Data caps would be fine if they weren’t colluding a monopoly.
Then everyone could freely switch to providers offering unlimited.
The pandemic exposed the lie that ISPs need to cap data because of infrastructure limitations. We all went to WFH with no issues on the infrastructure.
Ironically, he picked a metaphor that doesn’t support his point at all
If you go to a Starbucks, it’s like you’re buying a set amount of data. You don’t expect unlimited refills, because that’s not how the transaction works - you buy the coffee by volume. It’s yours with no strings attached
If you go to a restaurant, you buy access to coffee. I do expect unlimited coffee, I would be livid if they charged by the cup. However, you do not get to expect to take any coffee with you - you’re using their “infrastructure” to hold your coffee, and you don’t get to walk out with the cup. You don’t get to share it with the restaurant or the table - you’re burying a personal “subscription” to coffee for the duration of your stay
Coffee, like data, is effectively free at a restaurant. They must pay for the infrastructure, but after that each additional pot only costs a few cents. They must make at least 1 pot a day, and a human can’t safely drink more than a couple pots in a day (which is an obscene amount only the heaviest caffeine addicts could tolerate). You get it one small cup at a time, if you bought a second cup you could double the rate of coffee delivery… They might even just give it to you for free, because it costs them so little and they want you to come back
You purchase access to coffee for a time, or you purchase coffee by volume. They shouldn’t be allowed to charge for both - maybe if you’ve drank 14 cups and others want coffee, they should be given priority during lunch rush as the rate of coffee production is limited by infrastructure
It’s actually a pretty decent metaphor, it just doesn’t support his argument at all
I completely disagree that it is a decent metaphor. Unlike coffee, internet data usage is entirely nebulous to mostly everyone outside of the tech sphere. The metaphor serves as a way of misrepresenting a widespread ignorance for a fundamental understanding.
If we wanted a decent metaphor we’d have to compare data usage to something like health insurance. Well you see, you pay for your rate of coverage at these visits per year but also have to pay your deductible that might or might not be used off routine…
In the end if we want to simplify internet expense it is this: ISPs charge way more than they need to and search for ways to charge more to maximize profits without improving service.
I think its like any other utility (water or electricity or methane) except that you pay for the generation separately. So imagine that for electricity you pay a service fee to the grid operator to keep your connection capable of a certain amperage, and you separately pay the hydroelectric dam for the power you use.
ISPs are the grid operator saying, yes you pay for 200 amp service but you’ve already bought enough power this month. Don’t run your AC for the rest of the month.
The problem with health insurance as a metaphor is they have real costs… The insurance company does pay out real money every time you use your policy, and that makes it easy to muddy the issue
Let’s take the coffee metaphor further. They say “you can drink up to 400ml of coffee, past that we’ll add an extra fee. But don’t worry, no one does that”. Then they refill your coffee without saying a word, they won’t tell you how much you’ve used unless you ask, and they won’t stop refilling it unless you tell them not to
The reason the coffee metaphor is great is because, while it’s a real thing, it costs them basically nothing. Just like the extra electricity to send your data costs basically nothing
The cost is the number of coffee pots, the labor, the restaurant - all things that don’t change in cost no matter how much coffee you drink
Coffee works because the nature of the transaction is the same
ISPs have real costs too
Infrastructure costs. Their costs don’t change with how much data you use, they change with how much data they can throughput
That simply isn’t true, the costs are small and arguably negligible but they do have increased costs on more data usage.
Like coffee. It might cost them 1¢ a pot… It might cost them $1200 up front and $60 a month for their coffee makers
Not like coffee. Your average person simply can’t consume coffee beyond the average at any meaningful rate. We both know that internet usage can go from close to nothing to 100TB of data depending on the user.
Internet isn’t like coffee, it’s not that simple.
None of this would be a problem if the government didn’t sell us out for what we already paid for and allowed these vultures into the system. It should have be national from the start. It costs them about nothing to have data run through those lines. All those caps exist purely to garner profit.
Mostly correct take IMO. I don’t blame ISPs for trying. I blame government (and not necessarily just federal) regulations/regulators for allowing it.
I grew up in NY. We paid a boatload in taxes to make fiber happen everywhere. IT. NEVER. HAPPENED.
NY is strongly Democrat. Acting like Republicans are solely the problem is asinine, and nothing stops states from enacting their own laws within the state. If California and NY made it happen. Guess what would basically happen throughout the whole country?
I would just say, I do blame ISP’s for trying. It’s unethical to try and squeeze every cent out of your customers, community and country. It’s never just “business”. Businesses are operated by people while exploiting people. It’s not a cold hearted machine doing the thinking, it’s normal people making these unethical decisions.
Naw, last thing I want is the government running our internet. Hell, it would have never kicked off 30 years ago if not for private enterprise. Back then your average Joe knew jack about this new “information superhighway”. Voters would have never agreed to fund it, let alone blow it up as fast as the capitalists did. And yes, we’ve entered the “last stage” of that particular game. Enshitiffication is well under way.
