Terabyte-Using Cable Customers Double, Increasing Risk of Data Cap Fees

exlink said:
6GB per month while streaming TV shows? Do you stream it at 480p at the lowest possible bitrate?

I'll go through 6GB of data in a couple hours; let alone a month. But I stream at 1080p and 4K (when available), and regularly download games that are several gigabytes.
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We have the Roku set to 720p, but we only watch zero to a couple hours of television a week, tops.

EDIT: I forgot, we use a Tablo fo local channels and so some of what we watch is also from that which does not count against the streaming data.
 
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Darunion said:
You are the reason they oversell bandwidth. Download random shit you don't need just to bring the average up please!
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Agree in principle but not in practice. I have no delusions that they use the "cap" number as some aggregate based on user averages. I think they picked 1TB because it was some nice round number that at the time sounded huge, and they can easily throw in shit like "That's over 10000 hrs of video watching* ... *with 240p video" and then they simply make up a number that says "only 1% of our users go over that typically"
 
coynatha said:
And Comcast will cut our internet service to 75Mbps (from 150Mbps) if we cancel the TV side of the bill. It's a big reason we keep it. Plus, we love the Xfinity box & remote, DVR, and OnDemand portion. 90% of the channels are unwatched 90% of the time.
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Well ever region is different, but that's probably your "first tier" lie they're dishing you on that. If they give you 150Mbps now, they can give you 150Mbps without cable, they like to spread misinformation about what will happen if you cut TV. An easy check is to check out what internet offers are available for someone in your area who doesn't have Comcast (which can be hard if you live in some subdivision where literally everyone is wired), don't be signed into your account when checking, if they ask for an address give one across the street or something to say you're a new user. Very often they'll show different options, or offer you a "Blast increase" (or whatever their terminology is). Same thing happened here, I cut TV because after the promo prices I was paying like $70/month for TV I wasn't watching, and that doesn't even include the "DVR Rental" "Local sports franchise fee" "Local broadcast fee". They told me I couldn't "downgrade" via chat, so I sucked it up and talked to someone on a phone (which I think I got lucky because I was only on hold for like 3 minutes), said I want internet only, and they said I could do 25Mbps or 250Mbps, didn't mention in between values until I started stating that I can get fiber from AT&T, and 100Mbps from Sonic, and even a few other relatively unknown companies like Wave. And next thing you know "We can get you 100Mbps with blast upgrade which gives you 200Mbps (or something like that). And all I had to do was agree to 12 months.

Now again, I understand areas differ in what is offered, especially if there are literally ZERO other options. But if you press them hard enough, you might find they do offer stuff, and don't buy the promotional pricing as a comparison tool, because that's their "tier 2" lies and misinformation push, they get you to upgrade or side-grade a service you don't want but give you the 12month promo price which may be cheaper than internet only.
 
i will never pay for an internet service that has data caps. i will take a slower speed to avoid a cap any day. if i pay a little more, that's fine by me.

the rates they charge for data overage is extortion. pay more or we cut you off! but when you think about it, as technology gets better the cost per unit of data should decrease, not go up. but yet that is exactly what has happened.

i remember reading a report back around 2005 (give or take) where this is exactly the case and it pegged the actual cost per GB over at less than 10 cents. this was nearly 15 years ago.
 
coynatha said:
We're 80GB away from this months 1 TB cap. Got the kid RX580 rigs for Xmas...lots of game installs happened, and their baby sister pretty much has YouTube running 24/7, and the wife has Netflix on ALL the time. Did 823GB in December. 400-600GB the months before that. Your typical? family of 5.
3 gaming PC's. 1 workstation. 1 laptop. 2 smart phones. 2x Nintendo Switch. 1 Smart TV. Netflix + Amazon Prime Video. Echo Dot + Samsung SmartHub w/ a few light switches/doorlock, an Arlo camera, etc.

I don't feel like a heavy user.
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This is much like my situation. We're long time cord cutters, and we've ditched physical media entirely as well. So everything is streamed. My wife and I are both gamers, so we'll eat up data when we download a new game or get a big update. I watch a lot of twitch and youtube. The younger two kids will stream shows all day if we let them. The older two (girls) are more into streaming music, but they watch some video too.

