> How so? If I limit you to 1MB a month, good luck clogging my pipes. I said it's not an effective method of approaching the problem, so I'm not defending them at all.

Is your argument that "data caps" are not an artificial thing because you can have.. "data caps"?

Because from a networking point of view, data caps is an artificial thing.

> Nothing is unlimited, so why pretend you can get an unlimited amount of data?

Your connection is not unlimited anyway; the max you can get out of it is MAX BW * seconds/month.

Since the providers don't have guarantees about the max bandwidth, it can vary depending on the demand from the other users, I don't see why you need an artificial data cap.

Except Comcast and the other shitty ISPs (including mobile carriers) which implement data caps, despite there being no technical reason for it*. At least back in the day there was an actual limit to the number of active simultaneous connections an ISP can handle.

* even for mobile, data caps don't make much sense, as they are monthly and per-user while network congestion is temporary and local. Better sell unlimited data plans with different speeds (priced accordingly), and only apply those speed limits if the local cell becomes congested.

What? I definitely care how fast my internet is regardless of my bandwidth cap. For most people, internet consistency and speed is a more noticeable metric than data caps. Speed effects video/audio call quality, page load times, etc.

Look, i get annoyed at data caps. I've taken multiple comcast employees to task over it. But the idea that speed is irrelevant when caps are present strikes me as pearl clutching.

Not that hard I guess.

Data caps are the only reason you have affordable consumer internet because they allow a significant amount of oversubscription which matches the mostly-idle bursty behavior of consumers.

You can get leased lines from ISPs with no caps easily. You just won't like the real price that comes with guaranteeing a customer that kind of bandwidth.

Because if everybody uses more data there won't be more congestion? Sorry, that does not even qualify as wishful thinking. What caps do is force people who use the network more than others to contribute roughly proportionally more to its investment and maintenance.

If you really expect guaranteed uncontested bandwidth, anytime, anywhere, then your network could only ever sell you as much as you'd get if every one of their customers would gather in a single cell and fire up their radios at once. You would dream of modem speeds - and not be willing to pay even a cent for that tiny amount of service.

They’re related, but there may not be a direct 1:1 correspondence. Offering unlimited anything at a fixed price is a terrible idea for any company because there will be at least a few outliers that throw their modeling out the window, and there is ample precedent for ill-advised promotions bankrupting companies (see the Hoover flight article that was on the front page a while ago).

The issue isn’t with the existence of data caps, it’s with the laws that allow nominally unlimited things to be actually limited and the lack of competition that might produce the kinds of promotion you’ve suggested in the fight for market share.

And there is a reason for that -- it costs about the same to provide that service.

Nearly the entire cost of operating an ISP is getting the wires on the pole, keeping them there against weather and drunk drivers, answering customer support phones, paying for staff and buildings and electricity etc. None of which costs any less for the person who uses 1/1000th as much data.

Charging the amount actually attributable to additional data usage would cause the difference to be so small that basically everybody would just pick the unlimited plan so they don't have to worry about it. But they don't charge the actual cost, they charge more. Because the point is to suppress usage of Netflix et al (the main reason nearly anyone would exceed the cap) in favor of cable TV and zero-rated partners.

I really just want my ISP to be like my datacenter: 95%ile bandwidth billing. Nothing else. No services. No filtering. No "speed boosts." Just a connection to other networks.

> I pay for what I use.

Unless you have a metered services, you are not paying for what you use in that sense. You pay for access, sure, but not for what you use.

> My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electricity, they just charge me for what I use. Why should an ISP be treated differently?

The issue is not metered billing. I think most people would be OK with it; it'll suck for some but an honest effort to keep the 95% of usage at normal would go a long way, I thinks.

The issue is when you're being billed differently for what you consume, not how much. Would you be OK with electricity used by an LED bulb from company X was metered at 2 times that of company Y which is 2 times that of an incandescent? _That's_ the issue, not metered billing.

It sounds like those deployments required infrastructure upgrades, not more creative billing to stop people from utilizing it.

> We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

Even this isn't the reality. It's rare for landline Internet to be advertised with the actual data caps in effect. In my case, the data cap is defined nowhere except the Acceptable Use Policy (a long document that nobody is going to read) and in a My Usage part of your account (which you obviously won't see until you're already hooked up.)

At the same time, who are they going to be competing with? How many people are going to lay down fiber side-by-side with someone else's fiber? What incentive is for them to compete based on the data cap instead of following current practices which ae basically "100 MBPS BLAZING FAST SUPER-SPEED INTERNET!!!"*

(fine print)

* Limited to 200GB/month. Users going over this limit will be automatically upgraded to the next highest tier after three offenses.

