Technology

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

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.

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'm averaging 200gb a day to frame.io and other cloud services uploading raw video files. If I was on Comcast I'd be over my limit in a week.

When my wife, son and I lived with my MIL for a time she wanted to reduce her internet/cable/landline bill. Dropped the TV, got an antenna and she was able to watch the couple of channels she actually watched for free (minis rhe cost of the antenna).

She rarely took calls on the landline so she dropped that. We started doing some streaming to experiment and then found out that the local provider she had limited her to a 200GB/month cap and had two levels of overage fees of $50 for 50GB on top of the $150 she was paying for her 25Mbps service.

We blasted through that as I was trying out Google Stadia at the time.

Thank god her address was also serviced by AT&T. They gave her twice the speed with a 1TB data cap but for whatever reason it was never enforced for $50/month.

Moved out and went with AT&T at the new house. Just recently moved houses in the last few years and my choices for internet are either the 50Mbps for $50, whatever plans that the local ISP has which includes fiber, or something like T-Mobiles 5G Home service which didn’t work with my work going WFH (something technical about my work VPN was compatible).

I’m sticking with AT&T until something better other than the local ISP comes in.

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.

How are data caps affecting you?

They don't affect me because I don't use a company that has a cap... however, any cap that I would potentially have would wreck my household.

I covered some numbers in this post. https://lemmy.saik0.com/comment/3735470

I'm around 100x over the "cap" for the other major ISP in my area.

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.