• shalafi@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Xatolos@reddthat.comOP
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      2 months ago

      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?

    • RxBrad@infosec.pub
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      2 months ago

      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.

      1018GB of usage in July, 2329GB of usage in August, 3554GB of usage in September, and 831GB of usage in October with 15 days remaining

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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”)