Data Caps On AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile Will Return June 30 (pcworld.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Major Internet service providers are scheduled to end their quarantine benefits soon, once again subjecting Americans to data caps and removing protections if they are unable to pay their bills. The FCC's Keep Americans Connected Pledge is set to expire on June 30. Companies initially agreed to the pledge and rushed to add benefits. ISPs like CenturyLink, T-Mobile, Verizon, and many others said they would not discontinue service or charge late fees for those unable to pay because of the coronavirus. They also agreed to open their Wi-Fi access points for free. So far, the FCC has not publicly said that it would extend the pledge.
In some ways, ISPs face the same decision as governors in Florida and Texas: end their benefits, which encouraged users to stay home, or continue them for an indeterminate period of time. This could be the last weekend of unlimited data for Comcast Xfinity subscribers and other major ISPs. For many of those who are out of work, ISPs could begin demanding payment for outstanding broadband bills on June 30. Consumers who have been riding out the quarantine by streaming may also find that their unlimited data expires June 30. On that day AT&T, Comcast Xfinity, Mediacom, and T-Mobile are scheduled to resume normal service, and once again impose data caps. Some ISPs, like Cox, have already terminated some benefits, as its temporary unlimited data program expired in May.
In some ways, ISPs face the same decision as governors in Florida and Texas: end their benefits, which encouraged users to stay home, or continue them for an indeterminate period of time. This could be the last weekend of unlimited data for Comcast Xfinity subscribers and other major ISPs. For many of those who are out of work, ISPs could begin demanding payment for outstanding broadband bills on June 30. Consumers who have been riding out the quarantine by streaming may also find that their unlimited data expires June 30. On that day AT&T, Comcast Xfinity, Mediacom, and T-Mobile are scheduled to resume normal service, and once again impose data caps. Some ISPs, like Cox, have already terminated some benefits, as its temporary unlimited data program expired in May.
All they did was show (Score:1, Troll)
that they were always full of shit with the caps. Fuck them and fuck the FCC/FTC for never doing their jobs. Oh, and Ajit Pai should be executed.
Re: (Score:3)
^^^ citation needed
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yo RetardHD, why do you keep rejecting stories about the MASSIVE CENSORSHIP campaign that is ongoing TODAY?
^^^ citation needed
I don't know of any rejections, but I can't find anything in the firehose. The story ought to be this from yesterday (some peoples favorite white nationalists got their accounts removed from youtube) https://techcrunch.com/2020/06... [techcrunch.com]
GP is probably talking about Reddit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Eh, the Chapo podcast itself is not so bad, but the subreddit was a flaming dumpster fire full of idiots who took the sarcasm/jokes on the podcast literally. So nothing of value was really lost.
Re:All they did was show (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and Ajit Pai should be executed.
I was right there cheering with you until this. He's a douche, and he needs to go. But execution? You need help.
Re: (Score:3)
But execution? You need help
He means in the programming sense; he's hoping for a General Protection Fault in Pai.exe.
Actually of course, no he's not. Let's just chalk it up to bravado and over-emotionalism.
OTOH, everything's been so sanitized and protected now-a-days that I don't think he truly knows what he's saying. And I think that goes for whole a LOT of people now-a-days. And then of course there's attention creep -- if you don't get more and more extreme you won't get your point across. It's almost like attention- and a
Data caps have never been anything but thievery (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people reading their email, twatting their tweets and booking their faces probably don't ever come near any cap. Maybe not even on mobile.
If the caps were legitimate, users should be refunded or credited for not hitting the caps.
Yeah, but what are ya gonna do? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
[data use story clipped]
That story isn't anything even remotely close to a justification for data caps. That story is a great example of an ISP lying about its capacity, and trying to sell something it can't deliver. It's a great story of why ISP's need to keep their networks up to date so they can fulfill their advertising.
If they can't support a continuous 100mb/s (for example), then they shouldn't emphasize a 100mb/s connection when selling their service. There should be some truth in advertising. Instea
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So you would be fine if they instead only sold you a 10Mbit line and said "that is it, suck it"?
