
Netflix’s biggest bingers get hit with higher internet costs - pseudolus
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-13/netflixs-biggest-bingers-get-hit-with-higher-internet-costs
======
utf985
As someone who comes from a country where monthly data caps for home internet
are completely unheard of and it's standard to have internet with download
speeds between 5 and 10 MB/s for roughly $20/month since circa 2006, I find it
both puzzling and worrying that capped home broadband can still exist in any
developed country, especially with such tiny limits and ridiculous prices that
some of the posters here have mentioned.

A game can easily get up to 50 GB these days, and a even a single patch can be
up to a few GB as well. I can't even begin to imagine how any sort of work
gets done with something like a 500Gb monthly limit in anything above a single
person household.

~~~
hedora
Capped broadband is a new development in the US.

The FCC (federal government) is actually adding new rules to prevent state and
city governments from pushing back against the caps. For instance, without the
rules, states could ban selling or renewing right of way contracts for
internet providers that impose caps or violate network neutrality.

Some cities have started rolling out their own internet providers to compete
with the commercial ones. This (or breaking up the big ISPs and moving to
common carrier) seems like the right long term solution.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Capped broadband is a new development in the US.

No, it's not. _Published_ cap policies are relatively new, because a lot of
caps weren't published, despite caps existing and being applied to customers,
prior to the transparency rule in the Open Internet Report & Order (the Title
I net neutrality regulation that, except for the transparency rule, was struck
down by the courts that came before the Title II net neutrality regulation
which was repealed after Republicans took control of the FCC.)

~~~
SomeOldThrow
Now we just need the caps to be mandatory with all service advertisements and
signups and it almost might make sense.

------
strenholme
Some, but not all, US ISPs have caps on Internet use in the US. The cap is
usually one terabyte. There’s a long list of them at
[https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-
caps](https://broadbandnow.com/internet-providers-with-data-caps) , the
biggest offenders being AT&T, CenturyLink, Cox, Viasat (which, yes, is
satellite Internet), and Comcast (a.k.a. XFINITY).

The only reason why Spectrum, another big US ISP, does _not_ have data caps is
because they agreed, back in 2016, to the US Government to not have them for
seven years when trying to buy other companies.

~~~
99052882514569
A cap of 1 TB seems completely reasonable to me.

edit: After reading some replies, let me modify it and put it this way: the
concept of a cap of n TB, where n is such that 99% of users don't ever reach
it, seems completely reasonable to me.

~~~
alexkiritz
It’s not even remotely. It’s equivalent to 3 mbps. It’s not a technological
limit. It’s only imposed to extract more money and discourage streaming. It
sets the country back technologically. It also discourages content creators
from jumping to 4K.

~~~
99052882514569
Not sure what you mean by "It’s equivalent to 3 mbps". Are you, like,
streaming a video of an eagle nest 24/7?

You are paying for residential Internet service. The number of people who
would legitimately need to transfer more than 1 TB per month over a
residential Internet connection is vanishingly small. Bandwidth, particularly
during high-demand hours, costs money. It is not fair for other users to
subsidize your extreme usage scenario (since it is an axiom that all costs
borne by the ISP are passed on to customers). It is far more fair that you,
the extreme outlier, pays more.

~~~
vvillena
The problem is that underprovisioning uses some statistical average that will
fail on special situations. Content streaming is so common now that there are
peak hours where almost everyone is streaming video. If ISPs need to have that
use case in mind, it should be possible for them to sustain that demand 24/7\.
If they don't do that, it's for one of two reasons. Either they can't sustain
peak demand and they are trying to disincentivize usage, or they can handle a
heavy demand but want to charge extra for off-peak bandwitdh usage, thus
earning money for an already amortized infrastructure.

------
samueloph
Is there any cost that an ISP company has related to the amount of data
transferred? All the costs that I'm aware of are related to the bandwidth, not
the total transmitted data (eg.: IX connections and such).

The ISP companies want to do this because they get more money, that's simple,
and usually followed by awful things like exemption for certain services.

In Brazilian Facebook IT groups it's already common to see people from Angola
using the group to google things, because Facebook usage is out of the data
cap. Some Brazilians even created groups specialized in this "facebook
googling" for Angolans.

It makes me sad knowing how far ISPs are being able to push such bad things.

