It's great that the FCC does this for cell carriers, but they still are letting the data caps apply on home connections, which is going to do nothing except increase profits and decrease innovation.
There's nothing illegal about data caps as long as they are made clear. T-Mobile got in trouble here because they marked the plan as 'unlimited'. From the article: "'Consumers should not have to guess whether so-called ‘unlimited’ data plans contain key restrictions, like speed constraints, data caps, and other material limitations,' said FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc in a statement."
In my opinion, data caps on wireline service are getting pretty sleazy too.
For e.g: AT&T U-Verse will let you remove the cap[1] using a $30 add-on. However they'll also remove the cap "for no extra charge" if you subscribe to one of their bundles. (Which works out to about the same price, for the 2-year promotional period anyways, after which you'll be renegotiating your bill with retentions.)
I suspect they're doing this so that if you really need the bandwidth: you'll find the basic TV subscription to be a much better use of the $30. That way they get to tell their shareholders they've stopped hemorrhaging pay-TV subscribers.
I flat-out refused the sales guy as soon as I saw the 600GB cap in the fine-print of the contract. He tried to tell me most people don't get anywhere near that figure. Now I don't doubt that statistic, but I have my own statistics. I pulled up my router's bandwidth report[2] and showed him that my network would bump up against that cap nearly every month.
If you look at how businesses generally work, they're trying to get a certain amount of revenue in order to balance their budget and make a profit. Then they decide how to get it.
Data caps are fantastic. Because it means when they're raising their prices, they're charging the users who most use it, rather than just raising the price for everyone.
If you're being asked to pay for overage on a wired line plan, it means you're a 1%er in the Internet world. You're a burden on the system with how much you use, and you're upset you're being asked to pay a little more than everyone else.
Basically, people opposed to data caps are like Wall Street execs complaining their taxes are higher than everyone else's.
You could say that, or you could say that the cap is stopping me from actually using the bandwidth I pay for. I pay for 100Mb/sec down, how long would it take me to hit the cap if I used that continuously? So do I really have the 100Mb/sec down that I'm paying for?
And as a side note, I've never hit the cap - I'm not sure it's turned on yet (Comcast customer), but it's coming. But I won't have one soon because I'll be switching to a different ISP as soon as it's available. But if I stayed with Comcast, I would hit it as soon as I get a 4K TV and start watching 4K sources.
You are not paying for CIR 100Mbit. That's the point. (Go find a real commercial ISP with an SLA and a way to call their NOC to quiz them about QoS and peering, and see how much that costs)
The main cost there is the SLA, not the 100Mbit. Nobody is saying that the cheap consumer price should have an aggressive SLA.
And 100mbit of CIR per person isn't the right metric either. We're in a consumer context here, where bandwidth can be massively oversubscribed without capping or running out. That doesn't mean they're not actually selling that much bandwidth.
You can tell me if I'm way off-base on any of the following: Comcast claims that only 8% of their users average more than 1mbps, even in areas without caps. If we assume most of those 8% are using 5mbps and the rest use an entire 100mbps, we might get an average data use of 3mbps per customer. In terms of transit costs, that's nothing. Less than a dollar per mbps in bulk. Almost all the cost is in supplying the pipe that's capable of bursting to 100mbps. So there is no real need to have these caps. Just sell unlimited data.
No. Data caps (and bandwidth limits to some extent) are fundamentally broken.
My water company doesn't shut off my water because I took too many long showers this month. My gas company doesn't shut the valve because I had a few extra loads of laundry to run through the dryer. My electric company doesn't kill the lights because I was working on my car and used the 220V in the garage a lot this month.
Instead they install a meter at the inlet, charge me for exactly what I use (and when I use it!!!) and then they can plan their capacity based around their billings. If I need more inlets (too much current at the mains breaker, not enough gas or water pressure, etc.) then they charge me a fair price for the hardware and installation and bill that new inlet in the exact same way.
It's simple, transparent, and completely controllable by me. (If I don't want to rack up a larger bill this month I just close the inlet.)
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Caps and overages are a very different model: they are charging me much more than the normal cost of service once I cross some threshold or cutting off my service. That'd be like my power company saying: "you've used more than the average 901kWH, so you're going to have to pay the industrial rate on the rest of your consumption this month."
More importantly, since private companies are running the show, we have no real insight into what average data consumption for the populace even looks like. You take it on their word that the plans they market align w/ the reality of average use. We can't verify that's the case because they don't legally have to publish it.
Essentially these companies could be telling you "640k ought to be enough for anybody", and you're arguing that it's perfectly reasonable for them to say anyone using >640k is the top 3% and should be billed at a premium. That's not the sort of thinking that pushes the state of the art forward, in fact it's actively harmful and disincentivizes upgrades to the network.
Their pricing model doesn't line up with the reality of a band-limited service, and they don't give us nearly enough information to verify their claims of what constitutes an "above average" consumer of data.
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- Wireline service should be billed as a metered utility.
- Wireless service should have a fixed access fee to cover the cost of expanding the network (as well as providing E911, etc.) along with a variable access fee that is billed as a metered utility.
Anything else is borderline fraud, and I'm frankly sick of having to navigate the minefield of dishonesty that is consumer-grade ISP pricing schemes.
Carriers with caps generally don't shut off your service, they simply charge you more. So your example of the water company shutting of your water is facetious.
I definitely would prefer a more even metering method, and I think it should be granular down to the megabyte. But data caps are a move in that direction, a very positive move from where we were in the unlimited-but-not-net-neutral past.
Generally speaking, you are not getting charged for "much more" than the normal cost of service, if you have picked a good level for your data plan. Should be just over your usual usage, you might occasionally get an overage once or twice, but it should round out to be cheaper than having picked a higher tier every month.
I would agree with this as long as there was actual competition in all of the markets. But at this point we'd end up with the old monopoly AT&T/Bell style of billing -- I'm old enough to remember when a "long distance" call of a couple of minutes to a town literally 10 miles away would cost several dollars because it was in a different area code. We still have that situation in too many places.
