Consumer Complaints About Broadband Caps Are Soaring (dslreports.com) 148
Karl Bode, reporting for DSL Reports: Consumer complaints to the Federal Communications Commission about broadband data caps rose to 7,904 in the second half of 2015 from 863 in the first half, notes a new report by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency to obtain the data on complaints, which have spiked as a growing number of fixed-line broadband providers apply caps and overage fees to already pricey connections. According to the Journal, the FCC has received 10,000 consumer complaints about data caps since 2015.
We don't want data caps. (Score:2)
Re: We don't want data caps. (Score:2)
If everyone transferred the same amount of data every month that would make sense. In a case where I watch a couple HD movies a day I should pay more than my grandmother who checks her email once a day. I agree data caps are rediculous and are an effect of price competition between providers. Stop advertising pricing based on time (n per month) and start advertising pricing based on throughput. Consumers will adjust to the new model. There can be no "unlimited" plans period. They don't work. All you can eat
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Then how about offering different tiers? You want the basic stuff with limited bandwidth, pay less, you want the premium package with unlimited everything, pay more.
But that's not what ISPs want to sell. They want to sell you insane speeds with anemic data amounts, because it's cheaper to put high speed connections to your home than it is to ensure that their backbones can actually handle it if everyone actually used what they pay for.
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But that's not what ISPs want to sell. They want to sell you insane speeds with anemic data amounts, because it's cheaper to put high speed connections to your home than it is to ensure that their backbones can actually handle it if everyone actually used what they pay for.
If the premium package is expensive enough, they can use the money to upgrade the backbones, and still have more profit at the end of the day.
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If the premium package is expensive enough, they can use the money to upgrade the backbones,
Ah ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! Aren't they so cute when they're naive?
If they spend the money on the backbone, then how will they afford a new yacht, hookers, and blow?
Re: We don't want data caps. (Score:1)
Re: We don't want data caps. (Score:5, Informative)
There are better ways of doing it than caps. There are a ton of QOS type tools that work much better than caps. Probably one of the best is where there are different buckets. For instance you get full bandwidth for the first 10G/day, after that it is throttle at halfspeed for the next 10G. You can also give free data after hours just like they used to for cellphones where it's cheaper at night. If instead of trying to gouge customers at the top with overage charges and trying to gouge customers at the bottom by selling them a high speed connection to check their email, companies actually looked at their customer base and came up with plans that were optimized for their customers instead of optimized for profit then you could make virtually everyone happy. Most of the torrent people know that they are heavy users and are smart enough to schedule downloads for overnight hours if the rules are clear. Yes, having posted limits is more complicated than just saying "unlimited" but there is really no such thing as "unlimited". Unlimited phone calls and texting only works because a person has to physically sit there and do it so it sets an artificial limit. It would be easy to have unlimited internet if the person had to be sitting in front of their computer to do it but when computers are on 24/7 then you need some sort of policy to make it fair for both heavy and light users.
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Yes there is such a thing as "unlimited".
Unlimited transfer per day = [line-speed-mbps] * 60 * 60 * 24
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But that doesn't give a reasonable limit. Even a 10 Mbit connection going fill throttle could transfer over 3 terabytes in a month. 10 Mbit is probably about as slow as you want if you want to be able to stream an HD movie. Most people want faster connections like 30 Mbit or 100 Mbit, and those would yield 9 and 30 terabytes if you used them to their full potential. This is why you need some other limit. If you only limit on line speed, then most people would only be able to afford 1 Mbit or less and they w
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Setting aside for a moment the fact that most people aren't going to transfer anywhere near that much data, let's look at how data centers do things. Right now I'm leasing a dedicated server on a 100Mbit connection. It's a shared connection, so I can't always get the full bandwidth, but 99%+ of the time I can. I have an SLA, no caps and no filtering on the se
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If you wanted to get away with a higher contention ratio, you would have to reduce peak usage. But even with caps, almost everybody will use their broadband connection at the same time, the traffic peak, and "save" bandwidth when everybody else is also less interested in using their broadband connection. Unfortunately bandwidth cannot be saved. You can use it or not, but what you do has no effect on the bandwidth which is available tomorrow. Caps for saving bandwidth are like closing the window blinds to save sunlight.
