Well, first of all, we’re not talking about a 500GB cap in this thread, The proposed cap, as I explained in the OP, is 1.2TB.
Second, I just looked up this game, and the Standard Edition for Playstation is 60 bucks. It’s sort of odd to me that someone who will spends hundreds on a gaming platform, and $60 a pop for games, would argue that it’s a nightmare to have to pay a few more dollars for an internet connection to facilitate this incredibly fun and rewarding hobby.
Look, I understand your griping about monopolies.
I’m actually lucky enough to live in an area where I actually have a bit of competition for my internet business. If I decide I don’t like Comcast, I have a pretty well-rated company around here called Thames Valley that offers internet speeds up to 1 Gigabit at very competitive prices, and that has a 2TB cap on the package that I would purchase.
I moved here last year from San Diego, where I lived for over ten years, and where Cox had a total monopoly in my neighborhood. That sucked, because while their service was good, they could raise my rates or cap my data at will and I had to bend over and take it because I had nowhere else to go.
But it sounds like a lot of your data use is for work, and if that’s the case, why not accept that paying for more data is a cost of doing business, just like people accept that they have to pay for the subway, or to buy lunch, or business suits, or tools, or whatever else they need to actually make a living? As I’ve already said, you can get an unlimited data plan on Comcast for an extra 30 bucks a month, and if all those VM backups are essential to your life and your livelihood, isn’t that a small price to pay.? After all, as an Apple user, you are clearly willing, in an least some cases, to get screwed on price by a monopolist.
Actually, as I said in a previous post, Comcast admitted back in 2016 that data caps are a business decision and are not a technical necessity. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that data caps are morally wrong. If you could raise the price for your labor and expertise in your job, wouldn’t you do it? And if they’re a monopoly in your area, I think you should blame politicians and regulators at least as much as the companies themselves. Companies are always going to try to get monopoly power and other advantages for themselves; we should hold our elected and appointed officials up to higher standards when it comes to stopping them.
I’ll actually be interested to see what happens in this case. One of the reasons that Comcast didn’t have data caps in some parts of the northeast was precisely that they have competition in a lot of these markets, like mine. If someone in my area can get 300 megabit Comcast and 300 megabit Thames Valley for about the same price, but Thames Valley offers 2TB of data per month instead of the 1.2TB offered by Comcast, the customer might decide to switch.
That doesn’t mean much. You can buy games for much cheaper, especially on PC where virtually all game purchases are digital and require downloads (and consoles are basically in the same place these days). Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a mighty $4.50 for a 77GB download right now. Middle Earth: Shadow of War has been ten bucks for nearly 100GB. Add in game patches and updates on top of that. Hell, you have numerous Free to Play games that consume large amounts of downloads (especially relative to their cost if that’s supposed to be an argument).
Point being that “But it’s X hours of Netflix!” isn’t always the best metric for how far your data limit should get you. Some people do more with their internet than watch Netflix.
Too late to edit but worth pointing out that there’s numerous services that cost $7-$15 a month and give you large libraries of games to download and play at will (like a video gaming Netflix). So trying to say “But you spent $60 on a game so you can just afford the costs” really fails to stick the landing as far as arguments go.
I already do. I use Comcast Business instead of residential. It has several advantages: no data caps; exclusive data (regardless of how busy my local node is, my data runs at full speed, so no evening slowdown that residential can experience); responsive customer service (it wasn’t until my report that they repaired a problem that had been affecting the whole neighborhood). Why doesn’t everybody do this? There are some disadvantages: more expensive, particularly as speeds increase, for example 1GB is 4-5x the price of residential; 2-3 year contracts to get any pricing break; 30+ day cancellation notice required out of contract; cannot be combined with residential TV service (if that matters to you).
I’d support the idea that their whole business model is morally wrong, but that’s probably an outlier opinion. I still don’t understand why people are coming here to defend a monopoly who is raising prices and lying about why they’re doing it. I’d have less of a problem with it if Comcast just said they’re raising prices, and there’s nothing anybody can do about, as that’s what other ISPs have said.
Politicians take a huge amount of the blame. This goes back to Reagan era ideas about monopolies and mergers. This is one of those areas where Democrat and Republican politicians both agree, let companies get big and form monopolies, where I vehemently disagree with both of them. Of course I’m some weird kind of socialist libertarian capitalist, where I think that one of government’s most important roles is to maintain a functioning free market, and that a free market is very different from letting companies do whatever they want.
