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.

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.

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

Not true, if you have a data cap. Hence why data caps theoretically could serve a purpose. Again though, I'm not defending them.

> 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.

I agree. My point however is that complaining about data caps is besides the point entirely. We're lacking an SLA, we're lacking any way to ensure that we are getting what we're paying for.

Data caps provide no real benefit to the idea that they sell of reducing network congestion. The only way they could is to have a very aggressive data cap, resulting in a large X% of your users not even having internet access due to being capped. This of course, is basically impossible, as people would flip out.

By focusing on data caps we are, in my opinion, focusing on the red herring. Rather than getting what we're paying for on bandwidth, we're focusing on how much total data we can download.

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.

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.

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.

> 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"?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

This is what really gets me. I expected this sort of situation to come about when some jackass used up 1 petabyte of bandwidth on his unlimited plan, but 2 gigabytes?

To me, that's like offering unlimited coffee refills, but stopping customers after the second cup, with some excuse that there has to be some limits to "unlimited".

I think he's tying speed and data more closely than is justifiable for most people.

Many people (I'd guess maybe even most) want higher speeds not in order to use more data. They want it in order to use the same data as they now use but with less waiting.

Comcast just upped me from 220 mbps to 500, for example. That is not going to have much affect on my data usage. It will just mean that when, for example, I decide to play an old MMORPG that I haven't played in a long time I won't have to wait as long to download all the patches I missed. It won't mean that I'll play more games.

Same story when a year ago they upped me from 120 to 220. And a year before that when it went from 90 to 120.

Okay, so the ISP expects that people won't use what they're sold. That sounds like their problem and their bad planning.

Then you haven't been paying attention[1]. I live in one of these areas, and have already been getting 1-2 robocalls a day this month about my data usage. They're calling it a "trial", but the costs are very real, and it's all in place to go national when people here don't complain enough. If I go over in the next two months, I will start getting hit with that charge.

[1] https://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-...

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.

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.