[hackpelican]

I hope you’re still joking.

Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.

And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.

One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.

Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.

[mr_toad]

> Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.

In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.

[happymellon]

> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers

Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.

[encom]

Didn't https everywhere ruin caching? Unless you MITM everyone like CloudFlare.

[codebje]

https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.

In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.