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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.
yeah funny enough, this is more of a recent thing. it’s still spreading at the moment. isps over here just kind of got it in their head that they could make extra money with this one day.
It is insane. Even worse is we (taxpayers) gave them money to improve infrastructure and they put it in their pockets instead.
A lot of plans do. Especially with the major telecom networks like ATT and Verizon.
Recently had a smaller company come in and install fiber. $85/mo for Gigabit service with no data cap. That’s pretty good compared to what I was paying. ATT only offered 500Mb/s and that was over $110 a month with a data cap, I want to say 800GB.
Do not get reliable enough cell coverage for one of those mobile routers. But they aren’t any cheaper here since those are owned by the major telecoms.
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)
If there was a government-mandated monopoly on coffee and it was sold in L/s, we probably would.
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.
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.
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 try years I’ve had them i was quickly about 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.
LOL, you get the award for most uninformed and ignorant comment of the day. Did you get your views on and the history of the Internet from Ben Shapiro or something?
I can think of well over 400 billion reasons why private industry control of the internet infrastructure is a bad idea.
What a ridiculous take, tax payers ABSOLUTELY DID PAY FOR IT! WTF?
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
Private enterprises pocketed the money we gave them, and didn’t provide what they promised.
Fuck the corporations and their bootlickers.
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.
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?
The internet is not a
truckWaffle House carafe.Right. Everyone knows it’s a series of tubes! You’d think his fellow republicans would have explained this to him.
But that would be fucking amazing.
I like my internet like I like my WH coffee. Scalding, bitter and inconsistent.
funny that nobody argued opposite: all the new services are primarily streaming/hosted and otherwise “not here”. New crop of tech solutions requires crap-ton of bandwidth. So caps prevent those companies from doing ripping off customers in other areas. How un-Republican is that? They are getting in the way of enterprises making a living! So the most Republican thing to do would be to let foxes watch the henhouse. Ask ISPs to regulate themselves so that “everybody”'s (and I mean every enterprise) happy. In other words getting in the way of this proposal is very much just “polid’ticking” trying to undo what dems are doing regardless whether it’s actually a conservative thing to do or not.
Dafuq?
Seriously, lol.
The two republicans mentioned in the article are for sure the two heads of that vomiting earthworm in the pic. The coffee analogy guy being the one vomiting his drivel of lead addled brainrot into an elementary school level take on broadband data caps and general economic theory.
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.
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?
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”)
I don’t have one but I wouldn’t want to be checking it at all. My phone has one which I don’t tend to worry about because I don’t use it for data so much. With my home devices, the two of us stream a fair bit, have big updates to games, and have game pass so we’re downloading stuff which can be 80GB+. Add on hours of daily video calls and even our slow connection must get through quite a lot.
I hit data caps somewhat often. Mine is a terabyte a month, I tend to pirate a bit, but I also really enjoying messing around with technology so its not uncommon to spin up half a dozen PCs with different OS a month, Steam transferring data on a local network has been a godsend for games. To avoid it I often download things on my phones data or on a public WiFi like the gym and then SFTP it. If I hit the cap I will call and ask for the fee to waived, threaten to cancel, social engineer and usually get it thrown off the bill
Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”
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 have none but my friend has the max plan, 1g symmetrical, with a 1tb cap. He almost hit it every month if he is not careful, playing new games, streaming gameplay. My other friend works from home and hits like 1.5 tb a month with her imagery work.
I have a pretty solid average of 2-3 terabytes of download a month. My upload is between 4 and 10 terabytes a month.
I stream a lot of movies, youtube, etc. So does my roommate. I once had a sales rep in a different apartment say over the phone that I wouldn’t need to worry about the data caps. I laughed and hung up. I’d rather have slower speeds with no cap than higher speeds with a cap. there’s no point to having all that data if you spend the whole month worrying about hitting the data cap.