I don't feel like we're different than most families in how we use data, granted there are six of us. Still, it is a struggle some months to stay below 1tb. I had to set the default stream quality to 480p for youtube on the kids devices. The thought of doing a lot of 4k streaming is laughable to me given the cap we have. Good thing we no longer have a 4k tv.

Advil said:
250GB is average for streaming use.

We don't need data caps, we need INFRASTRUCTURE to handle demand.

We will NEVER achieve on-demand 4k streaming without sufficient bandwidth available.

Besides, I have heard it suggested from people who work in the network departments of major institutions that we probably have plenty of backbone right now, it's just that the providers either don't have enough bandwidth on their own networks, won't update their equipment on the final miles or are ACTING like this is a big deal when it really isn't for profit.

How can these companies sell 100MB or 1GB internet connections and then out of the other side of their mouth say they can't support the bandwidth? Why does ANYONE need a 100MB or 1GB connection if the entire purpose isn't to use a huge amount of data per month? And if they can not support that kind of usage, then why aren't the internet connections limited to an average they CAN support?
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This. You're right on the money. Twice now, Comcast has increased my speed but left the cap at 1tb. It makes no sense to me, at all. I'd much rather be back at 50mbps with a 2tb cap. We need to increase the data path width, not the transfer speeds.

THRESHIN said:
i will never pay for an internet service that has data caps. i will take a slower speed to avoid a cap any day. if i pay a little more, that's fine by me.

the rates they charge for data overage is extortion. pay more or we cut you off! but when you think about it, as technology gets better the cost per unit of data should decrease, not go up. but yet that is exactly what has happened.

i remember reading a report back around 2005 (give or take) where this is exactly the case and it pegged the actual cost per GB over at less than 10 cents. this was nearly 15 years ago.
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In a perfect world, I would not pay for a capped internet service either. However, between corporate money and a particular political agenda, that is not a reality for me. I have exactly two choices for an ISP. One is fast and capped at 1tb. The other choice is much slower and capped at 250gb. Guess which one I go with?
 
Jealous of you lot, welcome to New Zealand where we pay shitloads for 80gb a month and struggle to use it in rural areas. Rural is 35 or 40 mins from biggest city centre.. The politicians on an island get a 500k Wi-Fi system though, unsuprisingly.
 
doublejack said:
In a perfect world, I would not pay for a capped internet service either. However, between corporate money and a particular political agenda, that is not a reality for me. I have exactly two choices for an ISP. One is fast and capped at 1tb. The other choice is much slower and capped at 250gb. Guess which one I go with?
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Yeah, that is the problem, there isn't much in the way of choice for many people.

I am currently lucky to be able to chose between Verizon FiOS and Comcast where I live. I just happen to live in one of those rare areas where they actually try to compete with each other.

Thus far neither seem to have caps, but I am concerned that at some point that will change.
 
So, Verizon FiOS doesnt have an accessible page where I can see my usage statistics.

Anyone have any suggestions for how I can easily monitor this on my pfSense router?

I spent some time playing with the softflowd plugin last night. The plugin itself seemed easy to set up on pfSense, but where I ran into problems was with the Netflow collector. I spun up a VM on my server to be the collector, installed Ubuntu server on it, and tried to get NFDump and NFsen to work on it as a collector, but this turned out to be a much more convoluted task than I expected.

With my mind at reduced capacity due to the flu, I gave up after a while.

Any alternate/easier suggestions?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, that is the problem, there isn't much in the way of choice for many people.

I am currently lucky to be able to chose between Verizon FiOS and Comcast where I live. I just happen to live in one of those rare areas where they actually try to compete with each other.

Thus far neither seem to have caps, but I am concerned that at some point that will change.
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My Comcast used to be uncapped. I'm not sure if AT&T instituted their 250gb cap first or if it was Comcast with a 1tb cap, but Comcast seems to be content with saying "our cap is 4x higher" and claiming some sort of victory. It is the consumer that has lost, though, not the other corporation in the "battle".
 
doublejack said:
My Comcast used to be uncapped. I'm not sure if AT&T instituted their 250gb cap first or if it was Comcast with a 1tb cap, but Comcast seems to be content with saying "our cap is 4x higher" and claiming some sort of victory. It is the consumer that has lost, though, not the other corporation in the "battle".
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They are sly enough that they do different things in different markets depending on what the competition is like there.
 
travisty said:
People really need to petition for city run fiber. No caps here in Longmont CO with Nextlight Fiber :)
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Just waiting on Erie, Co to follow suit. We recently voted on moving forward with muni broadband. Wonder on how long it will take. Today I upgraded to 50$/mo no data cap...FML last 8 months were right on the edge of 1tb last 3 months were over.
 