This is also a flavor of whataboutism. A company does something bad, but it’s the fault of lobbied politicians and regulatory capture that lets them do it, so we shouldn’t criticize the company?
If “no one” was using 1.2TB then they wouldn’t need to cap it there. It’s pretty obvious that 1.2TB was specifically chosen as a number that sounds reasonable enough on the surface but they know enough people will break to (a) collect the overage fees or (b) get people to upgrade their service to avoid the fees. Then justify it based on a simple metric (but so many hours of Netflix!) that isn’t realistic for many households.
Not really, because that was more a general observation about priorities and not just about costs, and because the same principle applies to your cheap games too.
If you download so many games, and if gaming is so important to you, and if gaming takes up an amount of bandwidth that places you in the top few percent of all internet users (which is where people who use more than 1.2TB are), then shouldn’t your costs reflect, in some measure, the burden you place on the network?
I’ve been on gaming forums and I’ve witnessed myriad complaints along the lines of “I got shot because of my laggy internet connection” from a guy who’s playing a multi-player FPS game at 9.00 p.m. on a Saturday night. I don’t do online gaming myself so I didn’t really have a sense of how bandwidth-intensive gaming can be, but according to this story, “Cloud gaming over something like Stadia uses about 10 GB of data every hour at 1080p.” That seems like a lot, especially when you add it to the size of the game downloads.
Look, I’m partly playing devil’s advocate here. I’ve been plenty critical of ISPs in the past, and I think that the United States, or at least many parts of the United States, would benefit greatly from having some mechanism to ensure more competition in the broadband internet market. As had already been noted in this thread, there are lots of markets in the country that are effectively monopolies for one or other of the large providers like Comcast or Time-Warner or Verizon or whatever. Competition should be encouraged, and in areas where there isn’t any competition, I would support regulating ISPs like utilities. But even regulated utilities get to charge based on usage, and even regulated utilities are often for-profit companies that are allowed to make a profit under the conditions of their regulation.
It could be that the further expansion of wireless networks, especially faster networks like 5G, might allow for competition in the home internet market, with people having the option to choose a wireless provider for their home connection. But people have been predicting this for a while and it hasn’t happened yet, and wireless data is still (depending on provider) very expensive to purchase in the market compared to home internet.
I think that this is absolutely part of the issue. I’m not quite sure what we should do about it, though. I mean, this level of self-interest from a corporation is understandable, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it. At the same time, though, it’s hard to argue that the companies themselves, due to new technology and the building of infrastructure, haven’t improved our internet experience and the price we pay.
When I moved to the US in 2000, I got a dial-up connection through my university which gave me 56k downloads for $15 per month. Then I moved to 768k DSL which cost $40 per month and went up to $55 over the next couple of years. When we moved to San Diego, I took Cox’s Preferred tier internet, which was 9Mbps in 2008, and that cost $40 per month. I kept that Preferred tier for the whole 12 years we were in San Diego, and during that time my speed increased from 9Mbps to 100, and the price went from $40 to $80. Then I moved to Connecticut and got a 100Mbps package for $40 per month for the first year and $60 per month after that.
If we leave out the dial-up, this means that over the course of 19 years I’ve gone from paying $40 per month (in 2001 dollars) for 768k to paying $60 (in 2020 dollars) for 100meg. The US inflation calculator says that, with cumulative inflation over the past two decades, $40 in 2001 is worth about $58 today. So basically, my prices have remained the same for massively better speeds and data allowances.
Is that good? Bad? Is it still too expensive? That’s a rather subjective judgment. But if we’re in a world where these ISPs are for-profit corporations providing a service for money, we have to also accept that they’re going to charge us for things. I guess I don’t see it as too unreasonable that those charges relate, in some way or another, to how much we use the service. Because if they don’t charge more for people who use more data, they’ll probably just raise everyone’s rates to make up for it.
But, as far as I can tell, nowhere in this recent announcement has Comcast said that the cap, or the charges for exceeding it, are necessary to preserve the network or for any other technical reason. They don’t make this claim in either of the articles I linked in the OP, in the Gizmodo article I linked in this post, or in this Wall Street Journal article. And, as I noted in a previous post, Comcast admitted back in 2015 that data caps and overage charges were a business decision, not a technical necessity. Seems to me that’s an admission that they’re just raising prices.