\- edit to add more info about the current state in Brazil: Mobile internet
plans all have data cap and most have exemption on WhatsApp and Facebook,
while house data plans are forbidden to do so by Brazil's telecom regulator
(ANATEL), unfortunately they are lobbying pretty hard to change that.

~~~
Joeri
Yes, the costs are proportional to the bandwidth, but people want a fast
connection at a low price, so ISP's sell a fast connection at a discount and
limit how often you can use it through traffic shaping and/or data caps to
still turn a profit on it. The business plans are often unlimited, and
typically priced a multiple for what's the exact same technology as the home
plans underneath. If you want to know what unlimited bandwidth really costs,
look at the price of the business plans.

I think ISP's are often undeservedly painted as the bad guys. Yes, some are
profiteers, but most are just turning a normal profit, just like any business.
The only way for them to compete on price with other ISP's is to also impose
caps, because what they charge is just not enough to fund the infrastructure
for a dedicated connection with guaranteed bandwidth.

~~~
one2zero
I assumed the extra cost was not because of the unrestricted bandwidth
(Granted I have Xfinity in Chicago and only pay $15 a month for unlimited on
Gigabit)but because of the static IP(s) associated with the service. In
addition I would assume that trouble calls are elevated over that of a home
user with quicker response times.

Just looking at Biz service vs home and assuming that's because of unlimited
bandwidth is 1:1, there's more going on there that's different between the
two.

~~~
vel0city
Until a few years ago the cost to get additional IP addresses on most business
ISPs was pretty minimal. The ISP my company uses does not even charge for
additional IP addresses, you just need to give good reasons for why you need a
larger IP space. With a previous ISP, additional IP addresses were about
$10/mo but the cost of service was easily 3-4x similar rated speeds as a
residential connection. Most of the additional cost is due to increased
capacity planning and faster service times.

------
superkuh
The problem with this article is that it implies that the only use for high
use of data transfer is to binge watch or consume various forms of media. Data
caps don't kill that and never will.

What data caps kill are peer to peer services, self hosting, and anything
where people actually participate in the internet rather than acting as
consumers only. It's part of the ongoing push to make the internet into
another television where people all use the same centralized services and
never interact with each other directly.

Phone usage has made this even worse since smartphone network connectivity is
not real internet connectivity. There people have learned to accept data caps
(which make sense given the limited actual frequency bandwidth available for
radio in free space). But also they've learned to accept the inability to host
servers, use ports, or do anything other than HTTP/S. The ISPs have seen this
and are now copying the violations that wireless telcos have brought in.

~~~
papln
Why host a server at a home, with the security catastrophe that invites ot
your local network, instead of running your peer node on a rented machine in a
cloud or a colo, that you SSH into from your client?

~~~
olyjohn
To learn how to deal with the security catastrophe that is hosting your own
stuff. Just putting your things on other people's servers doesn't necessarily
make it secure.

------
curt15
>People who use more bandwidth should pay more, they say, especially since
capacity isn’t unlimited.

But don't people already pay more for higher bandwidth connections?

~~~
cmiles74
This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_
at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how
much data they will allow to be delivered.

Thus the situation in this article: they subscriber purchases a 4K television
and chooses a higher bandwidth cable internet plan. They do not realize that
they are only paying to use the same fixed amount of data up more quickly.

I wonder if we'll eventually see companies like Netflix and Disney pressure
cable companies to drop these bandwidth caps. In this article the subscriber
cancels their Hulu account and turns down the Netflix video quality, directly
costing Hulu money and devaluing their 4K television.

~~~
scarface74
_This is a key component of cable company advertising: they stress the _speed_
at which data is delivered to your home network and, somehow, leave out how
much data they will allow to be delivered._

To be more precise, they stress _download_ speed. Comcast’s 1Tb plan has
upload speeds of 30Mbps

~~~
CamelCaseName
In fairness, few people really need high upload speeds, which is why most
plans are as asymmetrical as they are.

One exception may be content creators, who quickly become aware of this fact
once they try uploading their first YouTube video.

In any case, although Comcast (and others) may advertise / stress download
speeds, that information is really easy to look up for anyone who is
interested [0], and is probably shown somewhere along the checkout path.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/Jg94Nv6.png](https://i.imgur.com/Jg94Nv6.png)

~~~
scarface74
Or anyone who uses a VPN for work. ...

------
tmikaeld
I'm working from home and have Swedish provider Bahnhof. Since I pull a lot of
backups and use 4k TV in often at 100TB (Terrabyte). Not a single complaint
and 40$/mo

~~~
zaroth
You download 800MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for $40 per month?
Color me incredulous.

Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a
$40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower
usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.

~~~
esotericn
This (terabytes, not petabytes) is a very standard connection here in Europe.

You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G
(probably more if you had a high gain antenna).

Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.

~~~
ryanmercer
>Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.

Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States
is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with
larger populations than several countries.

\- Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people.

\- Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people.

\- The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million
people.

Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are
individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly
8 times the population

~~~
esotericn
Sure, the relevant comparison is roughly the US with all of Europe.

It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in
the US that have microscopic caps, though.

We're not talking about the outback.

~~~
ryanmercer
>It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in
the US that have microscopic caps, though.

The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in
each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.

And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be
deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~
people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago
11,600~ people per square mile.

Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher
data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given
moment to handle peak.

Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users
in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to
serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude
smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.

The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size
is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing
physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in
Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia)
begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second
largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.

You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country
to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why
NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"

[1]
[https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm](https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm)

~~~
tmikaeld
Bahnhof also build their own infrastructure using their signed up customers
and hosting clients money. AFAIK, internet providers in the us don't and can't
invest like this to improve speed and lower cost.

------
tyingq
Doesn't Netflix cache at most ISP's? That reduces the internal costs for the
ISP substantially. Feels like they should factor that into their caps.

~~~
lkbm
This is what the whole net neutrality debate was about. If ISPs cap data for
small video sites, but not Netflix, that results in a massive advantage to
Netflix (and, presumably, other large incumbents).

For what it's worth, T-Mobile did this with Binge-On:
[https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-
video](https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/binge-on-streaming-video)

~~~
scarface74
What T-mobile did for Binge On is allow _any_ legal video service to sign on
and be zero rated. They didn’t advertise it, but they even allowed some porn
sites.

There was a poster on HN who said that his little small non profit was able to
fill out a form and be zero rated.

------
alkonaut
I want a no cap connection and I want a fast (200mbps+) connection but I’m
also perfectly happy to accept that I can’t have (don’t want to pay the price
of) a connection that allows me to use 200mbps 24/7 for a year.

That’s why I’m thinking there should be some kind of tiering where I get
unlimited 50 mbps (still ok for round the clock 4K) and also N terabytes at
the 200mbps for those occasional big downloads.

My current broadband is 500mbit without data caps, but I suspect that if I do
use 500mbit 24/7 for long then they’d start throttling of contacting me. I’d
be happier with a model with public caps than one with secret caps and
throttling. It could be that I really do have a true 500mbit no-cap
subscription, I don’t know!

~~~
zzzcpan
Internet is sort of naturally capped and throttled for almost all residential
users. You already can't easily download something at 500 mbit, servers do not
stay underutilized and may not have enough bandwidth for your speed, and
servers from more than a couple of hops away won't even be able to serve you
at that speed over a single tcp connection, so you have to look at things like
torrents. Then home routers, they suck too and might struggle with this speed,
wifi most definitely is out of question. You also need to store all that data
somewhere and at that speed you will run out of storage pretty quickly. ISPs
are aware of all this and can bravely offer you speeds you will not be able to
use beyond speed testing. They even expect new customers to go crazy with
downloads in first months of broadband usage and eventually drop their usage
to normal levels. Keep in mind, something like 10 mbit 24/7 usually costs them
very little to even care and I think these days 50 mbits is at that level too,
they are unlikely to mind if 1 out of 1000 users uses 50 mbits 24/7.

------
arnvald
How common is it to have data cap on cable internet? I lived in a few
countries in the last 10 years and have never experienced it. Is US the
exception here or other countries also have such limits?

~~~
viraptor
On a consumer, not high-tier plan? It's a standard in close to every country.
Where is that not the case? (I assume cable here as "any non mobile" rather
than actual cable tv internet provider)

You can find a non-capped (at least in theory) plan everywhere if you pay
enough of course.

~~~
medof
In EU (the Netherlands) you can get 4G unlimited for phone for about 20$. I
live with my friend hosts his own server for backups and home cinema.

For movies/tv shows/games we probably spend few TB a month.

I had never heard about such thing until now, it's ridiculous to have cap and
I'm so glad that I don't have to live in such a place.

~~~
concert-gilled
It is actually unlimited? Several companies in the United States offer
"unlimited data" but throttle speeds after you use 50 GB~ so much that it is
basically unusable.

~~~
markus92
Unlimited has to be unlimited by law. After 10gb of usage a day, you need to
text a number (for free) to get a few more gb, and so on. That's just there to
prevent flooding the network too much.

