Your 4K Netflix Streaming Is On a Collision Course With Your ISP's Data Caps (vice.com) 163
Household bandwidth consumption is soaring thanks to video streaming, new data suggests, and American consumers are about to run face-first into broadband usage limits and overage fees that critics say are unnecessary and anti-competitive. Motherboard reports: Cisco's 2018 Visual Networking Index (VNI) -- an annual study that tracks overall internet bandwidth consumption to identify future trends -- predicts that global IP traffic is expected to reach 396 exabytes per month by 2022. Cisco's report claims that's more traffic than has crossed global networks throughout the entire history of the internet thus far. The majority of this data growth is video; Cisco found that 75 percent of global internet traffic was video last year, up from 63 percent just two years earlier. Cisco says this number could climb to 82 percent in 2022, with 22 percent of overall video consumption coming from bandwidth-intensive 4K streaming. The problem: As monthly household bandwidth consumption soars courtesy of 4K Netflix streaming and other new services, many broadband users are likely to run into usage caps and overage fees that jack up their monthly rates. The report mentions Comcast imposes a terabyte usage cap on all of its service areas except the Northeast, but users can pay an additional $50 per month to avoid such limits.
not worth it (Score:2)
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My 3rd world country ISP has no data caps. If it imposes them, I will swiftly move to the next ISP. If that one imposes data caps, I will move to the third, and the fourth. If all of them impose data caps, the anti-trust council will heavily fine them all.
Why is the USA different in this regard?
Re:not worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
>Why is the USA different in this regard?
Because there is no second, third, or fourth ISP for most people.
For example, at my house AT&T is the only ISP available.
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That's a problem. Is it intentional? As in "ISPs colluding"?
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I'm in Canada, a country even worse then the USA when it comes to this stuff. The problem is that basically there's the phone company and the cable company for competition. Seems that when there is 3 or less competitors in a market, it's not so much that they collude, just don't compete. ISP A raises its price, ISP B sees this and thinks, "good idea" and raises its price.
Infrastructure is expensive and the phone and cable companies don't share their wires.
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Here in BC, there doesn't seem to be any alternate ISP's that use Telus's or Shaw's infrastructure. Possibly they're just hiding and since I'm rural, I haven't come across them. Usually these conversations talk about Ontario and Quebec where there seems to be competition like TekSavvy or your provider.
I'm rural enough (hour out of Vancouver with good traffic) that my only choice (due to mountains and stuff) is LTE, and that only became available last year. So perhaps I just haven't been paying attention.
Eve
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Hmm, just gets in a loop asking for my postal code. Doesn't matter as the cable stops about 5 miles down the road and due to rocky ground and fish bearing creeks, will never come here.
Telus was supposed to string fibre here, but opted to just stick in a cell tower, which was needed but fibre sure would have been nice.
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Well, you can get very slow and crappy dial-up, satellite, etc. if they are available. :P
actually it's worth it even when viewing in 1080p (Score:1)
4K is worth it if your HD stream doesn't have 4:4:4 chroma subsampling [wikipedia.org].
Most HD and 4K streams use 4:2:2 chroma subsampling to save bandwidth. However, a 4K streams trivially down-samples to 4:4:4 chroma subsampling at HD resolution, and that means you'll see a shaper picture on a plain 1080p TV with a 4K stream.
Example: 4:2:2 vs 4:4:4 comparison [wikimedia.org]
p.s. You'll see an even bigger difference if your TV supports 10-bit color.
Re:not worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
Sports.
Nerds don't watch sports. It is not "stuff that matters".
Re:not worth it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sports.
Nerds don't watch sports. It is not "stuff that matters".
Esports :)
<3 CS:GO
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There are sports nerds.
That makes about as much sense as saying there are "dating nerds". Sports don't matter, and if you think they do, you are not a nerd.
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Not a nerd but am a Geek, I fully accept the value of participatory sports so that families can enjoy them and stay fit and healthy, spectator sports are shite though. Especially the super disgusting government subsidised sports advertising, what the hell, government tax dollars subsidising sports so the sports can sell advertising and pretend they are fucking heroes and super stars, ohh fuck off with that shit already and all to sell crap advertising, note their preferred advertising cigarettes, addictive
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That makes about as much sense as saying there are "dating nerds". Sports don't matter, and if you think they do, you are not a nerd.
Oooooo. It is unusual for you to display such an obvious blind spot.
The sports nerds don't play sports, they track stats, theory-craft, pontificate, predict, etc.