I’m happy to criticize the company, but the fact remains that politicians and regulators are the ones who have let them get away with it. If you had been in conversations with me before, you’ll know that I’m also strongly opposed to public funding and targeted tax breaks for things like sports stadiums and business headquarters (see the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin, and just about every new stadium built in the last 20 years), but the fact is that it’s politicians and regulators that let this stuff happen. I accept (even if I don’t like) that corporations are going to ask for handouts and special privileges; in that sense, they’re no different from the panhandler asking passersby for money. What I really object to is our elected officials acceding to their demands.
I’d be curious to hear what you think the model should be for the provision of internet service. Publicly-owned, government-run monopoly, with regulated pricing? Force the large providers to lease their cables to smaller firms, which then compete in the retail market, like France and some other European countries do? Laws that mandate at least two providers in all markets, with a proviso that any company operating as a sole provider in a given market will be subject to service, speed, data, and price regulations?
You understand, right, that it costs money to build and service these networks, and keep them running? How should payment for all of that work? Should it be, now and always, a non-profit enterprise? Is profit OK, as long as it’s (what you consider to be) reasonable? I’m genuinely curious as to how you and other folks would change things.
Sounds like modern data caps are doing a poor job of reflecting realistic usage then. Gaming is a regular household activity, not some weird niche application.
I’m not arguing that gaming is bad or weird or anything like that. I’m simply making a point about usage.
Running my refrigerator and drying my clothes are regular household activities and not some weird niche behavior, but I still have to pay for the electricity I use.
And people are paying for data as well. In a completely different “package” format than electricity is billed and it’s those packages that we’re discussing, not a strawman about whether or not they should be paying for it at all.
My point is that gaming is a standard usage and the current packages don’t reflect that and, in fact, dance around it with nonsense “A bajillion hours of Youtube!” metrics rather than how many modern games you could download – something that is a very normal use case in many households and quickly blows up their silly examples. It’s basically like those stupid “Well, you can eat on $20 a month if you just buy a hundred pound sack of lentils and eat lentils for thirty days” arguments.
Here’s yet another article with links that buttress the position that usage caps are nothing but a naked money grab. As for what to do about it–community broadband seems to be the best model around. Here in Portland most people are stuck with Comcast, some of us have the option of CenturyLink or Comcast and maybe a couple of wifi providers but some smaller satellite cities like Sandy and Molalla have set up community broadband that kicks the ass of both the big ISPs. Faster service, cheaper, no usage limits–and they’ve even gone to the trouble of burying their wires so it’s even more bulletproof than the large companies–Comcast is notorious for going down like a lot lizard at a trucker convention. CenturyLink gigabit fiber is much more stable and the price-for-life feature is amazing. I had DSL with CL previously and honestly, I put up with the slow speeds JUST so I didn’t have to do the yearly annoyance gavotte with Comcast and their predatory pricing. When fiber hit my neighborhood I fired up a private browser window and got the good new customer deal and haven’t looked back once. Haven’t had to power cycle my modem or router in over a year too, that alone is worth the hassle of changing over.
But how are you defining standard? After all, it’s already been established that, even in the escalated internet use of pandemic lockdown, only 5% of customers exceed 1.2TB at all, and even fewer customers exceed the cap on a regular basis. It’s not clear to me whether all of those people exceed the cap due to gaming, but even if all of these high users are gamers, there are still probably tens of millions of gamers in the US who get through each month without going over.
And, to be honest, if people are going over due to Netflix or porn downloads or whatever, my argument would be the same. I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that the internet is essential in the modern world, and that we should make sure everyone has access to a decent connection. There is a very strong argument that you need internet for communication, job searching, shopping, and a whole bunch of other essential activities, and I’m happy to support a system that subsidizes internet for people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
But, to take your terrible lentil analogy, it’s also worth recognizing that some things are essential and some are just fun; we need some things just to get by, and there are other things that are nice, but that are not required for our health and wellbeing. Arguing that the internet is essential for modern life is not the same as arguing that everyone should be able to download and play as many 1080p games, or watch as many 4K movies, as they want without paying a bit extra.
You sound a bit like the guy in the Wall Street Journal article I linked above, who went over the 1.2TB cap:
He sounds like a family that earns over $270,000 per year arguing that they are not unusually affluent. (FYI, $270k is where the top 5% of household income begins.)
I am all for community broadband. I think it’s fantastic, precisely because it creates competition based not just on speed and price, but more general levels of service, as your story demonstrates. Evidence shows that when there are more providers, the big companies tend to improve their service and lower their prices.