I agree that monthly caps are stupid but "peak data" caps/throttles would have an effect on capacity. ISPs should be encouraging customers to download large files during offpeak times. This is where "zero rating" should be used. ISPs should be giving away custom torrent clients that don't count towards your data usage because they only download when there is excess capacity.
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I think some ISPs use this method [youtube.com] to calculate buckets.
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It would be better if they sold data by the GB, rather than a fixed amount by the month. I agree that people who use more data should pay more, but once you buy a GB of data there should not be a time limit on when you can use it.
With the "by the month" model, the provider gets the breakage at the end of the month -- if you buy 10GB and only use 8GB, then you've paid for 2GB that you have used. However, if you go over the 10GB, then you pay for everything you use.
A fairer model is the electric or gas compan
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The issue here is: how much more? In practice, that extra bandwidth doesn't cost the ISP very much. Most of their costs are fixed infrastructure-related cost, that don't very very much if more bandwidth is consumed.
If bandwidth costs are variable, then time of use should also be taken into account. Using bandwidth in the middle of the night, when most people are n
Re: We don't want data caps. (Score:5, Interesting)
"There can be no "unlimited" plans period. They don't work. All you can eat may work for Golden Corral, not so much for an ISP."
You mean, they can't work over there in the Corporatist States of America, right? Because it clearly works here in Sweden, with plenty of ISP's competing. Right now, it's saturday prime time, and I still get my full capacity, despite living in a neighbourhood where my ISP alone has over 400 households as customers, and 80 in my house alone.
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From 2007:
Me: "So what's your usage cap?"
Bredbandsbolaget tech guy on phone: "'Usage cap?' Is that some kind of hat?"
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I see that you, in your attempt to set up a strawman, conveniently edited out the part where I specified that I was talking about my neighbourhood and the house my apartment is in.
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In the U.S. it always seems to be an excuse for price-gouging, though
I live in communist Europe, and I get 100/33 with no data caps.
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But the economics are quite different now than they were a few years ago.
Hosting that used to cost $10,000 a month because of transfers can now be had for less than $100 or $200.
We're talking about residential broadband here, and the incumbent Cable TV firms that are providing that badly want to protect their
expensive traditional Cable TV service which many people don't see as necessary anymore.
We want to stream what we
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We don't want data caps because they don't make any sense. There's no shortage of bytes, they don't cost anything. The scarce resource is not bytes but bandwidth. Limits on data, whether with caps or "overage fees", are a very crude and ineffective method of allocating available bandwidth.
Sell bandwidth directly, then allocate it based on current network availability. Use a modifier based on recent usage of an individual subscriber as a multiplier on current bandwidth allowed for short bursts for low us
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For exactly the same reason as these data caps exist: ISPs vastly oversell their resources. And it ain't the first time, remember when dialup was the norm and you could barely ever reach your ISP because he though 100 lines is enough for a million customers, since, well, why would anyone ever want to be online 24/7?
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Data caps do nothing to stop congestion as everybody is free to download at full speed up until their cap during which time congestion reigns.
This could also be completely mitigated by restricting speeds to a manageable level. That's your overselling of resources.
data caps don't do anything to resolve that; they just make money for the ISP.
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Data caps do nothing to stop congestion as everybody is free to download at full speed up until their cap during which time congestion reigns.
That's not true. I have 1GB mobile cap, and I'm careful to ration it throughout the month. I'm not going to blow the whole cap on the first day, and then get nothing for the rest of it. And they're not getting any more money. I chose the cheapest deal I could find, that's why the cap is so low.
This could also be completely mitigated by restricting speeds to a manageable level. That's your overselling of resources.
At rather have a cap + high speeds than effectively the same cap at a lower speed.
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"But investment costs money!" yes it does. Now ask yourself why these ISPs are blocking any other providers from moving into their areas? Because they don't want the competition a
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Not a Big Truck (Score:3, Funny)
the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
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Doesn't QoS violate net neutrality? I mean it would be favoring one traffic of a service over another.