I'm not sure why you disagree with the statement "caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading the infrastructure." You're basically making the argument that yes, caps do have that effect, but are put in place as a necessary network management strategy, despite the fact that most of these networks worked quite well before data caps and don't work any better with them. While some or most of them are continuing to invest in upgrading infrastructure, most of them are also rolling around in billions of dollars of profit that they aren't investing...because there is no real market incentive to do what you're saying they "should" do.

> "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours,

What a world that would be. In reality data caps are usually 300GB in networks that can obviously support much more than this. I could blow through my former data cap in 12 hours. Heck even in your scenario, I would only be able to use my rated 1 gigabits for 2-3 hours at max utilization. It seems misleading to advertise Internet as 1 gbps if you can actually only get 1 gbps for 3/720 (0.4%) hours of the month.

EDIT: I misread that as 1 TB instead of 10TB, but I don't think 4% of the month is much better.

If you're selling XMbps for $Y then I should be able to use XMbps, regardless of total usage. That's the unit that they have chosen to market, "speed of connection".

The problem is that I have to pay for this this two ways. As it stands, they're going to charge me for a 125Mbps connection, then they also get to charge me more if I use that 125Mbps for more than 18 hours in a month. To reverse your statement: Why pretend that I have XMbps of data if I can't use it?

The rest of your statement makes a lot of sense, and the SLA is what's really missing. If that was addressed in addition to / in lieu of neutrality it would be a net positive.

You must understand that they can only sell you a 1gig pipe because they know not everyone will use it at the same time.

EVERY ISP in the world operates by oversubscribing their capacity. EVERY. ONE.

You want 1gig and removed data caps by law? Ok, get ready to be introduced to “boosted” bandwidth. You’ll get 1gig for the first 30 seconds of a connection then they will throttle you back. Already exists in some places including mine.

It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open?

> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.

You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.

It really $houldn't be that hard to under$tand.

It wouldn't though - at least for most major residential ISP's. They oversubscribe the connections, knowing full well not everybody will use the connection at the same time, and even when they are - they won't be using the maximum at once.

A minor example would be bringing a single 100Mbps connection into a small building and selling 12 x 10Mbps connections. It's one of they ways they can, yes, make a profit and also offer the bandwidth at reasonable costs.

Dedicated bandwidth is expensive. Think of your old-school T1's and your typical business class connection. You pay a lot for having that bandwidth reserved for your use alone. And majority of the time you aren't using it... and when you do use it, you use very little of it at once. Debating on HN doesn't take 1Gbps... so it goes unused. Residential users prefer lower costs vs. dedicated bandwidth.

> The data caps exist solely so they can squeeze people for money beyond what they actually need to maintain the network

Yes and no. You seem to be tip-toeing around the municipality-run ISP argument - which is a fair argument to have (although I'm concerned a city can maintain this network long-term and keep it as good as a for-profit company). There's no problem with an ISP charging customers more for the connection than the ISP pays to provide it. That's the incentive to run the network in the first place - let alone spend millions building it out.

I don't think data caps are bad so long as they don't impact "normal" use. Normal as being defined perhaps by the 95th percentile of use or something. The remaining users should be obligated to pay for their usage so that the ISP isn't forced to spread that costs onto other customers - that's simply not fair.

How? I have a 4K TV (and a couple of 1080), I work from home, my wife streams all day, and my torrents are always seeding, and have a gigabit line (with unlimited data).

I only average about 500GB a month, and my peak was 772GB.

I guess the only thing I don't do on a regular basis is play games.

Don't get me wrong, the caps are just rent seeking and also totally unfair (how come watching Comcast on Demand doesn't count against the cap but Netflix does, even though both come from servers on Comcast's network?), but it blows my mind that people can actually hit that 1TB cap.

Hats off to y'all.

But with tiered data plans, we paid for that anyway. I would understand if they offer this as a service we can enable to lower how much data we use, but making it mandatory is weird.

Non-mobile devices can generate a higher volume of data than a mobile device alone. You can go eat at an all-you-can-eat buffet, but they don't let you bring a wheelbarrow with

Sure, but with data caps, why do they care how I use my data? If I want to use more by using my laptop, what difference does it make to them?

The main legitimate use case I can imagine would be to spread out peaky utilization to minimize congestion and make the most efficient use of links. This might be achieved through differential metering or caps, where off-peak usage is unmetered or costs less. Giving everyone a 300GB limit doesn't do much good for the infrastructure if they're all blowing their 300GB watching Netflix during "prime time".

Of course, that would require an ISP that had genuine concerns about congestion and efficiency rather than blowing smoke about how "fairness" somehow demands that they squeeze more revenue out of any party within reach [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3rnfnm/leak_of_...

Using the service I have paid for is not abusing it, anymore than watching too much cable TV or making too many local calls is abuse of those services. If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us. And the top ISPs all have profits in the billion dollar range, so it's not like they're hurting for money and just can't fix the infrastructure. Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure.

That said, not once have I ever seen my speeds drop below what they're rated to be.