This is another area, too, where I get very angry with both the large companies and their political and regulatory allies, because there have been numerous efforts in parts of the US to kill community broadband, sometimes by actually outlawing it. Fuck that. To the extent that companies like Comcast oppose competition, I’m happy to criticize them and fight them all the way to City Hall, the Statehouse, and Congress.
Yes, right. Why, it’s almost as though normal people use a whole RANGE of things instead of “Durr, billion hours of Netflix” and things should be viewed through that lens instead. Just like most people don’t exclusively eat bulk chicken breasts and white rice and so any budgeting strategy that relies on that is a stupid one. Shocker.
Right. Which is exactly what’s actually happening. Glad you agree. The “hours of Netflix” thing is, for me at least, merely a useful shorthand to get a sense of how much data we’re talking about. It is not the determinant of my argument about caps.
No-one–not me and, as far as I can tell, not Comcast–is arguing that data caps are designed to target gaming or any particular internet activity. They are designed to target the top few percent of users, people whose use levels are, pretty much by definition, well outside the usual range.
It’s good to see that Comcast is moving away from the lie that this is a technical requirement, but just previous in this same post you say
which is part of the technical fiction of data caps. That extra usage is not placing a burden on the network. A few fractions of cents of extra electricity to pass the data, and a few more cents to move the produced heat out of the network center? And don’t say Comcast’s upstream provider. There isn’t one, they are the top level. For example to get from my laptop to this board my data travels over Comcast’s network and Hurricane Electric’s network. I pay Comcast, and this board (possibly through Discourse) pay Hurricane Electric.
My central idea for how this should be managed is something along the line of “whoever owns the wires cannot own the data that travels over them” (excluding things like usage necessary to manage the business, run a website, email, etc). Whether the wire owner is a private company regulated like a utility, a public service like roads, some public private partnership, or whatever, should be left up to local place to decide.
The wire owner would then have to lease out access to the lines in a non-discriminatory fashion. ISPs would pay for access to the wires, and customers could choose from any number of ISPs. This is very similar to how DSL was done in many places in the early 2000s.
Obviously there are lots more details. The main point is to take the part that is fundamentally a monopoly, the physical wires to every residence and business, and manage them so that the monopoly cannot be exploited, while allowing the parts that are open to competition to be competitive.
Reading your posts, I think we mostly agree, you just seem much more forgiving of the companies, and seem to be engaging in victim blaming on people who do use lots of data. I haven’t seen anybody defending people who run pirate torrent sites out of their basements.
The dominant cable operator around here, Rogers Communications, is every bit as greedy and incompetent as Comcast, but the trend so far has been to drop data caps altogether except on the very lowest tier of service. However, the caps they did have in the past were relatively low. My current 300 Mbps service used to have a 250 GB cap. I’m glad to see it gone so I don’t have to worry about it, but I rarely go above 250 GB anyway (they’ve stopped reporting usage, but the modem keeps track). It’s hard for me to imagine any ordinary household exceeding 1.2 TB in a month. Sure, things like Zoom may be essential for work and important to some for personal communications, but that stuff tends to be highly compressed and relatively low bandwidth. High-definition streaming is probably the biggest demand on bandwidth, but even that is very efficiently compressed and really not all that high.
It’s not quite true to say that usage doesn’t matter to the cable providers. For one thing, unlike DSL, cable is a shared medium at the local level, the notorious “last mile”. Heavy usage may require expensive network re-segmentation (or equipment upgrades) sooner rather than later. It’s the most common cause of complaints about substandard speeds. For another thing, last I heard ISPs usually still have to pay metered transit fees to upstream carriers unless they themselves are a Tier 1 carrier.
And the point I was making earlier was that Comcast is setting this just above the current “usual range” to make a profit off of it. More interesting than “But only X% use that” would be how many people are within 10% of that number. Because people increasingly use more data be it for “cutting the cord” or connected appliances or gaming or an increasing amount of 4K streaming, etc. Comcast is well aware of that and know that a number of people who aren’t using the capped amount right now likely will be within the year or two years and they’ll get the benefit of all those people suddenly bumping against the cap. The “X hours of Netflix!” is pablum for people who can’t see the larger picture, designed to make their caps seem ever so reasonable so long as you only eat lentils.
Just FYI: if you’re in one of the dozen or so northeast states where Comcast was planning to introduce data caps, you now have a reprieve until at least the end of this year.
