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Comment by esailija | Hacker News Reader

"I believe in most other countries, that aren't the United States, people pay their internet usage by bandwidth used." that's... false

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Yup. I was under the impression that data transfer limits are a pretty American thing, and in Europe they're the hallmark of a shady, crap provider (most commonly a big telco).

also depends on whether it's a mobile plan or not.

Yes, that too of course. I was thinking of residential connections.

I guess his United States isn't the one I live in.

Comcast says hi: http://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...

AT&T says hi: https://www.att.com/esupport/internet/usage.jsp

As far as I know, bandwidth in US is usually lower than in Europe.

And also more expensive than most European countries.

It's true for all of Australia and getting worse each year as the ISPs fight for profits after the country reached market saturation on broadband connections.

In South Africa it's sometimes true. Capped copper internet is substantially cheaper (same price as uncapped in the US) and usually higher priority than uncapped. Wireless internet is prohibitively expensive, one such tab can easily deplete a data bundle.

However, even uncapped internet normally has a AUP (acceptable usage policy, also soft cap) that is usually around 200GB - exceed it and your internet is de-prioritized to the point of being almost useless.

Either way, 4GB favicons are probably unhealthy for the overall internet.

Here in the UK, you can PAY to have unlimited and even that has abuse clauses.

My originial unlimited iPhone 3g connection had abuse clauses. Nobody cared when I used tethering to download 20gigs of steam games overnight - but if I was perma torrenting they might have done.

The contractual limits give the company a legal out to deal with use that starts to impact other customers, they are not commonly enforced unless they are looking into a complaint to slow internet and your usage comes up as anomalous and potentially contributory (according to a friend at an ISP at least).

So glad that all Swiss providers, mobile as well as dsl, have no fair usage or capping for their unlimited plans.

Download or upload 2TB via torrent? - No one cares

A friend of mine who works at Swisscom (no. 1 provider here) said they were forced by their software to enter an upper limit, so they just entered the max allowed length of that integer number.

I got throttled to dialup speeds for a month in ~2007 by my UK ISP (Demon) for downloading over 60gb in a month. The small print mentioned an abuse clause but didn't specify what the actual automatic hard cutoff was. I was very pissed off at the time.

Looking back, the funniest thing about it was that I ended up having an argument with one of the support people on a broadband forum and they were arguing that only pirates would ever need more than 60gb and that internet TV was never going to take off because the BBC iPlayer trial hadn't worked well in their browser.

These days there are UK ISPs with their own 4K TV channels.

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