As of 10-years ago or so (thoughts?), internet access is a need. Not as important as power or water, but it should clearly be regulated like a public utility. I’ve worked for a few ISPs, so I know the devil in the details, but:
- ISPs should be mandated to provide for rural customers at the same terms as urban folks.
- Local governments, even states, should be shut out of decisions concerning competition. If a competitor can build new plant, or light up dark fiber, they can go for it.
- Provide base-level service as a welfare benefit. Access is that important. Try finding a job without it.
tl;dr: Government’s role is to dial it in, not take it over.
This is a bad take. Several cities in my state banded together to create a municipal fiber network called UTOPIA. The fiber is owned by the cities that bought in and is used by several different ISPs. The ISPs pay UTOPIA for access, and then they have to compete with each other for subscribers based on performance, features, and cost. Like, there’s genuine market competition for internet! If the state owns the infrastructure and then forces the playing field to be level, then everyone benefits. People in the cities with UTOPIA got fast fiber internet waaay faster than anyone else, they have a plethora of choices (want a static IP and a business plan in your residence? There’s an ISP that sells that!) at great prices, ISPs get access to subscribers without having to maintain fiber, and the cities who bought in get to make money from this and attract residents and businesses who benefit from the service.
My city didn’t buy in. Google Fiber eventually came to town so I was able to kick Comcast out, but I am uneasy about what’ll happen if Google decides to drop their ISP business. If I was in a city with UTOPIA, it would just be one ISP folding and I’d be able to pick a new one and switch over right away.
EDIT: cool, Cory Doctorow wrote a blag post about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-16-symmetrical-10gb-for-119-utopia-347e64869977
UTOPIA users have access to 18 different ISPs. I feel like that speaks for itself right there. This is the future we all should have had.Private enterprises pocketed the money we gave them, and didn’t provide what they promised.
Fuck the corporations and their bootlickers.
Where do you think the Internet came from? It was a government project that began as Arpanet. And we would never have had it opened to the public if it wasn’t for Al Gore.
We can also thank Tim Berners-Lee for giving us the WWW
Yeah I can’t agree with that after decades of ISP dick jacking, public theft, and absolute neglect. They may have burned bright but they also burned fast. Internet service is such bullshit now when it could just be a utility bill, and we can’t even get at that cause utilities are fucked private corpos too trying to ratfuck the system so they can continue to charge plebs for energy we have figured out how to capture for free so now we all have to die so some silver spooned diaper can continue to get his.
i currently have one of the few municipal Internet plans in the United States.
best Internet I’ve ever had. gigabit symmetric fiber for a flat $60/mo. no fees, no outages, no data caps.
during the one outage i experienced in the three years I’ve had them i was quickly able to find multiple places to see status updates about the hardware issue they had and it was fixed in under an hour.
they also have a 2.5 gig and a 10 gig option for reasonable prices. I don’t think many other companies even offer anything above 1 gig outside of business packages.
it will be difficult for me to move anywhere else. with the work that i do this has been life-changing. come to Longmont Colorado, we have good Internet, amazing mountain sunsets, and lots of tacos.
i love my government Internet. it’s one of the biggest things keeping me here.
You have data caps on your broadband connections in the US? Does your phones have rotary dials too?
$190 bucks a month for a limitless connection is insane. I’m too cheap to pay 30€ a month for unlimited fibre connection so I use 4G router which gives me around 40Mbps unlimited connection and it costs me 10€ a month.
It is insane. Even worse is we (taxpayers) gave them money to improve infrastructure and they put it in their pockets instead.
And also you know we INVENTED THE INTERNET AND PAID FOR THEIR CABLES.
What the fuck do they even do? Sell data? Like this should just be a section of the government but everyone is obsessed with the private sector holding shit
Yes yes because any time the government does something to help individuals instead of business it’s SoCiALiSm.
I want what you have so badly, I hate our ISPs
I pay double what I did in the city for half the speed, but thank fuck I’ve got no data caps or I’d not have moved here, and I’ve made a decent Internet plan a hard requirement on ever moving
The 6 TB of torrents I’ve uploaded in the last month appreciate it, I’m sure
Every place with free coffee refills knows there’s a reasonable upper limit to what one person can consume.
And if they exceed it, it’s coffee. It’s dirt cheap (just like landline data)
What an ass backwards take
Access to data is a human right. Should be managed as utility or public service like the library and not for profit.
Yeah sure, then why is it that my entire bare metal server leased from OVH costs less than my Internet connection, and is fully unmetered access too.
I pay for a data rate and I should be able to use the full amount as I please. If we paid for the amount of data then why are we advertising speeds and paying for speeds?
If you’re fine with living in a datacenter where the direct connections to Internet backbones are available, then sure. It does cost money to install and maintain fiber/copper lines to individual residences. Of course running a new ethernet cable across an existing building designed for running cables is going to be dirt cheap.
