Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?
cell phone providers can, they just won’t (would eat into their profits)
and most of the home internet sold as “unlimited” was a scam – if you started to get too close to some hidden value, they would start throttling your connection
'Member when Comcast was caught illegally using Sandvine in around 2006/2007 to illegally throttle or block BitTorrent traffic?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
More recently, they throttled Netflix until they could extort them to pay for the traffic being used by their own customers, who were already paying Comcast for the very same data usage.
What a bunch of arseholes
Hm interesting, I’ve never run into issues with hidden throttling.
How would you know if it’s hidden?
Because I get my full speed
I wonder what that is? I’ve gone trough 300TB a month at one point
In the past it was due to technical constraints.
Now it’s just greed.
My home Internet charges extra when I use more than 1 TB per month. Not sure but I think it’s metered both up and down.
I remember Comcast suddenly started enforcing a limit of about 1 TB some years ago when I had them. Realized it happened when I renewed my contract to get a lower price again for a promotional period. Apparently I agreed to a new contract or something that included the new limit. >:|
FCC is looking into that, I think it was during Trump’s administration
I currently have that cap and wondering how I will be able to play MSFS2024 under these conditions. Absolute trash they get to enforce this.
Had the same thought, and a rep already told me I’m 200gb away. Let’s hope some of the stuff is cached.
Just try to pnpy so flights at 30k ft or above so you don’t have to load ground textures lol
Yep sounds familiar 😅
damn, I share almost a TB/day.
Hopefully only Linux ISOs /s
Nintendo roms
Wow.
How many nintendo roms are there?
switch roms range from 6-20GB each. plus SNES, full collection about 5gb.
Ah yes, switch games are not tiny small cartridges.
Gotta finish my “arcade” box-stick-raspberry one day …
5GB you say? That’s so incredibly cool actually.
AT&T asks the same question. They provide the bold option to pay more than the competition and get data limits on your home internet.
Not all home internet is unlimited. In many US rural areas, home internet connections have a monthly cap just like mobile networks do. A higher cap costs more, if it’s available at all.
In many US rural areas, home internet connections have a monthly cap
And suburban, and urban. I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t have a cap.
And not all cell service is limited. I switched from cable to 5G fixed wireless, because I was tired of having a data cap. It’s faster and cheaper too.
Caps are fake there’s no need for them besides to build golden marble pillars outside CEOs mega mansions.
Umm, my home internet has a 50GB per month limit. Can’t complain much though, it’s cheap at literally $1 a day, and I’m not a gamer or online streamer.
50GB a month though?? You don’t use any video streaming services at all? What do you use for media?
I do browse through YT videos, but I don’t bother watching full length movies. Honestly, I’ve lost interest in watching newer movies, seems like a waste of time to me. However, I do enjoy educational and scientific content.
That’s more than $1.50 per Gigabyte.
When you download a game from Steam, most games you literally pay more for the data than for the game.
Even when you pirate, you pay like $15 for a BluRay quality movieYou’d be dumbfounded to see what I’ve been able to accomplish using my connection. Terabytes of games archived, I just didn’t have to download nor upload them myself.
Wow I go through 50GB in less than a day. Sometimes an hour.
How is 1€/day cheap for such limited home Internet? I guess it might depend on where you are, but unless you are in the middle of nowhere that seems expensive.
Here in Germany for example, which really isn’t known for its cheap internet, I can find options that offer 100Mbit Flatrates for 20€/month.
My German friends and family don’t believe me when I tell them how expensive internet and phone is in the US. They all think it’s expensive in Germany. Having said that, there are some big differences in take home pay.
I ain’t even talking about the internet speed, I’m talking about the data cap. And $1 a day is about as cheap as it gets in my area.
as cheap as it gets in my area
That’s not a very good approach to assess prices
For ~$30 a month, that’s a complete and utter rip-off.
Even here in Neuland Germany you get at least decent internet with no caps for that price.
Good thing, because some games would take up all of that just to download and install.
Where even has that sort of plan anymore? Are you really rural American?
Found the American. In France that would be a huge ripoff compared to what the other providers have to offer. Like, literally any VDSL offer is around 30€/month (or under) and no caps
Of course you can complain, I pay less than half what you do for unlimited cellular data.
In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).
Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).
Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.
You might want to ask Ajit Pai.
Fuck a shit pie.
(Also, whatever you do, never Google that phrase.)
I mean, wasn’t gonna.
I’d have to look at Ajit Pai.
money.
data caps are coming to home internet soon too and with inescapable hidden contracts; switch to an independent isp to avoid it before you’re entrapped into one.
Ah yes I’ll just pick from one of the many ISPs in my area
they exist and they usually suck compared to something like comcast or at&t; but they’re much better than a $500 internet bill because you went over your limit or paying considerably more for breaking the contract that you didn’t know you signed when you didn’t read the fine print.
In a lot of places in the US there is only one home service provider.
i’m aware and fwiw; that’s where it’ll be implemented last since the people there are the biggest and best chance at pushing back against this successfully.
For cell / mobile phones, you’re sharing the capacity of the cell among multiple people.
In this example, a rural cell tower can provide up to 395Mbps.
It would only take 40 people watching Kayo at high definition (or any high definition video service) via their phone or a 4G router to saturate this tower.
For everyone else at this time, it’ll still work but even though they might have a strong radio signal (lots of bars), the internet will become slow.
Limiting monthly usage, or charging more for more data per month, reduces the risk of saturation.
There aren’t going to be 40 people using that tower if it’s truly a rural tower. If it isn’t a rural tower then they can update it to handle more throughput. The issue isn’t the towers, it’s the companies wanting to keep using old tech to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
Both of you can be correct. The policy is prevalent to squeeze money out of consumers. However, it’s also easy to imagine more than 40 people in a rural area using their phones for media purposes during PM times in 2024. There’s less to do, internet availability might not exist for some or all residents, and people use their phone for everything now. Casting from a phone is a larger percent of viewing TV now.
In a rural area the population density is a lot less than that of suburbs or the city. We’re talking about 40 people or less using a single tower, this also takes in account of the 3 carriers. If each carriers tower can handle 40 people, that’s potentially 120 users total in a few mile radius, which is normal for rural populations.
This tower has about a 20km radius on average due to topography, covers a stretch of the New England Highway and also covers the nearby village of Black Mountain. A good few hundred phones will be in range I expect.
The tower also has cells for Optus and Vodafone, but they are a significant minority of customers in this area.
This sounds like an issue with the carriers not actually putting in more towers to properly handle the load though. Aka greed.
I guess it depends what country you’re in. I don’t have limits on either and don’t want to imagine having that concern.
The first time I saw a mobile plan without any limits was somewhere around 2003-2004. Pretty soon after that, all the competitors started offering similar plans. So glad we got rid of those stupid limits.
Where are my Rogers home internet customers at? 🇨🇦
I moved to Telus when Rogers bought Shaw and screwed up my billing plan, and were unwilling to be competitive.
Both Rogers and Telus have capped plans and more expensive “unlimited” plans.
I have the opposite. Unlimited phone data, but it throttles above some high number that I’ve never hit. Capped home internet from crapcast, 1.3 TB, I haven’t hit it but I’ve come within a couple gigabytes.
They offer unlimited data if I use their modem/router for an extra $10/mo. Of course their modem comes with the wonderful feature of a public hotspot for any other Comcast customers in the area. I’ve been thinking about getting their modem, putting it in a metal box and just using pass through with my opnsense box.
