Our ISP caps data based on traffic used. Their method of figuring that consistently overestimates that traffic by a factor of 3x to 5x by my numbers. We get throttled after 3 or 4 days of unrestricted traffic, every month; then a whole host of sites stop working. Some wont send data to connections that slow (DDoS mitigation) and some sites just get stomped by the injection of a "you need to buy more data now) page into random urls, several times a day.
But I could pay them an extra $10/GB (their definition of "GB") to have better connectivity.
I use AT&T’s 50mbs broadband as they don’t offer me fiber. Their cap is 1024GB/month and $10 for every 50MB over.
With multiple people in my home, I hit this limit with just streaming (granted running in the background pretty much all the time). It’s frustrating as most services don’t have a way to throttle and neither does my home router. I’d like to have something that can throttle devices to a particular speed.
But this seems like a pure cash grab for AT&T and fear how bad it will be when I get faster speeds.
My other alternative is Comcast and it’s even worse.
Did you print that right? Most phone plans are $10 for every GB. I cannot stress how absurdly evil, how anti-person, how undefensible $10/50MB would be. Absolutely craven absurd obscene pricing. Any company charging that should not be left running.
its a typo, $10 is 50GB up to a cap of $200/m on non-FTTH, and if i recall correctly i was offered unmetered data if i purchased a full (non-basic) directv or att tv plan (which should be illegal, tbh)
How is Comcast worse? Their monthly cap is about 20% higher, and if you are willing to use their modem/router you can get add unlimited for around $11/month.
I'm guessing you are currently using AT&T's modem/router because you mentioned frustration that your router does not support throttling, which if you were using your own you could address by simply buying a router that does.
You do this by getting their XFi Complete plan. It's $25/month on top of your base plan, but it includes both the modem/router rental and unlimited so is only $11/month more than a non-unlimited plan with a modem/router rental ($14/month) on top of the base plan.
Well from a consumer POV, Comcast forcing you to lease their hardware that phones home to the cloud at all times, remotely set wifi password and all on the xfi gateway for a discount on rent seeking behaviour is incredibly bullshit.
That being said AT&T fiber at least doesn't allow you to use your own modem. You are required to use their equipment because they intentionally force no hardware to be "compatible" with their handoff. Last time I was using them you had to do some convoluted bullshit to even try (see https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt)
Just to be clear you don't have to lease Comcast hardware to get unlimited. You can add unlimited to a plan that does not include leased hardware. It's $30/month last I checked.
Prepend said Comcast would be worse than what they have with AT&T, which is 50 Mbps, 1 TB data cap, and leased hardware they do not like.
He could get similar on Comcast but without leased hardware and with a 1.2 TB data cap, so Comcast seems to be an improvement for them since it would be better on every aspect of AT&T that they mentioned. Hence my curiosity as to why they think Comcast would be worse for them.
I had my usage suddenly go from 300GB to over 1 TB (the cap) and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. This was after months of my partner and I both working from home and keeping the same usage habits. I tracked the usage on my router and it didn’t match up. I asked the ISP for proof and they had none. Fortunately I found fiber had just gotten to my house and had no cap so I was able to switch, but I wondered how much you can really trust the ISP accounting.
You cannot, they are criminals, negligently and malicious. I've had my isp (cox) steal my personal property, attempt to charge me rental fees for my own equipment, demand they own my property, blame my property for defects, and so much more horse shit.
What I gathered from the days of peak pandemic stay at home media consumption is that there is no practical reason to meter the average household’s data consumption via fiber or coax.
(thank you to the people who kept that working btw)
The cable coming from the street to my home is RG-6. There is some disagreement between different things I've found Googling as to the maximum data rate RG-6 can handle, but it seems to not be over 1.5 Gbps.
That would put an upper limit of a little under 500 TB on how much data it could handle in a month.
The cable going from the equipment on the pole that my cable is connected to doesn't look to be any different. I can't get a good look at it to tell what it actually is.
Looking around my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods that's all I see. I don't see anything different connecting my area to whatever is upstream of all of us.
That suggests that a whole bunch of us as a group have a physical limit of 500 TB internet data per month. (Actually less because those cables are also carrying cable TV).
Obviously they can't serve a whole large city or region on just 500 TB aggregate data per month, so they must have something with higher capacity going out to some kind of nodes that split out into multiple connections to the lower capacity part of the network, probably a multiple level tree topology with decreasing node capacity the farther you get from the root, but I've not been able to actually find any of those nodes.
Presumably when they need more than 500 TB per month for some area they have to replace the top node in that area with a node with a higher capacity connection to its parent, and then have that node serve two or more 500 TB per month nodes. How easy or hard and how cheap or expensive that will be likely varies a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood.
> Uncap America Act would ban data limits that exist solely for monetary reasons.
This might raise the price of basic internet service.
I would say to put an end to all data caps. Instead state what speed you get for how much transfer, and what speed you get after that. There should never be charges for 'going over your limit'.
I don't think the bill would have any effect. With the current FCC, providers could just do a network management study, impose even lower caps, and probably be fine. If the FCC materially changed, I don't think they would need the bill to go after predatory pricing.
With the recent supreme court rulings, congress has been shown that any action by a regulatory authority that isn't EXPLICITLY enumerated will be shut down.
But I could pay them an extra $10/GB (their definition of "GB") to have better connectivity.