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WHAT'S WRONG WITH CAPS? (Score:5, Funny)
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There is exactly two things that are wrong with them.
First, the psychological one. Getting a 100mbit link and a data cap of 10GB is like selling you a Ferrari but you only get 2 gallons of gas per month. What good is the Ferrari then? It's useless. Yes, it looks pretty and your friends will surely admire it and how fast it goes for the half mile you actually can drive, but that wears off quickly. You don't get more out of it than you got from your old Lada. Which is, incidentally, why people kept dialup for
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As far as I know it's still considered cruel&unusual punishment to suffocate politicians with cheesecake.
That's because companies are stupid about it (Score:5, Interesting)
Most consumers can deal with a data cap fine... if it is reasonable. It turns out most people are reasonable Internet users: They use it to get what they want, and leave it idle otherwise so that others can share. It is only some people who really abuse it (like torrent heads who download any and everything just to have it) that would complain about any cap, no matter what it is.
However rather than use it as a tool to help network quality, ISPs get greedy and try to use it to milk extra money from consumers. That means they want to set the cop too low on purpose, so people overrun it and have to pay more.
Like I have no issue with my data cap on Cox. For one, it is quite reasonable, 2TB. That's a lot of usage, even with a high speed line. So the chances of me hitting it are very low, even if I have a month where I'm using a ton of data for whatever reason (like restoring from an online backup or something). Also it is a soft cap. If I hit it they don't shut me off, just call me and pester me (or maybe not even that if it isn't much over, I don't know I've never hit it). Only if there are repeated problems would they act.
Now compare that to my boss who's on Comcast and ends up hitting his cap every month. Part of that is because he has a family whereas I'm single but more is because it is a 300GB cap. Our line speeds are the same (or near enough) but Comcast gives 15%ish of the bandwidth and it is a hard cap, you go over you pay a ludicrous amount for more. He's really annoyed, and I would be too in that situation.
It seems when they start charging money for it, they just can't help but get greedy and stupid.
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Yes and no (Score:2)
Technically, I can get Century Link but they aren't really competition. Cox offers speeds ranging from 15/2mbps to 300/30mbps. Century Link only goes to 6mb/768k which is really not at all enough for the Interwebs these days. They could stop being retards and roll out fibre, of course, but they won't because they are a phone company and thus have a terminal case of the stupids. Also in theory there are CLECs at Century Link but I'm not sure the status these days and they can't give any higher speeds. Wirele
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My pet peeve is services that have the same cap across all their different service levels... 5Mbps or 500Mbps having the same cap is absurd, and eliminates any real benefit to the higher-priced plan.
The big problem is landline internet service providers want it both ways... They want to sell you SPEED, and then sell you QUANTITY. Can you imagine your water utility charging you more money for 40PSI service instead of th
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Well yes and no with bandwidth cost. The marginal cost, like per bit routed is minimal to none. However the infrastructure isn't free and the more people want to use, the more of it you need. That's where sharing and playing nice have to come in. You can't just say "Well get more capacity," because not only does that cost money, but there are limits you start to reach in terms of how much traffic a router can pass and so on. It is a lot for the really big ones, but still limited (900tbit/sec total capacity
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Citation needed on that peak worldwide number. Also that single router is the Cisco CRS-X, when outfitted with maximum number (72) of 16-slot shelves fully populated with line cards and represents the maximum aggregate switching capacity of the system. Each shelf being an 84-inch rack and costing 6-7 figures.
Seriously, big bandwidth costs big money and requires high end ASICs. If it actually interests you, spend a bit of time looking in to it (it is really cool, I love high end networking gear). If not no b
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Citation needed on that peak worldwide number.
I guess you missed many of those /. posts about peak bandwidth over the years. Even if not "world wide", Netflix(~35%) and Youtube(~20%) make up 50% of peak USA internet usage and Netflix has claimed during FreeBSD conferences that they are near the 10Tb/s mark. It doesn't take much to figure out the USA's peak bandwidth is below 100Tb/s, or was several years back when this data was valid.