Well, I keep using it as an example, but it was a few YEARS ago now that GTAV launched with a 60GB download. People had a LOT of trouble installing that game during launch week.

60GB per pop. You download that game 4 times trying to sort it out.... bingo! 250GB used. And you havn't done one single other thing with your internet that month.

These data amounts they are talking about (250GB, even 1TB) are NOTHING if you actually use several of the common services available on the internet.

It's like these companies are still literally oblivious to the last 10-15 years of online development.

No one will be able to pay their overages and have the amazing technology we are told is coming.
 
Domingow said:
Just waiting on Erie, Co to follow suit. We recently voted on moving forward with muni broadband. Wonder on how long it will take. Today I upgraded to 50$/mo no data cap...FML last 8 months were right on the edge of 1tb last 3 months were over.
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I wish all the luck in the world to the rest of Colorado to follow suit. It's well worth it! =D
 
travisty said:
I wish all the luck in the world to the rest of Colorado to follow suit. It's well worth it! =D
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Looking at NextLight's pricing, it would cost $210 a month for 100/20 service with 5 static IPs. I certainly hope the rest of Colorado doesn't follow their pricing structure.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
I couldn't even guess at my bandwidth usage as I have no way to monitor it. Charter (now Spectrum) doesn't have caps nor provides a way to see how much data you have used. I pay $65.99/ month (no other services with them) and I just did a speed test and got 215.4 Mbps down and 11.5 Mbps up.
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pretty sure charter still uses the old 1TB soft cap system comcast used for years.. but all depends on where you live, west coast/mid west it's rare you'll ever get an excessive bandwidth usage notice while on the east coast it's a completely different story.


Advil said:
Well, I keep using it as an example, but it was a few YEARS ago now that GTAV launched with a 60GB download. People had a LOT of trouble installing that game during launch week.

60GB per pop. You download that game 4 times trying to sort it out.... bingo! 250GB used. And you havn't done one single other thing with your internet that month.

These data amounts they are talking about (250GB, even 1TB) are NOTHING if you actually use several of the common services available on the internet.

It's like these companies are still literally oblivious to the last 10-15 years of online development.

No one will be able to pay their overages and have the amazing technology we are told is coming.
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completely agree.. years ago yeah i use to download a lot of shit(just going to leave it at that) where i was pulling 2-3TB a month.. these day's 90% of my internet usage is either twitch.tv, netflix 1080/4k/UHD, or amazon prime video and i'm still doing ~ 980GB's a month in usage.. usually the last week of every month i have to set twitch to 720p to make sure i don't hit my 1TB cap and leave enough room in case any games in my steam library have a huge update(which is another reason why i uninstalled pubg a long time ago). god forbid if i want to buy a game and download it with how large games are getting that basically means a few days not being able to stream anything.

it's quite sad to see the state of ISP's and internet access in america. something needs to change and i think it's going to happen sooner than later as we get rid of the old fart politicians that have no basic understand of what the internet is.
 
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BSmith said:
Holy crap! We averaged just over 6GB/month in 2018 and I am going to guess most of that is streaming television shows.

I thought we were excessive in our use. WOW!
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No gaming consoles? I just went through 100GB in the past 2hours on the PS4. I do think you are at the bottom of the bandwidth graph there!
 
ND40oz said:
Looking at NextLight's pricing, it would cost $210 a month for 100/20 service with 5 static IPs. I certainly hope the rest of Colorado doesn't follow their pricing structure.
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So...that link is for commercial / business use. And FWIW 210/mo is still cheaper than similar comcast business offering.
This is the residential link, 69.99 for 1gig up and down.
 
