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Comment by guhidalg | Hacker News Reader

Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.

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If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a certain speed to the network.

Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB (Comcast is charging 20x that).

1c/GB would be a decent rate for home data transfer in 2023, but where would you set the free limit? For reference, at my house I have a 1Gbps line and it looks like in 48 hours I have downloaded 1TB of data (looking at the number of received bytes my AT&T device is reporting). Am I normal? I don't know, but AT&T does...

I think that's rather high compared to average, considering the standard cap for Comcast Xfinity residential is 1.2TiB per month, and they claim only "a very small percentage" of their customers use more.

I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay more.

1TB in 48 hours is absolutely not a normal residential connection usage.

The average US residential customer uses a bit over 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the time.

https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-hal...

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