So yes, there really are sports nerds. I am not one of them, but I have met some before. Have a nice day kind sir. :)
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There are sports nerds. There are AV super-definition nerds. Hi-res content is an emerging market. Debunked moron, next.
Sports nerds tend to be people who actually get out there and play the game.
Enforce anti trust laws. (Score:1)
Break up Comcast vzw att etc
Thanks Net Neutrality! (Score:2, Insightful)
"But Net Neutrality is about treating all services equal, it should stop this!" some will say... ignoring these very same caps came in during the NN era.
It's quite simple. The likes of Comcast being unable to throttle Netflix/etc directly, opts to put an artificial cap on it's users... then makes sure that some of their services do not eat into that cap... like any kind of On Demand streaming via an X1 console. Sure, that traffic doesn't cross the public internet, but uses the exact same DOCSIS tech in your
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"But Net Neutrality is about treating all services equal, it should stop this!" some will say... ignoring these very same caps came in during the NN era.
Net neutrality has zero to do with actual data caps. All it means is that my 1TB of netflix should be treated the same as your 1TB of hand-typed emails, which also means that 'exemptions' for data from 'preferered partners' from the caps are not permitted.
Data is data -- it really is that easy.
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that [Comcast internal servers] traffic doesn't cross the public internet,
But THAT's the trick. Think of your normal (techie) home. You've got servers and storage. You've got infrastructure: cabling, routers, WiFi hubs, and a link to "outside." You've got clients, wired and wireless. You might have peak BANDWIDTH problems which you ignore, or continual problems you fix fix by upgrading equipment: speed, wifi, storage.
But that's your HOME. It's a single one-charge per item with slight depreciation. (And power charges and lightning strikes.) This is also Comcast, with lots
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then makes sure that some of their services do not eat into that cap
That sounds like the opposite of net neutrality.
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"It's quite simple. The likes of Comcast being unable to throttle Netflix/etc directly, opts to put an artificial cap on it's users... then makes sure that some of their services do not eat into that cap... like any kind of On Demand streaming via an X1 console. Sure, that traffic doesn't cross the public internet, but uses the exact same DOCSIS tech in your cable modem which is capped."
Usenet used to do this. They'd have a local cache of news groups so you didn't have thousands of users crossing the peeri
Re: Thanks Net Neutrality! (Score:1)
The article also fails to mention that the Comcast cap is not a hard cap, it just gives you a warning. You also have to break the cap for three consecutive billing cycles before you become subject to overage fees. It also doesn't mention that the 1gig service plan (where available) doesn't have a cap.
I have three heavy, non stop HD streamers in my house, and rarely exceed 400gig in a month. I haven't bothered with 4k content yet because frankly speaking there just isn't enough 4k native content out there to
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It's not 3 consecutive billing cycles. It's three billing cycles, period. They give you two 'courtesy months', after which they are gone.
But why believe me when I'm on Comcast and have data to support what I'm saying. Looking back over the last 10 (complete months), I only went over my cap twice:
Year Month Usage
2018/10 893
2018/9 1029 (oops, 5 gigs over, minus one courtesy month!)
2018/8 1003
2018/7 2089 (I knew I was going to go over on day 10, so went nuts on an offsite backup project... wh
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My story is almost identical. Right down to the offsite project and knowing that I was going to blow through the cap early in that month. You're right, there is no "consecutive" stipulation. There's also no good reason for caps other than greed and artificial, government-sanctioned monopolies.
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I'd been slowly trickling about 300gb/month for a year to remote endpoint, even asking a former employer if I could use their bandwidth at night to trickle it up. They said no.
Fast forward a bit, got a new job at a better company, they scoffed at the idea of refusing such a simple thing... and they are ok with it during daylight hours. I've now ~5 tb sitting between two data backup providers... just in case my home burns down... along with one of them.
Gigabit service does have TB cap too (Score:2)
I have Comcast Gigabit, in some states it is unlimited - but in 27 states it falls under the Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan [xfinity.com]
However if you really need more than a TB in a month, they also let you pay $50 more (per month) for unlimited data (how generous! [yes that was a sarcasm]].
I'm about at the same level as you, I use around 500GB/month, and currently do no 4K streaming. I'm not sure it would bring me over the 1TB limit anyway though as I don't watch a ton of stuff, probably a handful of things would
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It is generous, I'd have to pay 25 cents a MB if I go over my 250GB limit here in BC.
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I'm a what now? And I made no such statement, only pointing out these caps are a result of NN, and your mental gymnastics deliberately hide the reality of why these caps exist.
I never said they were, I said that caps were a result of it. Big diff.
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Separate only if you treat it as completely separate, and not the logical outcome of having one hand tied behind their back when trying to milk the consumer, so opting to use the other hand.