Vathral said:
No gaming consoles? I just went through 100GB in the past 2hours on the PS4. I do think you are at the bottom of the bandwidth graph there!
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Right, 6GB a month probably is just advertisement banners for me. Need to get my pihole back up and running. Web browsing was so much faster with it.
 
86 5.0L said:
1TB? Thats cute

View attachment 138089
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I lost my AT&T unlimited data when I downgraded to 300Mbps from 1Gbps.
December was a heavy month, about 980GB, 20GB away from the cap.

If I continue to see heavy months, I will go back up in speed. Netflix, PCs, security cams running 24/7 really adds up.
We need a MetroPCS of home internet to come along to force companies to ditch the data caps, just like phone companies had to ditch cellphone minute plans.
 
Darunion said:
Right, 6GB a month probably is just advertisement banners for me. Need to get my pihole back up and running. Web browsing was so much faster with it.
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I have no idea how anyone gets by with 6GB used a month. Shit, my wife and I share a cell plan and we have 30GB a month on that. It is not unheard of for us to use 10GB each on our phones. I guarantee that my parents use way more than 6GB a month, and they don't have a smart tv. That's an extreme fringe low end number.
 
WorldExclusive said:
I lost my AT&T unlimited data when I downgraded to 300Mbps from 1Gbps.
December was a heavy month, about 980GB, 20GB away from the cap.

If I continue to see heavy months, I will go back up in speed. Netflix, PCs, security cams running 24/7 really adds up.
We need a MetroPCS of home internet to come along to force companies to ditch the data caps, just like phone companies had to ditch cellphone minute plans.
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I'd put money on T-Mobile's 5G roll-out rattling that cage. But it'll be a few years. And that's assuming they offer a home 5G modem/router option.
 
I consistently have issues getting below 1tb a month with comcast. I only have 50gb free until the end of the month in 2 days. I can understand a 1.5 or 2tb cap but comcast's 1tb cap is not enough for my family of 5. Unfortunately, I have no other option in my area except for comcast.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
completely agree.. years ago yeah i use to download a lot of shit(just going to leave it at that) where i was pulling 2-3TB a month.. these day's 90% of my internet usage is either twitch.tv, netflix 1080/4k/UHD, or amazon prime video and i'm still doing ~ 980GB's a month in usage.. usually the last week of every month i have to set twitch to 720p to make sure
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And this is primarily why there are data caps still, when a majority of the internet providers also sell television services it makes for competition they do not want, especially when they have a business model that also chqrges you extra for "HD" channels, most of which is 720p too. It has very little with data and everything to do with what type of data. The light is at the end of the tunnel that tv type entertainment is going to be primarily done through the internet and your cable or satellite provider doesnt have a monopoly on the pricing structure and channels to watch, but they do have the gateway to the internet and can throttle your usage there with things like data caps
 
Glad I don't have data caps.


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doublejack said:
I have no idea how anyone gets by with 6GB used a month. Shit, my wife and I share a cell plan and we have 30GB a month on that. It is not unheard of for us to use 10GB each on our phones. I guarantee that my parents use way more than 6GB a month, and they don't have a smart tv. That's an extreme fringe low end number.
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On my phone right now.

Rarely go over my 6gb.
 
ND40oz said:
Looking at NextLight's pricing, it would cost $210 a month for 100/20 service with 5 static IPs. I certainly hope the rest of Colorado doesn't follow their pricing structure.
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That's business I assume? Residential rates are $50 a month for gig up/down no caps

Also why pay extra for static IP If cost is an issue? Use dynamic dns
 
travisty said:
That's business I assume? Residential rates are $50 a month for gig up/down no caps

Also why pay extra for static IP If cost is an issue? Use dynamic dns
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Yeah it's not worth paying a for a single static if that's all you need except for some very specific use cases. NextLight probably isn't blocking ports like Comcast does with their residential either. But, for those of us who do have businesses or home offices out of the house, this municipal broadband business pricing is much higher than both Comcast and Centurylink business pricing. The current residential rate of $70 a month for symmetrical gig is a great deal though.
 
