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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

you still have limited plans for internet in the US?

We started out with limited, then everybody started advertising unlimited because they never thought anyone could use a ton of data. Then things like torrenting and Netflix and YouTube came along, and now everyone's using a lot of data again, so they're re-introducing data caps.

Of course, data caps are ridiculous in concept. It's not like they go out and dig up infrastructure when it's not in use. It's their anticompetitive attempt to put online video services out of business and reinvigorate the outdated and overpriced cable/satellite TV model.

Data caps seem fine as long as they keep up with technology. The problem is that even 5 years ago 300GB was barely reasonable and it is completely unreasonable today.

What I mean by "fine" is I would rather have a datacap and a higher speed that could potentially exceed the data cap if used 24/7 than a slower speed that creates a soft cap anyway.

I pay for 50Mbps internet.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300GB+%2F+50Mbps

I wouldn't even have to use full speed 24/7 to hit that cap, only just over half a day.

When I was in university, I shared a house with a bunch of friends, we paid for 30Mbps, then I set up a router with nice cache system, QoS and all that stuff.

Most of the days we used around 100GB+, our isp called sometimes (two months interval more or less) to say that we hit our monthly data cap (which was 320GB), we got used to saying "ok, so cancel my plan, we are going to another ISP that don't put cap on our data usage" and then they continued the conversation saying that "this month we will not reduce our speed, but next time they would have to, unless you upgrade your plan", "no, thanks".

Since they were a new provider in the region, guess that the infrastructure were more than enough to sustain our use, and I was really surprised that the same excuse worked for around two years (then I graduated, don't know how it's now).

Given the nature of ISPs, networks and 95th percentile billing, a rational ISP would have advised you to keep it down between the hours of X and Y on days A through B.

At least one ISP around here offers unlimited data, but at reduced mbps during peak times. I can understand their plan, trying to maximize their resources without trying to break the laws of physics.

If only others would maximize their available resources. Since they aren't, it's (even more) clear that the caps are arbitrary and serve only to maintain video distribution monopolies.

> 5 years ago 300GB

Enter Belgium. There they advertise just how huge 150GB is. Living in the Netherlands using 2.5TB a month I can only pity them.

When I lived there (2009) my cap was 4GB/month. After that the download speed went down to 28.8kbps.

In Belgium, like, a developed country? Please tell me that was at least a mobile connection

That's offensive to developing countries. China for instance has no-cap internet for only a few hundred dollars per year.

> That's offensive

Well if it had been in Congo it would have made more sense, right?

Quite the opposite, it was university housing for faculty and graduate students. The most expensive residential plans at the time had a 20GB/month cap, IIRC.

It is misleading to sell something as unlimited when that can't actually be fulfilled, and it's unrealistic to believe you can buy something of value that is unlimited.

Setting a price for finite capacity that is to be reserved is a robust user-pays approach.

I don't expect unlimited, because that would be unrealistic. What I expect, if I paid for 50Mbps, is to be able to realistically consume 50Mpbs.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50Mbps+*+%28seconds+in+...

A 16TB data cap would be realistic and reasonable.

Maybe you should read the T&Cs, the 50mbps probably refers to the maximum speed you can expect

T&Cs don't mean squat when you're dealing with a monopoly. They can put any sort of consumer-unfriendly terms they want in there and then say "if you don't like it, you're free to go to our competitors" of which there is only one and they are colluding.

The problem is a fundamental incongruence between the costs to ISP's, and the corresponding costs to customers. It's not just consumer ISP's that are guilty of this racket, either. Most "cloud" hosts, Amazon included, are making huge margins by charging their customers for total data transferred, but only paying upstream for rate of transfer, i.e. bandwidth capacity at any given time.

To simplify, let's ignore last mile costs and at ISP's who own their own infrastructure. Let's also ignore peering. ISP's, and hosts like Amazon, pay for IP transit on a capacity basis, i.e. data per second, e.g. "$1 per month per mbps." They buy this IP transit from providers like Level3, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, etc. What this actually means is that they pay a monthly fee for some amount of fiber optic cables to plug into their servers/switches. These cables have a set bandwidth capacity, like 1gbps.