That smells fishy to me.
The ISPs will always try to milk the consumer as much as they can. They will do it with their right hand regardless of whether their left hand is tied. The price is what the market will support. Forcing them to actually give consumers the product they're claiming to sell won't make the market sup
Is your country willing to share? (Score:2)
I don't have any caps, because I'm not some Amerimutt 3rd worlder.
How many refugees from the U.S. broadband regime is your home country willing to absorb?
Happy I have Spectrum right now. (Score:2)
Spectrum ain't all that, but at least they've been pretty reliable in my area, charge a flat monthly rate, and don't have a cap :)
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Spectrum is required by agreement with the FTC when they purchased Brighthouse & TimeWarner not to implement any caps for seven(I think) years from the time of purchase. Which is great for my 90 a month for 300mb ultra which tests at 450mb, cus in the last 40 Days 00 Hour 17 Minutes I have downloaded 5.76 TiB and uploaded 122.47 GiB lots of 4k Netflix / Prime & downloading HD linux iso's....
Just upgraded to an unraid box in a poweredge with the 12 bay addon they are gonna hate me going forward im
We all know this. What're you going to do about it (Score:5, Insightful)
When data caps were introduced, we all just grumbled and tolerated it because there was nothing we could do.
When net neutrality was revoked, we all just grumbled and tolerated it because there was nothing we could do.
You have one provider for your house. What are you going to do?
Yes, you'll just grumble and then get the extra data plan that has 2TB cap instead of 1TB cap for $25 more. There will be also the $50 more 5TB cap plan that is such a deal and $75 10TB cap. But, a promotion will get you the 5TB plan for $20 more per month for 6 months.
We won't do anything about it but pay more.
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Invoke some innovation and competition.
Ask the one provider for more data.
Ask the provider to allow different ISP on their network so someone can provide the data services needed.
Wait and see if caps change, if new ISP enter the local telco market.
Find local government and tell them that the "one provider" is not giving the service needed. That different ISP that could provide the needed service are not allowed to enter the area.
That "one provider" was to give the co
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What are you going to do?
Develop a better video format [wikipedia.org] which can deliver the same image quality at a lower bitrate [streamingmedia.com]. The AV1 encoder is still slow but it's improving. Dav1d is a fast decoder [jbkempf.com] implementation.
Netflix sees AV1 as its primary next-gen video format [csimagazine.com].
Doubles usage capacity, but there's still a cap (Score:2)
Even can AV1 can halve the bitrate for a given distortion level relative to VP8 and AVC, that just makes Comcast's 1 GB cap behave as a 2 GB cap would have on the old codec. It doesn't eliminate the problem once the household's usage rises to the new cap, such as replacing full HD (1080p) displays with 4K displays and using the hand-me-downs to replace 480i or 720p displays. Nor does it help with legacy streaming receiver appliances that do not include an AV1 decoder in silicon.
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CORRECTION: 1000 GB cap and 2000 GB cap respectively.
It's Xfinity Mobile that has the harsher (single digit GB/mo) caps.
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Per movie. Per decade new syndication. Thats a lot of quality 4K content that cant be made smaller with new math again. People still want to consume "TV", so they cant be told to watch "less".
Bring in a lot more new competitive ISP who can support such use. Community broadband so more than one ISP can enter the area.
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No one ever said AV1 is the whole solution, but it's clearly part of the solution. And let's not forget that eventually there will be an AV2. There is a lot more to do in video coding development. There will come a point when there are no real gains to be had over the existing video formats and we'll stick with whatever the current state of the art is. But we're not there yet.
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When data caps were introduced
The local population here moved to make sure they werent introduced here. Franchise agreements put the power in the peoples hands so long as the people know where the power rests.
Sorry California, your move to make it a federal issue while never doing anything to pressure the locals just shows exactly how dumb you are.
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BUT, at the same time, we need to push local gov to install fiber as a utility. The provides real competition and increased speeds.
We cheered for the end of idiocy... (Score:2)
I had to listen to American nazis cheer
Nom the cheers you heard were from fans of freedom.
The freedom for ISP's to raise the bandwidth caps, because they have the freedom to control traffic for some forms of network traffic (like torrents).
Just how EXACTLY would network neutrality have done anything but made data caps even worse?
Please response using a sentence that uses the word "nazi" less that fourteen times.
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Internet provision, like most mass communication services, is a closed market, for obvious reasons. We could pry it open just a little by electing politicians that will regulate them as common carriers, since "voting with your wallet" is a lost cause. All pricing should be based on bandwidth, nothing else. Content is nobody's business.