Yes but that isn’t changed by the amount of data used. There is no cost to supply per kb supplied, only a cost to maintain the equipment that governs the speed of the connection.
Here’s an analog example. If the city you lived in started charging you more for the water to come into your house faster as well as charging you for the amount of water you use. Obviously you should pay for the amount of a finite resource you use but the speed at which you acquired that resource should be limited only by the physics of the water transportation system.
Data on the other hand, is not a finite resource. There is no limit to the amount of data one can acquire given endless time and energy. So the only way to bill for that becomes the speed at which you acquire the data. You pay for the data speed and that funds the infrastructure to supply that speed indefinitely. End of story. The only reason data caps exist is that they want to charge more money for you to use less bandwidth so they can sell that bandwidth to other people. When what should really happen is, they should invest in higher bandwidth capacity and sell that to their customers to return on that investment.
Either supply me infinite speed and bill me for the amount of data used or supply me infinite data and bill me for the bandwidth. Not both.
How are data caps affecting you? Not sure what mine is, but I never go over on my home and phone connections. Are you hitting the cap? What are you doing and paying?
No, I’m not suggesting this isn’t an issue. I’m interested in what people are dealing with outside my experience.
It affects me very much, thank you.
Perhaps if you don’t work with code, art and assets, you don’t run into these issues. But with WFH as an option, and many people being contractors and not full employees, it would greatly benefit me to not have to pay an extra $100 for internet usage in a home of 4, for example.
You should be backing up any personal data you don’t want to lose to an offsite location? All I know is that if I did that, alone, on Comcast’s 1.2TB data cap, I’d be cooked.
Not to mention that individual games are commonly over 100GB these days, and have frequent patches. If you work from home, add that in. If you watch any sort of TV, that’s most likely streamed, now, too.
Sure, there was a time when I was always under the 1.2TB of my old Xfinity plan. That time has passed. Luckily, the T-Mobile internet I use now doesn’t have a cap.
A family of four can have serious issues with data caps.
So, if you are single, multiply your usage by four. Would you still be under your data cap?
So this won’t be a common issue, but just an example of “the future” Microsoft flight simulator is going to stream in almost all assets, textures, simulation results etc… they have a recommended bandwidth of 50mbs but I believe someone tested it and its more like 180 so just playing that game would mean you’re blowing through a data limit, it’s not something you could ever just download and just have on your local system.
I would also Imagine streaming video is quite high on the consumption of limits. I have no idea what the rates are on a video call type thing most people who work from home have to deal with, but that can’t be all that low as well.
I had Crapcast for awhile before fiber became available, I regularly use terabytes of data and their 1TB cap would be blown through in no time.
If data caps actually solved a problem like it does for cellular networks, it’d be different. But it’s not, it’s a cash grab, I “just” had to pay Crapcast an extra 20$/month
You see, for cellular, a tower is truly limited on the bandwidth because it must be shared among all cellular devices connected to it. And that could be thousands upon thousands of individual devices.
But for hardline, the ISP builds a trunk to the neighborhood and they build it to spec assuming they would sign up a certain percentage (Probably like 80%, or more if they know they’re going to be the only service for a while) to their highest tier. If their highest tier is 1Gbps, then they build their trunk line to that neighborhood to handle 80% of the houses having 1Gbps service.
They never get close to that percentage in the real world, most people are going to stick with some middle of the road package or slower. But, the trunk was built to handle 80% of the houses being active 24/7 at 1Gbps, which just doesn’t happen in the real world so a LOT of that capacity remains just at the ready.
Now that’s just bandwidth, has nothing to do with the amount of data transferred, that line to your house is built to handle whatever the ISPs highest package is or planned higher, whether you use 1Gbps to transfer 1 GB of data or 1000 it doesn’t matter
You see, for cellular, a tower is truly limited on the bandwidth because it must be shared among all cellular devices connected to it
That’s still a limitation on bandwidth, not data volume. It’s still the bandwidth that costs money, not the volume.
The difference between cable and cellular is that in the cellular case it’s much more forgivable to have bandwidth collapse when lots of people want to transfer things at the same time, but not because it’s a single tower, but because it’s a shared EM field. To duplicate bandwidth with cables you can use a second cable, to duplicate bandwidth with cellular a second tower doesn’t suffice, you need a new generation of transmission technology.
A fair pricing scheme would operate on a flat fee for your home connection (at a particular speed), plus flat fee for guaranteed speed to the internet, and allow for faster speed if someone else currently isn’t using their allotment.
That’s it. That’s what ISPs are, themselves, paying, and thus what the customer should pay. All this volume nonsense is suited-up business fucks grifting people.
(For completeness’ sake: Those guarentees are bound to be asymmetric because downstream the ISP only pays port costs, while upstream the ISP pays port costs plus max bandwidth used in a particular time-frame. Not volume, bandwidth. “What was the fastest speed, in this particular month, at which the data moved through the tubes”)