I do agree that those network devices are expensive, but when you're making $3bil+/month in revenue from the services
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The end-user connection equipment has some costs, but that's up-front, and doesn't change with maximum or minimum usage.
Absolutely not. A coax cable has over 1GHz of bandwidth, and that's only shared within a neighborhood these days, as nearly all have fiber-optic distributi
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15mbps UP and 2mbps DOWN? Are you sure it's not the other way around? In any case, if you can have 15mbps down at 80$/month isn't there slower, cheaper options? 15mbps down is excessive for anything but multiple HD video streaming.
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...if you can have 15mbps down at 80$/month isn't there slower, cheaper options? 15mbps down is excessive for anything but multiple HD video streaming.
100/100 Mbps is the slowest option offered by my ISP, and costs us about US$45/month. I could upgrade to 350/350 or 500/500, but with just my wife and me that seems a bit excessive.
Caps are too low, unreasonable and unnecessary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, the simple fact is us consumers are being abused. The caps are intentionally too low, because they have no purpose other than to squeeze out more revenue. It's rent seeking. The sick part is we built their tenements for them. We gave the ISPs billions in tax subsidies to build out better infrastructure, and they didn't. Rather, they kept the subsidies AND retained ownership of the infrastructure. I don't actually give a shit how we solve it, but less regulation is not the solution in this case. Unlike what seems like everyone sometimes, I don't have an ideological position for more or less regulation. Some regulation helps and some hurts. It's not all bad, and it's not all good. But, it's clear that the broadband industry needs more regulation. Here's my position: as long as low regulation and deregulation is working for all of us, great. But, when an industry is clearly abusing its consumers and obviously has no intention or incentive to change, it's time to bring out the big regulatory hammer. I guess we no longer have a big hammer. The only regulation that seems to pass anymore is regulatory capture benefiting the entrenched players.
We need out legislature to work for us. Look at the democratic race. It basically centers around the fact that even if the Bernie has more popular support, the party will just give the super delegates to Hillary. They're fucking us. They are fucking us harder than the ISPs. And, we still don't vote third party. No, that would be throwing your vote away. It's like high school. If you don't vote for the most popular candidate for student council, it's because you're a loser. If you don't vote for a major party, it's throwing your vote away, because you picked a loser. Jesus, this country is fucking retarded.
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I mostly agree with you but the simple problem with regulation is that regulators and politicians can be bought by lobbyists. I know for a fact that if Google fiber came through my area, my cable internet prices would drop by $20/month and they would lift the data caps, because Google fiber is $80(?) a month for gigabit with no data cap. What we really need is mandated competition in all cities, and then force those ISPs to offer same price service to the surrounding suburbs. Unfortunately, if you choose
The problem with your line of reasoning (Score:2)
I don't know what to say to that. I've never found a way to counter folks that say that. Part of the problem is these folks listen to right wing talk radio that gives them talking points to reinforce their viewpoint. They can out maneuver most folks in a debate because they
this is why (Score:4, Informative)
If I had to pay for my bandwidth, I figure our bill would be at $600-$800 a month. Maybe less now that UVerse was bumped up. I forgot to install bandwidthD, and AT&T's page just says "your unlimited so we don't know" on my current usage lol.
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Not all residential zones can get business class (Score:2)
You're fortunate. Some people live in areas where business class connections are available only to subscribers physically located in a business-zoned part of the city.
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The business is being run out of a business that the city or county considers to be in a residential zone.
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And where is that?
twilight zone (Score:1)
Over here in Europe, the caps on broadband/DSL/fiber/cable/whathaveyou have been gone for ages. There.Are.No.Caps. And the world didn't end on account of that as we have indeed fair prices for fair service. Let me say it again: unlimited internet usage.
Meanwhile in the US it seems like the stoneage of 1990s metered connections. Honestly, I don't understand how you can put up with being abused by the telecoms so badly.
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Or c) see if an employer in Great Britain or Ireland will sponsor your work visa.
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Ooh, gotta love that butthurt.
(Come to the Dark Side... We have bandwidth.)