They could charge their customers in the same way, E.g. "$2 per month per mbps," and make up to 2x on each customer, but this would quickly become unsustainable because there simply is not enough cable in the world to do that, and make customers will not be using their full capacity 99% of the time anyway. Instead, the companies "oversell" their capacity by advertising a certain capacity to customers, but then capping the total transfer so that the customers cannot operate at peak capacity 100% of the time, since there is not space for that many electrons on the fiber optic cables.

Amazon charges $0.1 per gb transferred. In bulk, IP transit from hurricane electric can cost as little as $0.50 per mbps.

If you operate a low bandwidth site on Amazon, and you transfer 1 mbps for an entire month, that totals to 155.52 gigabits, or 19 gigabytes. You pay $1.90, but Amazon only pays $0.50. If you transfer at a consistent rate of 1 gbps, you total 324 terabytes of transfer, which costs you $3,240 @ 0.01/gb (I think that's their bulk price?). Amazon, meanwhile, only pays $500.

Lots of people don't know this is how the hosting industry works, and Amazon is gouging the shit out of them on price. Lots of companies paying for the convenience of "the cloud" are getting ripped off. For high bandwidth sites, it's far more cost effective to colocate at a datacenter and buy the IP transit yourself.

I'm sure Amazon offers custom transit pricing to big customers, but you need to transfer a ton of bandwidth to get that, and by then you're already getting ripped off anyway.

You're quite right here, with two exceptions:

1) Fibre transmits photons, not electrons. 2) The fundamental infrastructure limits aren't the cable themselves, but the equipment at either end. This technology improves every year, permitting the same cables to transfer more data. This is why installing fibre through the streets is such a good investment: it scales up over time, without having to dig it up and replace it.

Also, the issue you touched on with customers sharing the same bandwidth is called "contention", and it's possible to determine the "contention ratio" (i.e. how many people are sharing a unit of bandwidth) for ISPs (at least, it is in the UK).

Last I checked, in the UK, the contention was always better on DSL services than cable; but the maximum bandwidth and minimum latency on cable is correspondingly better. Though I've not checked the Openreach FTTC offering, which I imagine has a better contention at the moment due to a smaller customer base.

Same where I live (Belgium), typical limit is around 150 gig.

Isn't Belgium notoriously bad when it comes to internet service? I remember hearing that a decade ago. 150GB is really low, unless it's some crazy cheap deal.

Deutsche Telekom has been making noises about instituting a cap at some point in the coming years, but it's still no problem to get 50Mbit VDSL with no long-term contract and no cap through resellers like 1&1.

> Isn't Belgium notoriously bad when it comes to internet service? I remember hearing that a decade ago. 150GB is really low, unless it's some crazy cheap deal.

Belgium is sooo backward for Internet. When I used to live there 7 years ago, prices were like twice the price of what you could get in France and my ADSL contract would only get 10 Gb per month, and I had to pay 5 euros to get 5 Gb more of data. The total ripoff. I'm so glad I left.

I was on the same plan. To top it all off the ISP was named Skynet.

For some reason, i can't reply on the comment below, so i'm doing it here.

We don't have crappy internet service when it comes to Telenet in terms of speed. The competition (DLS) is not stable on a lot of places.

All of them have caps on the internet and are very expensive when looking at our neighboured countries.

But then again, everything is expensive and everyone has a monopoly here in some sector...

The governement has financial intrest (stocks) in the telecom companies. So that won't change soon.

This is awful, 1 game on Steam can weight 40 Gb now (see Injustice), here in Russia I pay only 12.5 EU/month for 30 Mbit/s and unlimited traffic. I hope telecoms won't start reimplementing traffic caps.

germany is still unmetered and the last attempt of Deutsche Telekom to introduce a cap resulted in a huge backslash. For now we are save, but i have the feeling it won't last forever.

I think the worst we have is Kabel Deutschland, they say in their ToS they'll slow filesharing services down to 100kbit/s for the day if you reach 10GB on that day with any kind of traffic. But as far as I know that limit is not enforced.

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