Please ban data caps, Internet users tell FCC
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
iOS / Mac updates are humongous. 100+MB per webview-wrapper app. And they aren't sharable. iOS 18.1 today was 8GB. How many Apple devices do you have?
Every website these days starts to automatically play videos, with no way of disabling that (looking at you Fandom, and until recently, Ars Technica).
All video is consumed in a streaming manner. At least when you watched a movie over cable it didn't consume bandwidth. But when you watch the same movie on YouTube TV it is counting towards your 'limits'.
And you cannot set proper limits, as they calculate your usage once per day. Go over, $10 per 50GB on Cox. And your limit is 1280GB, even on their 2Gbit connection.
So unlike with your car where you have a pretty decent view on when it's empty, and you can fill up at almost the same price as the previous tank, here you're screwed twice, once because you can't measure, and second, because the price is outrageous.
For a 2Gbit connection, you can actually go through your limit in ...
2Gbit = 250MB / sec. 1280GB = 1310720MB. 1310720 / 250 = 5242.88 seconds, or 1 hour, 27 minutes and 22.88 seconds.
Insane. We need more competition.
If someone charged based on how long packets were in transit on their network or the time under load, wouldn't those provide similar but better outcomes?
Since the ISPs collude to gain a local monopoly over entire apartments, sometimes cities, sometimes states [1], ideally your response would be to de-occupy them, the same as if state police decided to disproportionately shoot at you because of your race.
[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
This might be technically true but for all practical purposes it's irrelevant. When your data cap is 1TB, random websites' ads or autoplay videos don't make a dent. Most of the actual usage is stuff that you can control: youtube/netflix, games, even os updates are pretty consistently sized that you can't plausibly plead "I couldn't control how much data I was using!" as you blow past your 1TB quota.
A single Steam game can easily be 50GB, so there’s another 5%.
It’s also an unreasonable burden for multi-user homes. Does anyone actually want to coordinate who gets to watch Netflix this month and who won’t be playing multiplayer games on Steam because they’re not allowed to download patches? Does that actually seem reasonable?
3 computing devices per person in a family of four seems... questionable. Besides a phone and maybe a laptop/tablet, any other device are typically shared, so that extrapolation wouldn't hold. Moreover ios devices is probably the worst case scenario. Pixel device updates are around 3GB, and windows updates are around 1GB.
>A single Steam game can easily be 50GB, so there’s another 5%.
Great, there still 85% for netflix and tiktok.
>It’s also an unreasonable burden for multi-user homes. Does anyone actually want to coordinate who gets to watch Netflix this month and who won’t be playing multiplayer games on Steam because they’re not allowed to download patches? Does that actually seem reasonable?
I mean if you blow your share of the quota on 800GB worth of steam games, leaving little for everyone else, that seems entirely on you? Give everyone a budget and get them to stick to it. If they can do it for cellular data I don't see why they can't do it for wifi.
My partner has a macbook, a mac mini, a windows laptop, an iPad, a Nintendo Switch, and a smartphone that she uses regularly.
That's 14 computing devices right there. For a family of two, not even four.
That's not including additional laptops we need for work.
Granted we probably don't represent a typical family.
Also most Steam games nowadays are 80GB-150+GB (Baldur's Gate 3 is 148GB, for example).
Which makes services like Xbox Game Pass less desirable, since you have to fully download and install all these new AAA games you might want to just try out for a few hours (or only take like 6 hours to get through their single player campaign).
I have to limit the downloads of those to 1 or sometimes 2 big games per month usually, and I go out of my way to transfer the games to external hard drives so I don't have to redownload them when I want to go back to them, which is something I never bothered doing before. I also watch a lot of Youtube videos at 360p to save bandwidth for other things, like Netflix.
Really? Phone+desktop and then either a work or school device depending on age. 3 seems fairly standard to me these days, and I’m surprised anyone here would balk at that.
That 85% isn’t just for Netflix and TikTok. That’s Spotify (8GB of mobile data on my phone this month, with the local saving on), browsing (4GB of mobile data for me this month), work calls or RDP if a need to WFH arises, security systems, etc. 15% of an entire months data caps on OS updates is an insane situation, 3rd world countries have better connectivity than that. It’s an embarrassment.
Steam will also absolutely chew through that. Anyone who games as a hobby is likely getting upwards of 100GB of patches a week just playing a few live service games.
> If they can do it for cellular data I don't see why they can't do it for wifi.