A bit of math. (Score:2)
Okay, my mom pays for a 75 MBit connection a month.
But there's, ostensibly, a 300 Gig cap a month.
If a cablemodem were run at maximum throughput for that month, it'd pull down approximately 23 terabytes.
The cap is, essentially, 1.2% of that.
Now, nobody is saying that a consumer connection should deliver that full 23 terabytes month in and month out. While bandwidth is (relatively) cheap, it sure as hell isn't THAT cheap, and it's understandable that various broadband companies simply couldn't handle that s
I read somewhere (Score:3)
I don't know about the rest of
When we have a service that has so much demonstrated value and that virtually everybody wants and that costs only $7/mo to provide you'd think we'd make it a public utility. Of course, everytime we suggest that it gets shouted down with "Do whatever you want just not with _my_ money!"...
A bigger issue with more "cloud" computing? (Score:2)
I think Comcast doesn't realize the data cap issue could be MUCH more serious than they thought.
It may be more than just a streaming video problem from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and so on. The likes of Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are pushing for more and more operations "though the cloud," and that could really use up a lot of data over the Internet in the near future.
I believe that the downfall of data caps won't be a lawsuit from Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, but from Apple, Google and Micro
Competition (Score:2)
I think the bigger issue is a lack of significant competition. For example, look at cities where Google Fiber is even just a rumor. All the sudden, the incumbents start offering faster connections with greater bandwidth and for less money than they do in other locales. What we really need to do is to make it easier for Google and others to expand into more cities.
One of the most significant barriers to entry is that the telco and cable providers have exclusive use of the "low voltage" part of the pole.
Why do people buy crippled plans? (Score:2)
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While I realise some customers in the USA may have only one choice of ISP
That assumption is why you don't understand. It's not some, it's most. Here's an excerpt from a report from the US Department of Commerce:
[...] only 37 percent of the population had a choice of two or more providers at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater;only 9 percent had three or more choices.
Source. [doc.gov]
Another article [arstechnica.com] says basically the same thing, coming from the FCC.
And even when customers DO have a choice, I wonder how often one of them would offer 'Unlimited' when its competitor doesn't.
Customer dissatisfaction but little/no competition (Score:2)
The C-level executives in any large company are disconnected from the customers who buy/use their products, being concerned with the "high level" views. But for most of those companies, they know that they have some competitors in the marketplace and will lose market share to those competitors if they fail to deliver.
In the case of domestic US ISPs, decades of almost completely unregulated consolidation have put pretty much the whole country in a situation where each geographical area has a single large inc
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People? Really? Did you do a survey, or what led you to that conclusion?
The complaints logged with the FCC would rather tell me that "people" prefer to get what they pay for.
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And at what point does getting what you pay for somehow NOT equal consistency?
Re: no surprise (Score:2)
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Say, how fast is your line allegedly according to your provider? And how much thereof do you really get?
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Officially I pay for a 2mbit ADSL connection and I get a 448/96 kbit connection. Consistently, sure, but that doesn't mean I'm happy.
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No. Fuck no. People, you need to read what's there and not what you want to read into it. Same goes for contracts.
He said "Yes we CAN". CAN. Being able to.
Nobody ever said anything about actually DOING something.
Re:no surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
They (we) don't want unlimited bandwidth. They want to use the bandwidth for as long as they want (and paid for), not some ridiculously short time and then get charged again for the bandwidth that they already paid for. For example, 50Mbps is good for 16TB/month, not 200GB/month. A broadband connection that's capped at 200GB is a burstable 0.6Mbps connection, not a 50Mbps connection.
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Exactly.... Imagine of cars were sold this way. Advertised as: Can go from 1 to 60mph in 6 seconds; In the fine print: the engine is limited how long it can operate a speed above 25 Mph.... the limit is 5 minutes per day.
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Nonsense, we're paying for a particular bandwidth, only that they don't actually want us to use it very much.
Re:no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
When you say "Freeloaders" do you mean the ISPs? They took government money to provide fast service, and then didn't build out, so that seems a charitable term to use for them.