------
gruez
I wonder why HNers are upset over this. Is this purely a framing issue? In
other words, if the status quo is

 _$80 /month; 1 TB included, +$50 for unlimited_

Would people be happy with

 _$130 /month; $50 discount available if you stay within 1TB_

or what about

 _$80 /month†; †pricing includes $50 discount for staying within 1TB_

~~~
wilde
It’s because most American HNers have no competition in their internet market
and can’t choose an alternative without a data cap.

~~~
dymk
Why would a lack of choice change how they interpret a simple reframing of the
same cost?

~~~
rhacker
The question was specifically "Would people be happy with" which also assumes
that they would be happy with a reframing, but they are, in fact, not happy
with that price at all.

------
reallydontask
We have a 4k tv and watch quite a bit of Netflix/YouTube/NowTv. Our usage has
been around ~ 450 GB/month, which apparently puts us on the 93 percentile of
usage though not sure if this is for our plan (100 Mbit) or all of Virgin
Media (our cable provider)

------
jedberg
> In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed
> at least 1 terabyte of data

How? I have a 4K TV (and a couple of 1080), I work from home, my wife streams
all day, and my torrents are always seeding, and have a gigabit line (with
unlimited data).

I only average about 500GB a month, and my peak was 772GB.

I guess the only thing I _don 't_ do on a regular basis is play games.

Don't get me wrong, the caps are just rent seeking and also totally unfair
(how come watching Comcast on Demand doesn't count against the cap but Netflix
does, even though both come from servers on Comcast's network?), but it blows
my mind that people can actually hit that 1TB cap.

Hats off to y'all.

~~~
sevencolors
Sounds like you're not actually watching in 4k. A 4k video could be around
7-11GB/hour [1], so 10+ movies and binge several shows and you've over the 1TB
easy. Sounds like a lot for a one person, but with a family it's easy to chew
up 100+hrs in a month

A 1080p movie will be 2-4GB/hr.

 _[1][https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-
netflix-...](https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-netflix-
use-976146/) _

~~~
jedberg
Yes, of course not, because no one has that much 4k content. I guess that was
sort of implied in my comment. Even with a 4k TV it's pretty hard to find
enough 4k content to blow out that cap.

------
filleokus
I don't really get why this is so controversial? I mean, all of the HN crowd
here must understand the idea of oversubscription, and many of us have also
seen prices for dedicated 1 Gb/s connection in data centers?

Am I missing something here? Am I overestimating the costs of bandwidth, does
the Netflix/CDN edge serves inside of the ISP network lower it dramatically?

~~~
SomeOldThrow
This is hardly the only possible response to oversubscription, just the one
that maximizes short term profits. The customer certainly isn't funding better
internet (if it did the government subsidies would have worked), and they
certainly aren't getting the advertised service.

So yea, you could frame this in terms of rationality, but since when was
rationality the sole basis of ethics, and since when have ethics become
irrelevant to human life?

------
JTbane
Paying for bandwidth makes sense. More infrastructure is needed to move more
bits around.

Paying for data transferred does not. Data isn't limited like water or
electricity.

