Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?
My Comcast has a terabyte monthly data cap. They will send you an email if you get close to it, and if memory serves they allow you one time to go over it before they charge you some.
Even with downloading many big games sometimes when I refresh my PC and using streaming video apps all the time, I’ve never hit it but have come close several times. I also work from home.
My home Internet charges extra when I use more than 1 TB per month. Not sure but I think it’s metered both up and down.
damn, I share almost a TB/day.
Hopefully only Linux ISOs /s
Nintendo roms
Wow.
How many nintendo roms are there?
switch roms range from 6-20GB each. plus SNES, full collection about 5gb.
I remember Comcast suddenly started enforcing a limit of about 1 TB some years ago when I had them. Realized it happened when I renewed my contract to get a lower price again for a promotional period. Apparently I agreed to a new contract or something that included the new limit. >:|
FCC is looking into that, I think it was during Trump’s administration
I currently have that cap and wondering how I will be able to play MSFS2024 under these conditions. Absolute trash they get to enforce this.
Had the same thought, and a rep already told me I’m 200gb away. Let’s hope some of the stuff is cached.
Just try to pnpy so flights at 30k ft or above so you don’t have to load ground textures lol
Yep sounds familiar 😅
AT&T asks the same question. They provide the bold option to pay more than the competition and get data limits on your home internet.
I am lucky to have a local ISP that is amazing. I’m hoping that they never change.
Home Internet usually doesn’t have unlimited internet. There’s usually caps baked in somewhere. Don’t believe me? Read the fine print. At some point, at some bandwidth usage in the monthly cycle, they will throttle the living crap out of your connection. It’s written into pretty much every contract I’ve ever signed, and I’ve been with over a dozen carriers of landline internet over the years.
The reason being that they don’t want you serving websites or business class functionality with residential level internet. They didn’t build their network with those constraints. They want you paying for and using the business internet package, which has dedicated bandwidth and no caps because you’re paying for a dedicated line to be run.
For mobile phones? Old pricing models still trying to be relevant. There’s no technical reason.
I’ve read the contract of my internet provider. No limit
Then again, I don’t live in the US
Home internet has unlimited internet
It’s not 2002
Well, maybe not in that…one… country
There’s “hard” caps, and there’s “soft” caps. When you hit the soft caps with many of these ISP’s, they start throttling your internet usage by a substantial amount.
Relevant Screenshot of caps as of Sept 2024.
I said “home internet hasn’t had data caps for a couple of decades, well except maybe in that one country where people have no consumer rights and everyone gets fucked up the arse for money just for existing”. I’m paraphrasing here.
You said - “Oh yeah, let me prove you right!”
I’m not sure where you’re going with this
Ok, I missed the sarcasm and allusion to the US as the country you were talking about. That’s fair.
I assumed the OP was asking the question for the US. Which of course, is the thing people in my country do. Assume everything is about us ;)
Weird how 97% of people don’t think that eh? 😂
Closer to 96/95% now ;) But yeah, your point stands. What’s even worse about this, is I’m working on a dual citizenship with Portugal, so I should have had more self-awareness than I showed ;)
I can only speak from a UK perspective, but most home ADSL/VDSL/Fibre providers don’t have limits, other than “if your usage is tanking the network, we’ll ask you to knock it off” type clauses.
Most providers are also signed up to an agreement that if your speed drops 50% below the agreed speed on the package on average, they’ll either give you refunds, or let you out of the contract.
The only ones that throttle are the bargain basement operators aimed at people who don’t care, and one otherwise very competent provider that for some unexplainable reason only gives 1TB by default, charging an extra £10 for 10TB.
And I guess there is also a pricing step up to guaranteed bandwidth. For business use, they tend to be things like 1gbits headline, 500mbit guaranteed burst, 100mbit guaranteed sustained.
I am in the US and I do not have a hard cap, and I regularly go WELL above the soft cap listed for my ISP in that image with no throttling.
Neither my phone internet nor my home internet has a GB limit. The phone internet costs 25€ a month, and home internet 30€.
AOL used to be $19.95/mo for forty hours, then an additional charge per minute beyond that.
Oh god, taking me back to their stupid always-on-top timer on the screen. It was anxiety inducing. I’m so glad pay by the minute internet didn’t last, can you imagine??
I can. My phone bills were over $400 for a while in the early 90s. $400 in 1994 is worth over $850 today.
greed. some home internet services are also capped too for the exact same reason.
I have the opposite. Unlimited phone data, but it throttles above some high number that I’ve never hit. Capped home internet from crapcast, 1.3 TB, I haven’t hit it but I’ve come within a couple gigabytes.
They offer unlimited data if I use their modem/router for an extra $10/mo. Of course their modem comes with the wonderful feature of a public hotspot for any other Comcast customers in the area. I’ve been thinking about getting their modem, putting it in a metal box and just using pass through with my opnsense box.
Lots of home internet does have a data cap, but you might not realize it. Typically what will happen is that, once you hit your cap, you’ll be rate throttled. That throttle might not affect most video streaming since Netflix is really good at video compression, but you’ll see the hit if you are, for instance, downloading large games from PSN, Steam, etc.
Home internet usually does, it’s just pretty high.
For cell / mobile phones, you’re sharing the capacity of the cell among multiple people.
In this example, a rural cell tower can provide up to 395Mbps.
It would only take 40 people watching Kayo at high definition (or any high definition video service) via their phone or a 4G router to saturate this tower.
For everyone else at this time, it’ll still work but even though they might have a strong radio signal (lots of bars), the internet will become slow.
Limiting monthly usage, or charging more for more data per month, reduces the risk of saturation.
There aren’t going to be 40 people using that tower if it’s truly a rural tower. If it isn’t a rural tower then they can update it to handle more throughput. The issue isn’t the towers, it’s the companies wanting to keep using old tech to squeeze out as much profit as possible.
Both of you can be correct. The policy is prevalent to squeeze money out of consumers. However, it’s also easy to imagine more than 40 people in a rural area using their phones for media purposes during PM times in 2024. There’s less to do, internet availability might not exist for some or all residents, and people use their phone for everything now. Casting from a phone is a larger percent of viewing TV now.
In a rural area the population density is a lot less than that of suburbs or the city. We’re talking about 40 people or less using a single tower, this also takes in account of the 3 carriers. If each carriers tower can handle 40 people, that’s potentially 120 users total in a few mile radius, which is normal for rural populations.
This tower has about a 20km radius on average due to topography, covers a stretch of the New England Highway and also covers the nearby village of Black Mountain. A good few hundred phones will be in range I expect.
The tower also has cells for Optus and Vodafone, but they are a significant minority of customers in this area.
In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).
Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).
Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.
Not all of them do, I’ve seen that in America data limits on home internet is common, and here in Europe unlimited phone data is common.
