Their network is under provisioned. They sell an apartment building 300mbps connections to all 8 tenants, but only have a 1Gb connection. To make sure that link isn’t always saturated, they impose a data cap to make you not want to use the bandwidth you’re paying for. On top of that everyone’s connection is crippled during hours like the evening when everyone is using it. As a bonus, they can sell you cable TV on top, so you don’t hit your data cap watching shows.
I build ISP and private data networks for a living.
A contention ratio for residential circuits of 3 to 1 isn’t bad at all. You’d have to get pretty unlucky with your neighbors being raging pirates to be able to tell that was contended at all. Any data cap should scare the worst of the pirates away, so you probably won’t be in that situation.
If you can feel the circuit getting worse at different times of the day then the effective contention ( taking into account further upstream ) is probably more like 30 to 1 than 3 to 1.
I cringe every time I hear people choosing LTE / 5G for home connection over DSL / fiber. Here ISP’s can’t legally have a mimimum bandwidth less than 70% of the nominal bandwidth for fiber / copper described in the contract.
But they can sell as many mobile subscriptions as they please and they sure like selling them.
Because businesses exist to make money, so they have to balance charging as much money to the customers as they can without losing them to a competitive company. That used to mean that they had to treat customers with respect and make them want to stay with the business, but now they’ve realized that they can just pay lawmakers to let them have a monopoly, allowing them to charge as much money to the customers as they want without worrying that they’ll leave, since there’s either no competition for them to leave to, or the competition is using the same strategy, so leaving wouldn’t fix anything anyway. Free market, baby!
It still shocks me that they cap usage. There is no reason at all to do this. Why are they doing it?
Their network is under provisioned. They sell an apartment building 300mbps connections to all 8 tenants, but only have a 1Gb connection. To make sure that link isn’t always saturated, they impose a data cap to make you not want to use the bandwidth you’re paying for. On top of that everyone’s connection is crippled during hours like the evening when everyone is using it. As a bonus, they can sell you cable TV on top, so you don’t hit your data cap watching shows.
I build ISP and private data networks for a living.
A contention ratio for residential circuits of 3 to 1 isn’t bad at all. You’d have to get pretty unlucky with your neighbors being raging pirates to be able to tell that was contended at all. Any data cap should scare the worst of the pirates away, so you probably won’t be in that situation.
If you can feel the circuit getting worse at different times of the day then the effective contention ( taking into account further upstream ) is probably more like 30 to 1 than 3 to 1.
Wouldn’t two Steam users downloading a game be enough to notice?
QoS is a thing, so it depends.
No, if two 300 megabit tails are shaped correctly, a third user shouldn’t notice that the 1G backhaul has got a bunch of use going on.
If you do, there’s something wrong or you aren’t really getting the 1G for some reason. Not generally a concern in a carrier platform.
Depends. If steam is pulling a full 300mbps on both connections there would still be 40% of the bandwidth available.
I cringe every time I hear people choosing LTE / 5G for home connection over DSL / fiber. Here ISP’s can’t legally have a mimimum bandwidth less than 70% of the nominal bandwidth for fiber / copper described in the contract.
But they can sell as many mobile subscriptions as they please and they sure like selling them.
Are you kidding? Lol. It’s money. The answer is always money.
Queue nip flaps and rubbing.
The only reason its ever been, money
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Because businesses exist to make money, so they have to balance charging as much money to the customers as they can without losing them to a competitive company. That used to mean that they had to treat customers with respect and make them want to stay with the business, but now they’ve realized that they can just pay lawmakers to let them have a monopoly, allowing them to charge as much money to the customers as they want without worrying that they’ll leave, since there’s either no competition for them to leave to, or the competition is using the same strategy, so leaving wouldn’t fix anything anyway. Free market, baby!
It’s illegal for them to cap it in some jurisdictions (e.g. Massachusetts, where I live).