Hacker News Reader

Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Like how Comcast starts charging you money for every $x megabytes over 1.2 TB. Only it makes sense for a wireless ISP like Starlink to do it due to spectrum bandwidth constraints. A wired ISP like comcast just does it to try to extract more money out of a userbase that has stopped growing.

View on HN

Comcast doesn’t give you dedicated bandwidth. Their spectrum is a limited commodity just like starlink. Lots of similarities actually.

True. But a very large number of dedicated physical transmission lines (ie, coaxial cable) allows you to re-use the same spectrum over and over for different groups. While propagating radio waves in free space means that everyone in line of sight has to share the one single spectrum.

no, it does not make sense. it's like if you buy too much beer in a month, they start to mix it with water and sell it for the same price

If you can offer me unlimited beer for a fixed consumer-range monthly price, I've got a bridge to sell you.

This is besides the point but of course there's a number. You've never explored where that number is before? Of course, you're drinking some cheap shitty beer. It's an unlimited plan so you're not getting top shelf small batch IPA. It's some macro brew, let's say it's Budweiser. How many of those you think you can drink a day, every day, every month?

Lets say I charge you $300/month for "unlimited" Bud Light. No sharing with your friends, just all you can drink for $300. If retail is $1/beer, you'd only have to drink 10 beers/day for the deal to be worth it to you (every month only has 30 days to make the math easier), but let's say my costs are only .50's a beer because I'm buying in volume from a cheaper state, then you'd have to drink 20/day, or 600/month before I start losing money on the deal. Now remember, this is 20/day every day of the week for a month. Or 10/day on weekdays and 45 on Sat and Sun each, or almost 2/hr with no sleeping the whole weekend, every weekend.

Even if you think you can keep up that schedule, a bunch of your buddies joined as well. You think every one of them can also keep up? Because if someone wimps out and drinks 0 beers during the week, or skips any weekend, you've got to drink their portion in order for me to lose money on top of the 45 you're drinking a day. Anyway so you plug all that into a spreadsheet based on what you think you can get priced in volume after tax a state or two away, vs retail, and then figure out how many beers does a normal average person drink by themselves before they pass out.

Waddaya say? I'd feel bad if you die of cirrhosis but you did that to yourself.

Brilliant!! Let me know when BeerPass gets its series A round done and you're looking for senior engineers

ok, if we keep this analogue, i offer you **!!!! UNLIMITED !!!!** (vuvuzela noises here) beer for a month. however in the 67th page of my EULA i say, after you drank a gallon of beer this month, you have to use a really, i mean really really thin straw to drink beer for the rest of the month. done, sell me a bridge

+1 for a vuvuzela reference on HN

A better analogy is probably a gym membership cutting you off from working out twice a day

Odd how Comcast needs a data cap for "outliers," yet every apartment complex can offer free unlimited, unmetered water usage.

Free and unlimited ? I had a water leak that took time to fix, I saw it on the bill, and the utility company too, fining me for "industrial-grade" usage. If you consume yourself more than everyone else in your building, someone will come do something about it eventually to make you stop.

Most apartment buildings where I live (a major metro) are not sub-metered. They don’t know how much my unit uses.

Comcast doesn't have infinite bandwidth, does it? At some point it all drops down to a small straw.

Comcast can easily add more straws where needed. Wireless hucksters like Starlink can't.

And this is why wireless is not, and will never be, an acceptable primary connection.

I have a 1.2gbps connection with them. That costs $70/mo (with their new subscriber promotion). They give you a 1.2 TB data cap per month.

Every month I can use my connection at full speed for 8.79 seconds.

On the bright side I can pay $30/mo more for unlimited data.

edit: I have been informed that I am bad at math and the correct answer is actually 2.4 hours which does make me feel better, but it's still a funny comparison

It'd take 133.33 minutes to transfer 1.2 Terabytes at 1.2 Gigabits/second. Double checked with Wolfram Alpha https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+long+does+it+take+t...

The whole idea of bandwidth caps is archaic and hilarious. Most of Europe has no cap at all, why is the US different?

The FCC chairman with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup coffee mug maybe wasn’t working in the public’s best interest?

Um... You need to check your math.

1200 megabits / 8 = 150 megabytes

1.2 TB = 1200000 MB

12000000 MB * (1 sec / 150MB) = 8000 sec = 2.22 hours

you mean 2 and a half hours

That’s an argument for bandwidth caps, not data caps.

No, it's not. A 1Gbps comcast connection would then need roughly a 5-10Mbps bandwidth cap if you wanted to ensure everybody could hammer the connection at the same time. A total data cap allows most people to use the connection at full 1Gbps speed whenever they want (because most people are only going to be hammering it on average no more than the data cap)

...while those who know they'll hammer it more than average have a specific idea of how much they can get away with.

It is an argument for de-prioritization. If you have blown past your 1T limit bu the rest of Comcast's network isn't too busy then it doesn't matter, but if the other people on your circuit want to use the data they get priority over your traffic.

It isn't. If you use a lot of traffic when the network is idle, there should be no penalty for this, because the capacity otherwise goes to waste.

If you use traffic when the network is congested, so is everyone else who is active when the network is congested, so you should all get an equal share if you're paying the same monthly fee, and a share proportional to your max connection speed if you're not. Nothing to do with how much you used when the network was idle.

Really, they're the same thing, given that your data cap resets every month.

For instance, if you maxed out a 100mpbs home connection 24/7 for a month, you could transfer no more than ~32tb.

But that means that bandwidth is still utilized, while a bandwidth cap at, say, 10Mbps would mean that 10 users are make up what one user at 100Mbps make up. In theory, a neighborhood or block might have the cable infrastructure to support 10Gbps simultaneously. There is no real benefit for the ISP to ensure that bandwidth is 100% utilized, so they have no incentive give a user more bandwidth than they paid for. Thus, capped bandwidth.

I’d suspect data caps are useful for over sold areas, but are great for lining the pockets of greedy ISPs.

I pay 50 a month extra to Concast for no caps or throttling, and for the most part it seems to be true.

Unlimited Data is $30/mo in many markets for Comcast, and if you use xFi Complete for $25/mo and just flip the modem into bridge mode, you also get unlimited data included (taking their modem saves you five bucks a month, and it’s compatible with Gigabit x2 which is 2000/200 service).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com