The FCC wants to regulate broadband data caps again
theverge.com
theverge.com
I don't know if any home markets still advertise "burstable cap" billing, but it existed in the early 2000s. Comcast doesn't want a small number and a "sometimes more" asterisk. They want a big number with an "always less" asterisk. And they don't want to make usage-based billing part of the messaging, customers already understand the pain of cellphone data caps.
It's just an argument about how much dishonesty they can get away with and for how long.
(Not that I have a dog in this fight. Municipal fiber ftfw. Unless you live somewhere that already has 3+ competing providers, the only question you should be asking is "what will it take?")
Comcast's problem isn't that they can't afford to provide the service you paid for without the caps, it's that they're oversubscribing their backbone so heavily that they would never be able to do it from a technical perspective. The reality is most people don't hit that cap, so the cap is actually meaningless and does nothing for large consumers. It's just a consumer-hostile practice, where Comcast is trying to take ten miles where they were given an inch. This FCC is just going to codify it though, the FCC has been in the pocket of one provider or another for the last 15 years at least.
The extra $30/month would be for "actually unlimited" since removing the QoS means you never get de-prioritized. This might be better than the alternative where there is no $30/month service but all data defaults to the lowest priority and you need the extra device to get reasonable performance when the network is busy. But then one wonders why someone couldn't just set up their home router to tag all packets at the highest priority, why do they need this device in the consumer's home at all instead of doing it in the CO?
In the case I'm talking about, it really only matters how Comcast's network treats their direct customers, not how you get treated after, and they absolutely ignore customer QoS (at least on residential links).
I did a quick search and couldn't find what I was looking for, but it looks like in 12 states they were prevented until 2022 for enforcing the data cap, and there's a pending class action suit in California related to the WiFi impact on data caps: https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
Anyway, that's my understanding. The net-net is I coughed up the $30/mo because I have no alternatives to Comcast (even at lower speeds) because my landlord has an exclusivity contract with them, and I don't want their shit-tier CPE anyway, especially throttling my traffic and broadcasting a WiFi SSID I don't control. My entire network is proper SME enterprise-grade rackmount gear and I have WiFi 6E throughout my house that is secured to only allow devices I control/allow to connect.
Also if they are doing traffic shaping, where does the default unclassifiable (eg VPN) traffic fall? It should be easy enough to get an unlimited VPS at a close enough data center and relegate Comcast to a dumb pipe (as they should be).
I'd guess the goal of traffic shaping on CPE would be to keep upload bandwidth on the cable segments less congested. Or perhaps conntrack is easier to do in a distributed manner?
FWIW I think the DiffServ RFC explicitly acknowledges that the QoS marks are generally ignored across administrative boundaries. It was an extension of the earlier 4-level QoS priority, so by that time it was clear that transit networks weren't paying them much attention. What would be surprising is finding a consumer ISP that actually did something different when a customer set them.
Most of Silicon Valley is in the clutches of Comcast as well, unfortunately. It's 1.2gbps down / 35mbit up or ATT 768K DSL (and we'd have to pay to get phone lines) where I'm at. Of course, if you check the FCC Broadband Map, there are 7 providers here, with ATT showing 5gbps FTTH, which I've confirmed with their reps multiple times is not possible (there's no fiber on the poles in our backyard and they won't install any anytime soon).
Apartments I've lived in around SV as well are also under the Comcast exclusive contract, with restrictions on any antennas or dishes, so the only other choice would be tethering an LTE or 5G device.
We sold out the critical infrastructure of our country to investors and this is the result.
You can make whatever argument you want that Comcast's behavior is reasonable and necessary or that this isn't consumer-hostile. You won't convince me. I pay for gigabit connectivity, I should get gigabit connectivity. If they can't offer gigabit connectivity, they shouldn't offer it, rather than lying to me and then penalizing my traffic. It's that simple. Companies can't take a product to market they're incapable of actually offering and then act like it's the customer's fault, it's fraud. Nearly every residential ISP in the US behaves in these ways, it's not unique to Comcast, and it's not aligned to what is promised and offered in their advertising/contracts.