There ought to be a law that advertising a plan as "unlimited" is disallowed
if there is a cap.

~~~
ubercow13
It’s obviously way more complex than that, though. The ISP isn’t going to make
sure that all of their peering links have enough bandwidth to carry the full
advertised bandwidth of all of their customers connections simultaneously, in
case everyone tries to download at full speed from the same website at once.
On their end, the bandwidth is under provisioned. Data caps are a way of
managing that that give customers higher peak speeds in exchange for limited
data transfer.

------
chendragon
Here in Vancouver BC Canada, we do have data caps but it appears to have been
only $10 CAD ($7 US) to upgrade to unlimited for that month. Hence, it's not a
massive issue other than in principle to some.

Currently there are two companies, Shaw (cable) and Telus (fibre to the home),
and some smaller ISPs that use either Shaw cables or Telus DSL.

Internet pricing here tends to look like $20-35 CAD per month on the low end
up to about $110 for a high end fibre symmetrical connection, with most plans
coming in around $50-75 if you play the "bounce from ISP to ISP every few
months" game. Data cap costs appear to look reasonable on most plans and you
can get them without caps.

------
dahart
This made me laugh out loud:

> Cable executives prefer not to call them caps, referring instead to “data
> plans” and saying it’s a matter of fairness. People who use more bandwidth
> should pay more, they say, especially since capacity isn’t unlimited

If _any_ internet provider or cell provider offered reasonable pay per GB data
rates without an unreasonable minimum monthly usage charge, I would be all
over it. Google Phi is probably by far the closest thing I've ever seen, but
Comcast & Verizon are absolutely not willing to let me pay only for what I
use, so it's very funny to hear rationalizing quotes about "fairness".

------
tracker1
Ran a business connection at home, and still on that account, it's about 50%
more for the coverage but no caps and much more responsive when I've needed
on-site service. Of course I'd like to save the extra ~$50/month for 1gig
down, 80mb up vs the 200/20 I have now. But the static/unblocked IP and the
better service level make it necessary for when I'm working at home.

For comparison, about $140/month with fees for 200/20 business, where consumer
gigabit/80 is about $90/month iirc. Business gigabit is like $300/mo (f that).

------
dangerboysteve
Maybe this is not the case for Comcast but Netflix deploys edge servers into
the data centers of ISP to cache content local to the client. So this should
make the data on-net and keeping it inside the ISP's pipes. if this is the
case, why would overages be factored in with this traffic? Greed ... count all
traffic as traffic on-net and off ?

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

------
monocularvision
I have no problem with a data cap. But any and all services received from that
provider (i.e. television service) should have to count towards that cap.

------
onetimemanytime
Problem is the lack of real competition. Capping usage so it hits only X% is
reasonable but then not if you already you pay $100 a month. Still, back to
point one, only competition can sort this out and is lacking. Even if they
raised prices to $150 after a few years, they'd raise them more.

On the other hand, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple etc have shifted everything
online so they are saving on distribution.

------
barking
I have Netflix playback settings set at Low quality, which is <= 300 MB per
hour which is 10% of High or 5% of ultra HD.

Seems fine to me.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Have fun wollen the VHS-like quality on a 4k screen.

~~~
barking
It's on a forty something inch tv we generally watch netflix and maybe because
we don't watch terrestrial tv at all any more, we don't notice the lower
quality. As long as I don't have buffering I'm happy. Anyway we live in a
rural area and get our internet by wireless so beggars can't be choosers!

~~~
criddell
If there was a show you wanted to watch in high quality, you can download it
before watching.

------
mrosett
Network congestion is a real thing. If everyone else in my neighborhood is
streaming Netflix in 4k, it's going to reduce my connection's performance. Why
shouldn't the cable company charge them more for that? If we all pay the same,
I'm subsidizing them.

~~~
airstrike
Because if there are that many people in your neighborhood who can stream
Netflix in 4K, the ISP can lay fiber in a densely populated area making a
metric shit ton of money for the foreseeable future, and the pipes will _not_
be clogged. They can easily fit everyone in their fiber infrastructure.

The ISP isn't losing money from offering fiber to New Yorkers. They lose money
by paying for infrastructure in less populated areas in middle America.
They're trying to make up for that by making urban customers effectively
subsidize the Capex the company needs to spend elsewhere

This is a problem in the US and not elsewhere because it's a massive country
with people spread all over

------
cesarb
A monthly bandwidth limit corresponds to a lower average bandwidth. For
instance, if my calculations aren't wrong, a monthly limit of 1TB corresponds
to an average bandwidth limit of around 400KB/s, even if your link should be
capable of much more than that.

------
jeegsy
I know that its probably a cliche at this point but stories like this give me
the forlorn hope that maybe, just maybe physical media will make a strong
comeback.

------
gist
Maybe they are doing him a favor. Maybe he shouldn't be spending all of his
time binge watching Netflix and perhaps he has a much larger problem ('why')
that he should address instead.

------
Pxtl
Here in Canada there was a huge problem with data caps when Netflix launched.
Since then they've loosened a bit, but even now, most low-to-mid broadband
internet packages have caps under 200GB.

------
ocdtrekkie
I have no issue with this. Unfortunately people have failed to recognize that
pricing methods used by ISPs aren't related to the cost of providing some
amount of data, but provided to cover their entire business + profit, divided
out amongst the customer base.

The only thing data caps do is ensure that heavy users pay more. The
alternative to them, is that Comcast would just raise all customers' bills
even more.

In an ideal situation, we'd have pure metered data usage, and pay by the MB,
similar to how we pay for electricity or natural gas usage. Then people who
barely use it would pay drastically less, and yes, the heaviest users would
pay even more.

------
janvdberg
How much generated traffic are we talking about?

