Ask HN: How do you deal with Internet Provider Data Caps?
We are just two people in household, and sometimes our friend stays with us.
I do work from home, and I am software engineer. So a lot of software updates, downloading/uploading containers, etc.
Looking at the Xfinity data usage for the last 6 months: the average is 1300GB, with one month we went to 2.2TB.
I do not understand, how people who share rooms/houses, have kids, can stay below 1TB a month. Just a simple math:
- one 4K movie a night (~5GB, usually more) = 150GB (if two people watching 2 different movies that is 300GB). - software updates on your phone. FB app is 300MB, updates every week, so that is more than 1GB of updates of just one app on your phone. It is not an average for the app size, but most of the popular apps are 200MB+ and update every week. So my guess, every phone, in best case scenario uses about 20GB to just update apps. So if 2 people have one phone and a tablet - that is 80GB of just app updates. - laptops, and software update as well. My guess, another 10-20GB easily per laptop. Two people - 40GB. - if you play games, you probably download one or few games a month, which can be 10-100GB in size at this point.
So that is just basics, and we already have about 400GB of usage a month.
Now, if you got sick for a few days, and decided to watch the two seasons of Games of Thrones or something. 20 hours of 4k video will get you additional 100GB.
In our case, my guess, another 500GB are just regular data usage, browsing internet, instagram, video cameras (ring, eufu) uploading videos, iCloud sync, zoom, doing actually work, etc.
So question is, is our data usage is the same insane? Is it hard for you to keep your usage under 1TB?
In case of Xfinity I actually pay additional $30 a month not to worry about the data caps. But my guess other providers might not have this option.