I don't have any specific knowledge of how Comcast does or doesn't do throttling on their network but it is very unlikely that is happening via the CPE. They may be doing some QOS via PCMM (PacketCable MultiMedia) but that is often used to manage congestion on the cable network and not the backhaul/transport side.
Agreed, I rent currently and the landlord has a deal with Comcast, so that's the only option. There are no alternatives. This is a commonplace practice for corporately owned rentals, which is like 70% of the US rental market.
Compare this to my situation prior to my recentish relocation, where I had the ability to negotiate with multiple providers and was able to get two separate links dropped to provide myself redundancy/backup and maintain a negotiating position on price. Now I'm just over the barrel with one of the most consumer-hostile ISPs in the world.
I absolutely refuse to believe those speeds are offered at those prices. Otherwise, I'm getting totally ripped off.
I was paying less than $55/month for 25mbps with Comcast.
> I was paying less than $55/month for 25mbps with Comcast
The Comcast plan is ~1000x slower than the AT&T plan cited, FWIW I was not able to locate the 25Gbps plan on the linked AT&T site so likely a typo.
Yeah, that would be extremely cheap then, but I'll believe it when I see it.
> teeny-tiny 5Gbps upload speed
EDIT:
Also, checking Cox, they have the exact plans the article mentions, but in Mbps not Gbps.
Yeah, someone definitely didn't sanity check the units on those speeds. Especially the reference to the "...with a teeny-tiny 5Gbps upload speed" which is more than twice as fast as the fastest (2Gbps) plan that my local fiber company offers.
> In the case of AT&T, pricing can start at $55 per month for a 25Gbps plan before going up to $65 per month or more after a year, and the company will charge $10 for every extra 50GB you use (unless you upgrade to unlimited for $30 per month or have a plan that’s already unlimited).
Links to https://www.att.com/internet/internet-service-plans/
The pricing can start at $55 per month for a 25Gbps plan is clearly a reference to the "Internet 25" plan which is 25Mbps (not Gbps).
There's a footnote on the price for the Internet 25, 50, and 100 plans indicating the data cap: "Incl. 1.5TB data/mo., overage charges apply." There's also "See offer details" link with this pop-up:
It links to https://www.att.com/help/internet/usage/ for info on data allowances. Internet 25 and Internet 50 have a 1.5TB allowance, but Internet 100 is unlimited. All of the AT&T Fiber plans are also unlimited data.
I don't know why anyone would choose Internet 25 or Internet 50 over Internet 100 since all three are the same price, so it must be an availability issue.
It's also weird to me that AT&T would price all three of these plans the same and apply a data cap only to the slower speed plans. I wonder if it indicates is more expensive for them to provide the lower tier plans for some reason?
Disclosure: I've had AT&T Gigabit Fiber since Jan 2017. It's $70/month (total) which has included HBO Max as a freebee for several years now. No data cap. It's the best residential Internet service I've ever had, by far.
https://twitter.com/googlefiber/status/628651613637361665
They finally trenched my neighborhood six months ago, a full six years after AT&T. But I still can't order service.
More for homelab, but a road I would definitely go down if 100gbps service was available to me for $50/month.
There isn't really a point except some people like to push the boundary for fun. Agreed it's not anywhere close to necessary for normal home users. But we don't always do things just because they're necessary :)
I mentioned VyOS won't handle line rate (it'll do ~5 Mpps on average hardware) but there are options like DANOS that will. 10 Gbps is do-able with < $1k in hardware, including the server.
VPP+FRR or VPP+DPDK can handle 100 Mpps/100 Gbps across NAT. And with the new Linux Control Plane in VPP, it's possible VyOS will get support in the future (https://vyos.dev/T1797). They're also considering using eXpress Data Path (XDP).
Again, totally pointless but so are many other things we spend our time/money on.
Most home equipment, even the computers themselves, can't handle those speeds. Unless they're moving into the ultralow cost home data center segment, it's probably a mistake lol...
My parents live 5 minutes away in a slightly older community that only has 1 high speed provider, and another provider that maxes out at 15Mbps. They have a data cap of 1TB/month, despite the ISP offering 1Gbps service. They then offer Unlimited Data for an extra $50/month.
Consuming 1TB/month is pretty easy to do if you do any gaming/streaming. Most games these days easily consume 50-100GB to download and install.
