some higher priced and fixed (10 Gb/s or whatever) and resell it to users at advertised speeds that are a major fraction of whatever the local uplink is.

Globally, downstream video makes up 57% of bandwidth usage:

* https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/new-study-examines-internet-t...

Given that most high bandwidth usage is for video, the cost of transit/uplink doesn't matter as long as you (a) have a Netflix CDN appliance (or three) on your network, and (b) you peer with Youtube/Google at your local IXP. And most IXPs also have most cloud providers peering as well, so a lot of online stuff will be caught by that.

Looking at TorIX, my local IXP in Toronto, Canada, and sorting by bandwidth of the connection, we have (selectively) Akamai, CloudFlare, Facebook, Fastly, Amazon, Blizzard, Google, Limelight, and Microsoft all with 100Gb/s or more (and often redundant):

* https://www.torix.ca/peers/

Transit is for reaching the wider Internet, which I think is the minority of traffic.

So as long as you have a dark fibre connection to your local IXP(s), which is a fixed cost, I don't think peering/transit costs matter that much.

Indeed, and it's happening while cable providers push more offerings to IP-based services. Xfinity will hand you a free Xfinity Flex streaming box to watch free shows and content that all count against your monthly data cap.

My SO and I both work from home full time now, and we will easily hit 600-800GB/month. I can't imagine how homes with several kids streaming YouTube videos handles this without paying the extra monthly fee for the Xfinity modem just to remove their data cap.

So glad this just isn't a thing in the UK.

Yes, services are contended (1/32 on my FTTP), so if everyone goes full beans the whole time it would slow down, but I never have issues, even at busy times on my 900/100 plan. Turns out, most people's usage is bursty, and even every home streaming simultaneously at 4K is only using a fraction of the bandwidth available on the GPON circuit.

I've used multiple TB a month (when working from home full time during the lockdown, with kids remote learning and spouse working remotely as well) and didn't get so much as a peep from my ISP. Unlimited really is unlimited.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/fios-...

Hardly makes it a "scam". Annoying and restricting perhaps.

It also isn't nearly as tight as your 2.2 hours suggests in practice. Gigabit is fast enough that most downloads take seconds so the chances of someone spending hours at full speed is pretty low.

Unlimited is definitely nicer

It is a scam when xfinity advertises unlimited when it is intact not.

I mean I could also roll up at a coffee shop with a tanker truck and demand they fill it up based on my $5 bottomless coffee purchase. But nobody sensible reads bottomless that way.

Also I don't think your reading of their offerings is right. 1.2TB allowance on the basic package and those that want more can purchase an unlimited package:

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/exp-unlimited-data

Your analogy is too far off in scale to work. Constant coffee refills would take days to fill up a tanker truck. If a tanker truck is 1.2TB, then getting a coffee refill every few seconds isn't the equivalent of full speed downloading, it's the equivalent of streaming high quality video.

So the analogy you proposed would say that streaming video is abuse. The analogy is wrong.

Also, when talking about how "most downloads take seconds", video game (re)installs can be over 100GB. You could have two people each install two games and blow out half your data cap in an hour without doing anything remotely unreasonable.

I reject 'complete scam', though that example is obviously egregious.

My 50Mbps plan should be capped (1280GB in my case.) I don't know what the utilization factors are, but that would be a lot of traffic on what is not a high powered plan, and I appreciate the price I get. Even when I try to go for the cap, I've never even made it to 400GB (because I don't know how to use that much traffic, mostly.)

As with almost all these broadband provider problems, it's the barriers to new entrants that prevent sensible equilibrium.

The scam part is where the limits are all disclosed in the small print while the large print on their advertising material says "unlimited"; it takes serious pilpul to redefine that word.

AFAIK there's nowhere on Comcast's site that says unlimited bandwidth. I just went to sign up and they were pretty clear about data caps.

Right on "Xfinity"'s homepage I see them offering "Unlimited". Then in the fine print below it, in a much smaller font, it says they'll throttle your connection after only 20 GB.

Serious pilpul to call that "Unlimited".

If you’re seeing references to throttling and 20GB, you’ve accidentally gone to Xfinity Mobile, their phone service.

Whatever, it's advertised right on the front of Xfinity.com, and it's the same damn company. I have numerous emails from them telling me they'll me that I'm close to my monthly limit and they'll fine me if I go over. Comcast are snakes, just like the rest.

The practices of cable Internet and MVNOs have nothing to do with each other. They just share branding.

Same company, same leadership, same scummy business practices. I don't know why you're trying to hold water for Comcast of all companies. I guess Elon Musk is just so awful that he makes you think Comcast is good? I don't particularly like the guy either, but get real. Comcast are scum.

I don’t know what has given you this impression. Hopefully you’ll find it easier to navigate between their websites from now on.

Given me what impression? Should I not judge a company by the lies they put on their website?

>> I just went to sign up

To Comcast? For the love of God, why?

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