If that's all they could sustain, then yes. Maybe watching their competition put them out of business would light a fire under them to expand their network so their actual offerings matched their advertising. They should not be allowed to sell what they can't deliver.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Data caps have never been anything but thievery (Score:5, Insightful)
Data caps have a legitimate basis. An OC3 line costs about $10k/mo for 148 Mbps capacity 24/7.
No. OC3s were SONET which required inherently complex and expensive equipment, and is ancient history at this point.. Metro Ethernet protocols are much cheaper. noone uses OC-x anymore. A piece of dark fiber costs about $1000 a month, after applying DWDM mux that piece of fiber can support 40 channels at 100 GHz spacing, which is more than 200 Gigabits channel capacity... Some carriers are just trying to be lazy and not upgrade their networks Or not bother to even install fiber, trying to stretch low-capacity legacy copper that was put in 30 years ago, then "solve" problems on their customers' backs by pretending there is false scarcity.
Re: (Score:2)
30 years ago? The main copper wires to my house from AT&T are original from 1954! My house had the original call box, still live, when I bought my house (then I promptly paid to have the entire house rewired from scratch).
Re: Data caps have never been anything but thiever (Score:3)
piece of dark fiber costs about $1000 a month
Dark fiber costs vary based on the length of the fiber, and while $1k per month may eventually pay for the cost of initial buildout, it doesn't pay to fix it when it gets cut or damaged. It'll easily cost several thousand per hour to splice. And that's just the pair of strands, you have to light it up yourself and if it's more than 5-10km you're putting in repeaters too. You'll pay several thousand bucks just for the optics (at wholesale price, not retail) and the transport gear starts in the yens of thousa
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Data caps have never been anything but thievery (Score:5, Informative)
Data caps have a legitimate basis. An OC3 line costs about $10k/mo for 148 Mbps capacity 24/7. Meaning It costs about $206/TB
You do realize this is 2020 right? OC3 lines are ancient history. Everything today is metro ethernet. I have full DIA's to many of my facilities running 10 gigabit for less than $3K a month.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the entire reason they exist (Score:5, Interesting)
> Most people reading their email, twatting their tweets and booking their faces probably don't ever come near any cap.
Right. Most people are receiving a packet maybe 0.1% of the time. 99.9% of the time, your 100 Mbps connection is sitting idle and the bandwidth is available for your neighbors. If you use 6 GB/day, your AVERAGE usage is 0.5 Mbps.
As an ISP, with a 100 Mbps line to an area, you can very easily provide 30Mbps service to 100 typical customers. They each download a web page in 200 milliseconds, read it for 60 seconds, download another in 150ms, read it for 100 seconds, put their phone down for 20 minutes ...
On a high speed line, a day each customer may be receiving packets for a total of 10-100 seconds. The faster the connection each customer has, the less often they are actually using it. So 100Mbps port can handle 100 typical customers easily. Which means the cost of 100bps of infrastructure and backhaul is shared between 100 customers.
Then out of those 100, you have the two guys who torrent all day while streaming HD Netflix on a TV they aren't even watching. Those two guys fuck it all up. They use more bandwidth than 100 customers on Facebook and Gmail. So you have a choice:
A. Charge the two guys who use 100 times as much more, so they pay their fair share
B. Charge everybody twice as much
Those were the two options. I third option became popular a few years ago:
C. The traffic from normal users takes priority over the traffic from the two guys torrenting all day. They can torrent as much as they want, but their torrents may slow down in the evening when all their neighbors want to check Facebook.
Those are the options. "Caps", both the original, actual cap which stopped you after you used your share and the newer "cap" which simply prioritizes people who don't use way more than their fair share, are for the same purpose. The are ways to avoid having the normal customers, the Facebook and Twitter and Gmail users, pay the cost of those with extremely high usage.