With AWS you get charged on consumption only. If you consume 10GB of bandwidth, you get charged $0.20. With ISP's you pay $80-120 upfront for 1TB whether you use 10gb or 500gb, and then an extra $50 for unlimited on top of that. Why offer 1Gbps service, if your customers are not supposed to use it and would max out the data cap within a day of actually making use of the 1Gbps service?
Caps discourage people from using too much and making the network slow for everyone and/or very expensive to run. It'd be great if, instead, bandwidth was prioritized based on usage each month. So the really heavy users that cause problems for everyone else will run slowly during the day but still can be fast at night.
Ideally there would be a way to mark streams as low-priority in a way that didn't count against your quota, that could be used automatically by backup software and other cases.
Another possible system which seems fair to me would be to give each user a guaranteed 1/N of the bandwidth. If there's any unused, then split it equally among those that are using it. In practice an ISP needs to have enough capacity to support streaming during the peak hours, so that'd keep the 1/N value reasonable. For example, if a local ISP offers 1 gbps connections to 200 customers and has them sharing a 10 gbps upstream connection to the wider internet, each would have a guaranteed 50 mbps, with ability to burst to all 1 gbps most of the time. That's plenty fast for streaming from several devices per household. If someone needs faster guaranteed speed, they can pay extra for more bandwidth shares.
If you do backups at night and send 50TB/month but only at times when the network would otherwise be idle, why should your connection be slower than anyone else's during the day? Likewise, even if you did send a lot of data during peak hours, what would be the point of throttling you at night when the network has capacity to spare?
It only make sense to throttle people during peak hours who send a lot of traffic during peak hours. But that's what already happens if you don't do anything, because the links get saturated during peak hours and people have to share them so the people who are using the network when it's saturated have slower speeds.
What they could do is sell a more expensive plan where you get prioritization during congestion. Then if you don't use the network during peak hours or don't care about it being slow at those times you can save money, and if you want your connection to be fast all the time you can pay more.
AFAICT the reason they don't do this is it requires admitting that their network is heavily oversubscribed and they're too cheap to upgrade it, which is kind of a PR fail.
It would also both drive and pay for network upgrades, because the people paying the higher price would expect to get the full speed they were sold, so the ISP would have to keep the network at least fast enough to handle all of that traffic. And could afford to because they have more revenue.
Then the better network is faster even for the people paying the lower price at times outside of peak hours.
Are datacaps normal on fibre in the US? I was first thinking it was mobile data. 1 Gbps 5G with 100 GB usage before the speed is reduced to 3 Mbps for the rest of the month is ~37 USD in Norway. As for fiber, ~100 USD is a normal price for 1 Gbps no matter how much data you use.
Well, until Congress decides to not kneecap every department in the government. We're kind of boned.
Checks and balances is called kneecapping these days? There is a reason the president doesn't have unlimited power over the executive branch.
If Biden considered it a crisis that the FCC has an open seat, he would look for a clearly palatable candidate.
...so you're on an ISP with a data cap. Not even a very high one.
Comcast is ripping off customers twice. Don't defend it.
I have zero problem with caps. I use my connection mainly for text and HTML; to the extent that I download video, it's usually being forced on me by advertisers. I use a satellite dish and STB/PVR for most of my film and TV news requirements.
I don't want to share a cap-less contended channel with people who spend all day watching 4K movies on a 6"x3" device; and I certainly don't want to share the costs. It's like a vegetarian going to a restaurant with colleagues who all order T-bone steaks, and splitting the bill equally.
For what it's worth, I have a no-data smartphone contract, and capped FTTC to my home. Even the smartphone contract is abusive; I have it mainly to call a taxi, or to receive 2FA challenges over SMS (i.e. ultralite usage), and yet I still seem to use up my monthly budget every month.
Not really; I'm strongly in favour of universal healthcare. I would like it to be more universal, and better-funded.
Now, you mention insurance: are you advocating for an insurance market where everyone pays the same rate, regardless of their previous claim record? Because that's what you get if there are no data caps. In fact it's even worse with insurance, because there are many situations where you must have insurance by law; nobody's compelled by law to have an internet connection, let alone a contested one.