Comcast plans data caps for all customers | Hacker News Reader

Comcast plans data caps for all customers

arstechnica.com

3 pointsopendais9 comments

Does any rational basis for data caps exist?

If you saturate your connection with Comcast until you hit your data cap, and then turn off your cable modem for the rest of the month, you'll cause more trouble than if you stream Netflix from 2am to 2pm, and don't do much during peak hours, exceeding your data cap by factors of 2 and 3.

This looks an awful lot like one of two things:

1. Abysmal ignorance of how TCP/IP networking actual happens.

2. Monopoly rents by another name.

Can anyone say for sure which one it is?

Can anyone else say why Comcast's few competitors aren't trying to steal customers by blaring ads about how they don't have data caps?

I think it's more like physcologically conditioning customers to use less data.

But why would a data provider ("ISP") do that? Do they want to have the ISP part of their business de-valued? Or at least not increase in value as fast?

I realize that you can't say definitively that "Every new valuable service is going to increase customer data use" but that's pretty close. Web pages have gotten bigger (and more diffuse) with time. What we want from web services has changed over time, basically using more data as time increases.

If Comcast et al conditions customers to use less data, then all they're doing is putting brakes on change. They're trying to limit what new services can provide by making those services less acceptable.

So, a double whammy: monopoly rents increase, and there's less chance of a disruption to the incumbents in the marketplace.

If you're selling "unlimited" service for a fixed price, of course you want to encourage customers to use less. ISPs don't care about new services; they're already getting as much money as their customers are willing to pay so increased profit must come from reducing costs.

I'd buy that, except that I already gave an example where a pattern of using broadband service below a data cap causes more trouble than 2x of 3x over the cap with another pattern.

The only way that a data cap could possibly reduce costs is to actually reduce overall usage enough so that Comcast (or whichever ISP) can cut physical hardware and the personnel to service it. Preventing future increases by conditioning consumers seems like a bad bet if you want to reduce costs now.

Caps are definitely a crude tool, but given that most usage is going to be during peak hours anyway, lower overall usage usually translates to lower peak usage.

And yes, when I talk about reducing costs I really mean reducing the rate of increase of bandwidth demand relative to the rate of decrease of bandwidth cost due to Moore's Law.

They /all/ want in on the action is why they aren't complaining. Every single one of them has a plan in place or is planning to try to achieve the same data cap mechanism for extracting additional money from those '2%' [which will magically grow over time to a much larger % because BW usage grows much, much faster than 200gb in 5 years.]

AT&T has had 150gb & 250gb caps.

TWC is trying to do something similar in a different way: http://bgr.com/2014/03/13/time-warner-cable-data-caps-reject... “Despite the extremely low uptake rate, Marcus said he thinks there’s an important principle for the company to establish: The more data customers use, the more money they should pay,”

Charter does too: http://www.myaccount.charter.com/customers/support.aspx?supp...

Etc.

So this is collusion to increase monopoly rents?

I realize that it's hard to prove collusion, but still...

Collusion in the sense they all operate from the same playbook.

It isn't any more 'collusion' than DuckDuckGo and Google 'collude'. They operate from the same playbook [e.g. I make money from ads providing search content] and optimize revenues based on their goals. DuckDuckGo differentiates on privacy, Google differentiates on other things.

If you have a duopoly in most markets [e.g. AT&T + Comcast], now that AT&T has bit the bullet, why wouldn't you join them and offer 20% more data in your plan and call it a day? You can extract most of the same value and fence them in by offering more.

It is the same reason in game theory, you have gas stations near each other generally. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/05/21/why-gas-stations-...

Each of you sit near each other and divide the market in half.

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