The whole premise of that being reasonable is that you have a way to avoid it by using WiFi.
I don’t even particularly hate the concept of charging by volume. What I hate is charging by rate and by volume, and making the volume charges extortionate. They’re utterly absurd, and exceed the cost of production to a degree that ought to trigger an investigation.
I’m sending this from the Orion Browser on iOS, with the Firefox versions of ublock origin and privacy badger turned on. Every other platform that runs a modern browser (safari or chromium derivatives) runs firefox natively.
That doesn’t invalidate your other points, of course!
Are you sure they can't be shared? See https://support.apple.com/en-us/102860 and https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/intro-to-content-...
Disclaimer: I haven't tested this.
I have. Seems to work as advertised. You do need to have a Mac around.
That's definitely something you can control
They either need to ban auto play ads, or get rid of caps. Actually I'd even go a step further and say that no-login wifi should be a public right... It's already insecure to use wifi at all of these private company stores like Starbucks anyway, and the companies are literally using connections to spy on what everyone does... If we continue down the path of extreme ad proliferation, the least companies could do is distribute free wifi networks as a country-wide mesh of free internet ad spam connections.
We're paying more now than ever for Internet Services, the least they could do is make sure it's unlimited fully.
Suddenly there (in a functional market) be a reason for caps to be lifted as consumers can readily compare worst case usage.
All that said, the caps are a terrible mechanism and should be entirely removed as thankfully Australia mostly did a decade ago.
And I am not talking about wireless plans or mobile data. I am talking about the home internet (VDHL mainly but with some fibre in some areas).
And as another commentator said, people consume a lot of data to ads (media or text) with the average page reload of some websites of ~10 MB. I introduced ublock origin, alternative YouTube frontend to many people and they were happy with their overall experience.
* I have a friend who usually renew a plan each time a couple of steam games needs an update
If I pay for 100GB internet a month, that should equal a quota of 1.2TB a year.
That, or you reduce the amount I pay if I don't use my quota, and you reduce it further if your download speed is not what was advertised. Fuck these guys!
Also recall that consumer agreements for Internet service never include a "CBR" or "committed bit rate". If you want your ISP to live up to a service contract, for availability and guaranteed download speeds, then you'll go to their Business-class unit and sign a contract for commercial service.
And you can prove that this is true: your ISP doesn't care if you can connect to anything except their head end. They will troubleshoot your modem, restart it, and work on the wiring between you and them, but they couldn't give a rat's ass if you can reach example.com or not.
They should be more transparent about what to expect, but realistically it's out of their control. They don't control Netflix's outbound traffic, for example.
The difference between 1,000mbps and 970mbps can (partially) be explained by protocol overheads.
There's a difference here though. The ISP isn't being nefarious if you don't get the advertised speed because they can't control anything outside of their network. The butcher, OTOH, presumably knows how to read a scale and can charge the appropriate price.
I currently pay for 300Mbps symmetrical and actually achieve on the wire always greater than their advertised rates (for both down and up). And while I was doing the tests (today) multiple others were streaming and playing video games, so it's even more than I am seeing above.
If you use gigabit ethernet out of the modem/ont then yes you will not see full gigabit speeds due to overhead. This is of course dependent on the type of connection you have and the equipment they use, so your broad statement is inaccurate.
Good to watch out for, though!
Not true of all ISPs.
And at some point, even if they are only advertising signaling rates, it's inconsequential.
I'm paying I think $70/mo for symmetrical gigabit. I just ran a speed test and got 922 mbps down, 910 mbps up. I'm not going to complain about that.
Does speedtest.net include packet headers in its speed? Assuming 40 bytes of a 1500 byte packet is from headers, leaving only 1460 bytes is available for application data, that means that a minimum if 2.7% of my bandwidth is packet headers.
So if speedtest.net is only counting application data and not compensating for the bandwidth used by headers, then I should at most see 973 mbps on my gigabit connection.
i don't mind usage based pricing if they show you how much you've used and ideally where you've used it. then i can simply cut out all the services that suck up all that data. For example, I refuse to install Facebook because it's hundreds of MB.
The ISP doesn't need to know that. Maybe if it's a toggleable option on your modem-router and you want to enable it, sure. I wonder if pi-hole or something like that could track usage... we need a client-side middleman.
The company that owns the cable that goes into my house is required to provide access to any other ISP at a set rate. As a result, I can choose between quite a few different providers. I’m able to buy gigabit internet from a small local provider for $75CAD with no contract, no cap, and really good customer support.