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?
cell phone providers can, they just won’t (would eat into their profits)
and most of the home internet sold as “unlimited” was a scam – if you started to get too close to some hidden value, they would start throttling your connection
'Member when Comcast was caught illegally using Sandvine in around 2006/2007 to illegally throttle or block BitTorrent traffic?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
More recently, they throttled Netflix until they could extort them to pay for the traffic being used by their own customers, who were already paying Comcast for the very same data usage.
Hm interesting, I’ve never run into issues with hidden throttling.
How would you know if it’s hidden?
Because I get my full speed
money.
data caps are coming to home internet soon too and with inescapable hidden contracts; switch to an independent isp to avoid it before you’re entrapped into one.
Ah yes I’ll just pick from one of the many ISPs in my area
they exist and they usually suck compared to something like comcast or at&t; but they’re much better than a $500 internet bill because you went over your limit or paying considerably more for breaking the contract that you didn’t know you signed when you didn’t read the fine print.
In a lot of places in the US there is only one home service provider.
i’m aware and fwiw; that’s where it’ll be implemented last since the people there are the biggest and best chance at pushing back against this successfully.
Umm, my home internet has a 50GB per month limit. Can’t complain much though, it’s cheap at literally $1 a day, and I’m not a gamer or online streamer.
For ~$30 a month, that’s a complete and utter rip-off.
Even here in Neuland Germany you get at least decent internet with no caps for that price.
Good thing, because some games would take up all of that just to download and install.
That’s more than $1.50 per Gigabyte.
When you download a game from Steam, most games you literally pay more for the data than for the game.
Even when you pirate, you pay like $5 for a BluRay quality movieYou’d be dumbfounded to see what I’ve been able to accomplish using my connection. Terabytes of games archived, I just didn’t have to download nor upload them myself.
Where even has that sort of plan anymore? Are you really rural American?
Guess so. The installation tech had to test like 18 sets of dead phone lines before managing to find one live pair to even connect the internet.
Wow I go through 50GB in less than a day. Sometimes an hour.
How is 1€/day cheap for such limited home Internet? I guess it might depend on where you are, but unless you are in the middle of nowhere that seems expensive.
Here in Germany for example, which really isn’t known for its cheap internet, I can find options that offer 100Mbit Flatrates for 20€/month.
I ain’t even talking about the internet speed, I’m talking about the data cap. And $1 a day is about as cheap as it gets in my area.
as cheap as it gets in my area
That’s not a very good approach to assess prices
My German friends and family don’t believe me when I tell them how expensive internet and phone is in the US. They all think it’s expensive in Germany. Having said that, there are some big differences in take home pay.
$50/mo for internet is a relatively low rate for the US unless you’re lucky enough to live in one of the few places with municipal internet.
50GB a month though?? You don’t use any video streaming services at all? What do you use for media?
I do browse through YT videos, but I don’t bother watching full length movies. Honestly, I’ve lost interest in watching newer movies, seems like a waste of time to me. However, I do enjoy educational and scientific content.
My previous home line had a hard cap at 1TB per month. That seemed like a lot at the time, but I think as the internet grows and requires more bandwidth these “sky high” caps will feel smaller and smaller.
I guess it depends what country you’re in. I don’t have limits on either and don’t want to imagine having that concern.
The first time I saw a mobile plan without any limits was somewhere around 2003-2004. Pretty soon after that, all the competitors started offering similar plans. So glad we got rid of those stupid limits.
They convinced the FCC, cellular networks are different than wired, and should have different rules.
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.
Playing devil’s advocate here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps is wireless spectrum congestion.
It’s going to be precisely the reason. If you have a dedicated wire, fibre or copper then the entire available bandwidth is available per connection (one caveat with copper is crosstalk but it is minimal and can be mitigated). With fibre the available bandwidth per strand is huge.
It’s so fast that even where there’s contention, it is rarely a problem that everyone sharing a part of the connection is downloading or uploading at once. So pretty much most of the times you test, you get the full speed.