What ISPs haven't done well is communicating the price plans to customers. The old "you buy X GB and you are cut off after that amount" was simpler and more clear. It was also wasteful because it left unused capacity that somebody would want to use. Reprioritizing the "greedy" users, or "heavy users", allows them to use more without impacting the service to normal users.
If anybody has a better idea for how to structure it, I'd be interested to hear any ideas.
Any ideas that start with the assumption that the laws of physics don't exist, bandwidth is unlimited, and fiber runs itself for free - don't bother. Just go look at how many billions of dollars the ISPs and mobile operators spend each year on upgrades and ask yourself why they are wasting hundreds of billions on upgrades when they could instead just snap their fingers amd have bandwidth appear by magic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Testing by Glasawire of TikTok and Instagram says "you should be able to watch TikTok for about 20 hours before going over 1GB of data" (with resolution set to "normal"). Android Authority reports similar usage.
Netflix is 3GB / hour for 1080p, 7GB/ hour for 4K.
4K Netflix uses data 140X faster than TikTok, plus Netflix keeps running when people walk away - people have Netflix on in the background while they do housework or whatever. They don't do that TikTok. That's why Netflix accounts for about 85% of e
Re: That's the entire reason they exist (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Okay.
My point is that with 100 users, roughly two of them will use as much bandwidth as the other 98. That is, they'll use 25X the average. It doesn't matter exactly how. Leaving Netflix running at 4K all day is one way to do it. Being a torrent feign is another way.
With 25X as much usage, they cost maybe 10X more.
So, do you charge them 10X more, or do you charge 98% people twice as much as their share?
Or, do you say those two "extra heavy users" get to use the all the bandwidth they want, but at a pri
Re: That's the entire reason they exist (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would agree option three makes the most sense.
What to call such a plan is apparently a problem. A lot of people here aren't happy with it being called "unlimited".
Re: (Score:3)
No, data caps are purely about profit. That's it.
If they really needed data caps, all the ISPs would be willing to work on a proper metering system with standards on how the data transferred is measured. The ISP should be willing to install a sealed calibrated meter in your house that tells you how much data you use by looking at it, similar to your gas, electricity and water meters which you pay for by the unit. There would be standards and the meters will be provided to all subscribers with calibration an
Caps are bullshit (Score:2)
They are nothing but a free way for ISPs to bring is some extra cash every month. It should be illegal to offer me an unlimited pipe, and then charge me more or slow me down if I use it too much.
Ajit Pai and his FCC cronies need to all be ousted along with politicians who put them in charge.
Great timing, assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
Right when COVID19 cases are soaring, again.
Haven't you heard, we're back to normal (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't buy into that mentality. There is no such a thing as a ruling class that's immune to COVID19. They stand to lose their life, just as much as you and I do.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The current ruling class would very much appreciate it if you'd stop acting otherwise. As it is they stand to lose big in November if the economy doesn't pick up. So they'll pry this economy open with your cold, dead hands if that's what it takes.
I hate to break it to you, but the ruling class always wins big in November.
Verizon gave me 15GB once (Score:2)
Literally once.
Can't believe that ATT actually did better.
American Telcos are without exception criminal conspiracies against The People. Burn them all.
Screw U 2 (Score:2)
Now we know you (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any proof of this?
My connection was rock solid for the past 10 years.
But these last few months I have seen so much unstable, speed fluctuations, service interruptions etc.
Maybe it's a coincidence and I only have 1 data point. But it's still my experience. Although my friends who I game with online many times a week have been seeing interruptions as well that they normally never had in the past years.
They have been lagging and dropping from our games pretty much every week and have to reconnect
Comcast doubles rates this month as demand rises. (Score:2)
Last month I had some connection problems I called into comcast about, and eventually found my way to their retention center where I was told I could raise my speed from 35/10 (d/u) to 300/15 for the same price with a 2 year contract. However, I should hold off a month and take advantage of a 1 month free service, and then call in to change the service. I followed the sale person's calls only to discover that the 300/15 plan now will run over twice what I am paying now, but does offer 1 month free at the