That is what pricing is based on (Score:2)
All pricing should be based on bandwidth, nothing else. Content is nobody's business.
That is exactly what my Comcast bill is based on - I have gigabit Internet, I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. It doesn't matter where I go.
Now some phone companies are a little trickier, but not much - T-Mobile is also based on bandwidth choices I have made, and I can visit any site. But I also have the option to opt-in to a service that feeds me a max bit-rate feed for video. which does not count against my data ca
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Why do you feel that is not what pricing is based on today?
The fact that you have data caps. It's a bullshit quota. The price should be on bit rates, keep it simple. Regardless, we need to make the service into the common carrier. Nobody should even know what content is going through your pipe, only how fast you want it to go.
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So you don't mind your ISP blocking sites for political reasons, especially if your few choices are all blocking the same sites?
Then stop autoplaying full screen videos on start. (Score:1)
Then stop autoplaying full screen videos on start.
Good (Score:1)
Standard def for me (Score:1)
I must be getting old, because most content I watch is just fine in SD or sometimes HD for movies. Still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about 4K? Is it really worth it? Or just bragging rights for anal people who convince themselves its important.
Google (Score:3)
Given that my ISP is Google (actually, WebPass, which is now owned by Google Fiber): No, it's not.
(But I don't have a 4K streaming box, or any need, given I don't have a 4K TV given that you can't tell the difference at normal seating difference and I couldn't get a 4K plasma screen if I wanted to...)
No caps here (yet) (Score:2)
But my 1080P dumb-ass TV seems to be terribly out of date now.
Anybody know of any good 55-65 inch dumb 4K TVs ?
Oh, did I mention Inexpensive? I can always not allow WIFI access to a "smart" TV, but why pay for something that is spying on me, and obsolescent before it's out of the box?
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Where are you and what's inexpensive? There were a lot of decent sales 1 week ago... and for several months before then. But now, and for the next month, is probably the worst time of the year.
Wide Open West (Score:3)
.. has no caps.
This is why Net Neutrality worthless (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why, we need to push local govs to install fiber as utilities and/or count on starlink/1-web to destroy these monopolies.
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You left out "government set price controls" from the list of options.
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You left out "government set price controls" from the list of options.
Price controls worked for California with regard to energy production. They totally prevented Enron from.... oh... wait... it created Enron rather than prevented it...
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Well, what cause "Enron", assuming you mean the financial collapse of the company, was the fraud they did in other parts of the company. They made money off of California. If you meant it caused Enron to fleece the people in California, that didn't result from price controls. Enron profited from avoiding the price controls. For instance, they would wait until one of their bids for emergency electricity (which the state was required to have, but was not subject to price controls) had been accepted at an
There are still data-caps? (Score:5, Informative)
What 3rd world backwater....oh....it is the US....I see. In the modern world, you get somewhere between 100MBit and 1GBit symmetrical at a reasonable price these days, no caps.
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Yes, I know. I have friends in Germany. Still all "Neuland" with regards to the Internet.
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Ah well, somehow all the "old" powers are sleeping though the current tech revolution.
no problem (Score:2)
How about cell phone data? (Score:5, Informative)
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there is no such thing as unlimited, especially on cricket.
you are either stuck with 3 Mbps service with slower speeds after 22 GB with congestion or have more speed unless congestion after 0 GB (zero)
don't know about hotspot but maybe the 9 GB cap is on tethering only.
Just a matter of time (Score:2)
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That's a good thing, my doctor told me I needed more fiber.
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It's just a matter of time before Netflix, Google, Amazon, Vudu and all these other companies spin up a new ISP and send it out into the world to compete with Comcast.
Welcome back, Rip Van Winkle! I see you had a nice nap.
This already happened. Google created Google Fiber. They went out into the world and tried to compete. They gave it the fuck up in 2016.
Google doesn't have the tenacity to do anything that doesn't instantly have 1 billion users. Their expectations are completely divorced from reality, on all fronts, and running an ISP was the worst possible fit for Google attitudes.
But regardless of Google's cultural problem, they couldn't make it work because doin
4K content? (Score:1)
I'm sorry but you can keep your low-bandwidth video crap to yourself.
I mean seriously, how can you even watch anything that's been compressed to 4kbps?
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Me This Month (Score:2)
I'm 30% over my cap: ~1.2TB used on a 900GB cap...
This is mostly video streaming (much of which is 4k)- but both my fiance and I work from home as well and I do use quite a bit a bandwidth for that.