------
mxuribe
An awful fact of life in pseudo-capitalist America: if a corporate entity can
charge you more, they will (and it does NOT matter whether it aligns to
traditional supply-and-demand models or not)...And in the case of internet
service (in the U.S.), consumers can not exercise their market ability to move
to an alternative provider. In America, on paper it states "market
capitalism"...but - at least for internet service - in reality, it is nothing
more than an awful form of the not-nice parts of communism. We lack choice in
our markets. </vent>

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> An awful fact of life in pseudo-capitalist America: if a corporate entity
can charge you more, they will

It's a bit myopic to say this only about America.

------
shmerl
Data caps shouldn't exist on ISP plans

~~~
dboreham
You can pay more to not have a cap.

~~~
shmerl
These plans are already overpriced. Charging more for the same thing is
fleecing, and an indicator of a sick monopolized market. Hopefully once low
orbit satellite plans will kick off for real, crooks like Comcast and the like
won't be able to do it anymore.

------
zuuow
Hot take: I watch almost no HD video, and I practically don't download
anything. Why should I have to pay the same money than someone who spends all
day streaming 4K Netflix from 5 screens?

"Just buy a lower speed" is not feasible since ISPs keep pushing the lower
speed that you can get higher and higher. Overselling. If all you get is
fibre, here the minimum is usually 100 Mbps, which I evidently don't need.
Same about data caps in mobile connections.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Because that's how flat rates work: Everyone pairs the same price for the same
product and the losses due to bad actors or power users are caught by the
majority of users who don't use the product that much.

Gym memberships work the same way.

------
AndrewOMartin
There shouldn't be allowed to be a top 1% of internet users.

~~~
dalore
There will always be a top 1%. That's how percentages work.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
My comment was my obtuse way of pointing out that companies will therefore
always have the excuse of "some users are using the system heavily" for
pushing up prices.

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sadness2
TLDR; people who use more data have to pay for more data

~~~
jmkni
Not in the UK. I've literally never had an ISP contain about bandwidth, and I
use a _lot_ of bandwidth.

~~~
mprev
Either you’re pretty young or you’ve been lucky. Unlimited broadband was not
the norm in the UK around ten years ago.

~~~
GordonS
Can confirm, metered and capped services were the norm, even after ADSL became
mainstream.

~~~
newaccoutnas
Especially if you're paying for one of the better services, like Andrews and
Arnold etc. They have caps listed on their broadband pages. There have been
regular stories where customers have been sent letters about their bandwidth
usage even though they're on 'unlimited' plans. The ISPs generally refer to
clauses in ToS, which (imho) doesn't mean anything can be 'unlimited'.

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maxaf
There’s no such thing as unlimited anything. If you use more, you pay more. If
you find this notion ridiculous, imagine for a moment that a company offered
unlimited gasoline for your car, or if your rental property advertised an
unlimited number of occupants per bedroom. That’s bananas!

As a side note, I’m horrified by the idea that there are people whose Netflix
watching habit runs afoul of their ISP’s data cap. Isn’t that sort of
existence depressing as all hell? Imagine the degree of brain rot caused by
this quantity of video content.

~~~
Waterluvian
Your mind seems really quite closed to other perspectives.

Internet is like nuclear power. When there's a lot of extra at night they can
practically give it away. My ISP does this.

Also I can go through about 400GB a month of Netflix just by having it on in
my home office as a sort of ambience.

~~~
maxaf
I’m not denying that using a lot of bandwidth is a valid thing to do. My point
is that heavy users must pay more than casual users.

~~~
Waterluvian
I think your argument is valid but there are other valid arguments too.

I work from home and drive very little. I still pay an equal (more than equal
actually) share of taxes for road maintenance.

I have a cottage at the very end of a private road. I pay the same amount for
20km of road maintenance that the poor sap at the beginning of the road pays,
and he only uses about 100 metres of it.

None of my kids go to school yet, but I pay for public schools.

Obviously this isn't a new debate, but I wanted to draw the parallel with pay-
per-use vs. spooky socialism because I think internet access is no different.

~~~
maxaf
The poor sap and you don't pay the same amount. Fuel taxes, which are levied
as a percentage of what you spend on fuel, will be different for you and the
poor sap who drives less. The more you drive, the more you pay in fuel tax,
which (ostensibly) goes towards road maintenance.

~~~
Waterluvian
If we wanted a pay to play model, fuel tax is a great idea. But based on the
breakdown of my city's funding, basically none of the roads are paid for by
it.

The poor sap at the beginning of the road absolutely pays an equal amount.
It's actually an interesting problem I'll try not to tangent on. You've got a
road and each person needs a certain fraction of it. How do you equitably fund
the road?

