Hacker News Reader

Comment by IdiranVibe | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same

View on HN

Western Europe is covered in little hamlets and the odd big city, but it is amazingly densely populated as a region.

So cell service, internet, trains, and cheap flights are all easier to provide there.

Whereas here in the much more sparsely-populated North America, those things are all pricier, and it’s easier to accommodate big trucks, big highways, giant Costco’s, etc.

For residential internet most people have no data cap and those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my desktop according to Windows.

1TB/mo is not “very large” since you can get that kind of data allocation on a $2-4/mo server.

Residential internet connections aren't designed for the same kind of usage as some VPS.

Ok but we’re talking about a whole computer with redundant power and connectivity and memory and disk storage compared to throughput on already-installed non-redundant wires. One of those certainly costs way less than the other, but Comcast still charges multiple orders of magnitude more for.

Its not a whole computer, its a tiny fraction of a whole computer. And that whole computer is in a giant datacenter hundreds of feet from massive ISP interconnections and only a few hops of hardware away from it. Meanwhile the residential customer is probably many miles from the nearest interchange, often even hundreds or more miles.

Location, location, location.

I do agree the over the cap costs imposed by residential ISPs are many, many multiples of their true cost, but they're mostly there to discourage use not be a reasonable price. If you want business level usage hop on their business networking where pricing models are more designed for more average load.

Only data caps if you only have one choice in broad band. Once you have two or more, data caps go away and price is cut in half. If there are no competitors, the provider will milk the customers of cash.

I suppose at that point it's a geography issue which is less of a problem here due to the size of the country

It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested.

My home internet has no data caps.

I don't know about other ISPs, but Xfinity/Comcast residential internet has a data cap of 1TB/month, regardless of the bandwidth tier you pay for. Although you can pay a (substantial) fee to remove that data cap.

Removing the Xfinity data cap would increase my bill by 60%. It is outrageous.

Comcast Business has no data cap and so might be an option

Reply on news.ycombinator.com