With mobile data, the entire cell is sharing a small amount (in comparison) of spectrum. Unlike a wire, the entire spectrum cannot be used by a single tower, a pretty small number of channels are carved out for them. Also because the signals are travelling through the air, there is more of a problem of signal loss and interference to contend with, so the channels very rarely reach the maximum possible speed (forward error correction and reducing bits per symbol to reach a suitable signal to noise ratio both will reduce speed for example.
For upload (which isn’t usually much of an issue) there’s another problem of guard time between timeslots. When downloading, the cell transmitter transmits the whole time and shared the channel between all users (another thing that can slow things down) so there’s no problem of needing a guard time. But when it’s separate transmitters (phones) sending there’s going to be a guard time between different handsets timeslot and the more active transmit stations there are (phones) the more these guard times add up to wasted bandwidth. Luckily most people are downloading far more than uploading, so it’s less of an issue.
I think for these reasons caps are used to limit people from ALWAYS consuming data on the cell/mobile networks and instead using wifi wherever they can in order to keep it fast for those that do/need to.
It’s a self managed QOS. If the customer knows they can only use X data they’re going to be a bit more cautious about using it. Vs if they have unlimited data then they’ll just download that 50 gig file on their phone because “fuck it why not”. The less data each individual customer uses the less infrastructure they have to build, and the faster/more consistent their existing stuff will be.
Cell tower time is a LOT more expensive than time on a fiber optic cable. Your ISP installs a few boxes to serve your neighborhood, a cell carriers tower might go 20 miles.
Home internet had data limits too. In fact, you originally paid by the minute of usage through your telephone line before flat rates became a thing, blocking all calls in the process. Back in the day we’d use various time limited free trials by AOL and other ISPs to browse (Freenet was a very big one here in Germany), which they kinda threw out battling each other for customers. Look up AOL free trial CDs for example.
Limits on home service used to be more common, but some plans still have caps. My home internet has a cap, it is just really, really high and they charge you more for exceeding it instead of cutting off access.
My phone also has a cap, but the cap means the connection is throttled instead of charging more.
I have had a home plan in the past woth no limit, but they didn’t offer service to my new house when I moved.
Home internet did happen to have a limit in most places prior to the pandemic (at least in California). It was one of the big quiet changes that occurred. For example, ATT used to have 150GB limit about 5 years ago but it kept getting bumped up.
That is exactly the reason.
Those caps also prevent the small percentage of people who would abuse the system from having as much of a negative impact on other users.
Back when the company I used to work for offered an unlimited voice calling deal (we’re talking 25 years ago on the old analog cell system) there were a few people who decided it would be a good idea to use their phone as a baby monitor, which tied up a voice channel for days at a time. There being only a dozen or less voice channels on most towers at the time made that kind of thing a signifigant cause of congestion.
Yep. And to add to your statement, its probably to make torrenters/massive downloaders pay or curtail their activities. Then streaming came along, voice chat, etc… that both helped us entertain ourselves and work within the home from the pandemic. If people didn’t have unlimited plans, they would switch ASAP because it was no longer a want, it became a need.
I went over my home data cap a couple times. The ISP rep was not amused when I called to have them bump my speed down to the lowest tier and add unlimited data. I pay less now and the speed difference is not noticeable for me with daily usage. I told them I was going to download random crap all day, delete, and redownload out of spite lol.
It is a proxy for don’t use too much on the busy towers. In small towns it doesn’t matter, but if you are in a downtown the tower will have many people connecting to it and the radio frequencies are shared. By putting a limit on everyone they force better sharing of that limited bandwidth. The limit is very large - far more that than the large abusers will use alone, but in a dense areas it is less than the common person will use all at once.
Tmoblie has (or had?) a binge on plan - if you used video (which we quickly figured out meant low quality - but probably good enough for a tiny phone screen) or audio you were using a lot of data, but it was consistent all day and so they didn’t have to count it - if the tower doesn’t have enough bandwidth for everyone on the first day of the month they have to fix that. That is the real worry: the tower running out of bandwidth on the first day of the month.
In the past it was due to technical constraints.
Now it’s just greed.