Luckily municipal fiber is rolling out here and my neighborhood is in the initial rollout! So - by January I could have bidirectional Gbit... but I don't know the price of the service just yet....
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I'm 30% over my cap: ~1.2TB used on a 900GB cap...
This is mostly video streaming (much of which is 4k)- but both my fiance and I work from home as well and I do use quite a bit a bandwidth for that.
Several years ago I convinced my wife to cancel our cable subscription. We used the money allocated to that to upgrade our internet to the fastest we could get at the time, and with unlimited internet. After all that we still pocketed $40.
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You are crying... but di you even know who grants your ISP its franchise agreement? Are you even aware? Why havent they been voted out? Why havent you made sure that they get voted out?
OTA (Score:2)
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Sometimes it's not that easy.
I live in London. I struggled to get any signal at all. The UK turned off analogue years ago. And DVB-T / T2 literally wouldn't get a signal. I gave up trying for the last year.
I only returned to it recently (the RPi DVB-T hat looked cool and I wanted to set up tvheadend) and then ended up with the following config:
- A huge loft aerial that gets nothing, even with a booster, despite being in between some of the UK's biggest transmitters - Crystal Palace and Hemel Hempstead.
Good, glad to hear it... (Score:4, Insightful)
F* you, and your 4k F*ing video streams.
I hope you have to pay through the nose for those 4k video streams. Until the baseline definition for broadband has been bumped up to 1Gigabit/sec, meaning a new definition of the minimum internet connection speed for sale in the US, allowing a few special snowflakes to be used as a rational for the outrageously expensive costs of internet connections that are common here in the US and at the same time leaving tens of millions of people with no access to 1Gigabit/sec connections, whatsoever, due to the criminal diversion of exorbitantly high monthly rates from the long-promised and never-delivered upgrades to our infrastructure, straight into the pockets of their F*in shareholders, is injustice in the extreme.
4k video on your F* phone!, give me a F*ing break, the human being has yet to be born, whose eyes can discern that kind of resolution difference on a 5" screen at 2 ft. Maybe it's worth it on a 60" screen from 12-15 ft away, but on a F*ing phone??????????
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I take it you’re unaware that 4K only needs about 25 Mbps to stream without buffering? Anyone with minimum “broadband” speed can stream it, so while I agree that work needs to be done to improve things and would even suggest that a rant is warranted, I don’t know that I agree with the specific focus of your rant.
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Yeah my rant was a bit over the top, i'll admit, and of course I realize my argumentation there was completely and utterly reactionary(slap!bad !iwbcman !bad!slap!), given that *anything* can and will be used as an excuse to squeeze the maximum amount of rent out of the public, while doing the least possible, pocketing the most possible.
Hell the ISP's deliberately fail to cancel your service(which they force on you by constantly
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Gawd, I am becoming a curmudgeon
Is it being a curmudgeon when it's for the right reasons? I'm not so sure... ;)
I've been putting off calling my ISP because they jacked up my rates just a few months after I upgraded my service to get rid of their data cap. Coworkers of mine are paying about 75% of what I'm paying for the exact same service from the exact same company in the exact same city. I had service from this same company about 10 years back that cost me about 30% of what I'm paying now. I had no data caps and had more than enough spe
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My broadband is 10-15mb range, would be nice to do that....
Plus I use the internet for much more than viewing one show at a time.
but 4k is a farce. TV/screen manufactures need a way to make more money, the 3d was a flop
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It's actually about both (as well as cost and availability), but I was responding specifically to the OP's rant about bandwidth, hence why I limited myself to that topic.
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Reading about 4k screens on 6" (or less!) phones has been *laughably* ridiculous, because even if I could reliably
What is " Data Caps "? (Score:2)
Asking from Europe.
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Use HEVC for 4k (Score:1)
All the HEVC content I find has 4k content at the same (or smaller) file size as the normal x264 1080p stuff. Why don't they just use a more efficient encoding method for 4k content and not raise the required bandwidth at all?
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I believe it's a combination of licensing, and lack of hardware support.
That said, I do believe Netflix routinely keeps different encodes of the same content for different clients, so if they don't already have HEVC versions, they will, once they figure it's worth the bother, and as more people acquire devices which can play it back, they'll be used automatically.
Last o' the month... (Score:2)
The last week of everything month is me closely watching consumption and yelling at the kids (and myself) to keep it under Comcast's 1TB. Under normal use we are just at the limit but occasionally we'd go over but 100gb without cutting back. Game downloads on Xbox seem to be another issue. Even if it's a physical copy the "patch" is still almost a full 100gig download. Sadly the only offerings are "no cap at double the price" or "enjoy your 1TB."
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