ND40oz said:
Yeah it's not worth paying a for a single static if that's all you need except for some very specific use cases. NextLight probably isn't blocking ports like Comcast does with their residential either. But, for those of us who do have businesses or home offices out of the house, this municipal broadband business pricing is much higher than both Comcast and Centurylink business pricing. The current residential rate of $70 a month for symmetrical gig is a great deal though.
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Also it's only 70 for the first year the it's 50. OR 50 if you sign up within the first 90 days of moving in iirc
 
doublejack said:
I have no idea how anyone gets by with 6GB used a month. Shit, my wife and I share a cell plan and we have 30GB a month on that. It is not unheard of for us to use 10GB each on our phones. I guarantee that my parents use way more than 6GB a month, and they don't have a smart tv. That's an extreme fringe low end number.
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I use 100-400MB a month in cellular data. My total download usage since September is 1.14GB. Some of us just don't use much mobile data. I wouldn't be surprised if I had north of 1TB of data usage on my regular internet at home but my data usage is not being monitored either by myself or my ISP (no data caps).
 
Vathral said:
No gaming consoles? I just went through 100GB in the past 2hours on the PS4. I do think you are at the bottom of the bandwidth graph there!
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I used to have a gaming console, but only bought one game for it. Only reason I had it was for the Bluray player. Never liked gaming on consoles due to the controls.

I am thinking I am at the bottom of usage, these days. I was not too surprised by that, but I was surprised by the amount. Every year we seem to use less. We took an uptick when we dropped DiSH and went streaming. Before that we were ususally at 500MB/month or less. I was shocked at the first report being over 4GB. I was really taken aback by it.

Funny thing is, we do not have any data caps. I think we are at 80Mb/s for the download speed on the connection.

It is difficult for me to imagine what people are doing to use up that kind of data. I could see the occasional spike due to a game update, but that is not an everyday thing.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
I use 100-400MB a month in cellular data. My total download usage since September is 1.14GB. Some of us just don't use much mobile data. I wouldn't be surprised if I had north of 1TB of data usage on my regular internet at home but my data usage is not being monitored either by myself or my ISP (no data caps).
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I use more than 400mb a month on my mobile web browser. I use it a lot to look up reviews and things like that when I'm out and about, shopping for example. I also use some apps that consume a fair bit of data, such as The Score for sports news and scores. Then there's streaming on the go, between youtube and twitch, as I'm waiting (with four kids, I can't keep track of how much time I spend waiting in the car as I'm playing free Lyft dad). So yeah, several GB a month on mobile is easy as pie for me, and that's without tethering.
 
Dang.. I thought our usage was pretty high, but nothing compared to some of you guys. We "cut the cord" (god I hate that term since almost everyone still has a cable of some sort coming info internet) several years ago. Keep local channels via Xfinity only because it's like $2 more than just going Internet only but no Xfinity equipment and while I DVR some stuff with Plex we never watch the DVR version. Everything we watch on TV is streamed, with the exception of some movies which we grab from RedBox and either watch that night or rip/watch/delete. 2 kids (9 and 12) who are addicted to YouTube so when they aren't in school (like today due to low attendance numbers) YouTube is playing pretty much constantly. Netflix, Amazon Video, Emby make up all our streaming. Not a gaming family.. so Usenet makes up for that. I also work from home 4 days a week (VPN into work) with something playing on an extra monitor. We don't have 4K TVs, but everything is watched in 1080P.

With that said... we aren't even close to hitting 1TB. Maybe it's because we all watch the same thing on one device (TV) during evenings? How many games/updates do people who hit 1TB download each month? Do you have 3-4 different 4K streams going at once in the evenings? Leave music/video streaming in rooms you aren't in?
 

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spiroh said:
I consistently have issues getting below 1tb a month with comcast. I only have 50gb free until the end of the month in 2 days. I can understand a 1.5 or 2tb cap but comcast's 1tb cap is not enough for my family of 5. Unfortunately, I have no other option in my area except for comcast.
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Like you, I don't have a choice for ISP. I'm stuck with Comcast.

I talked about this a year ago when they started putting caps in place. Comcast says only a tiny percentage go over 1TB. They know as well as anyone that as more 4k and 8k content become available, the data usage will go up to the point where many people go over that cap. I really doubt they are going to up the cap for free so that people are not getting hit with fee's.

The whole point of putting caps in place a year or two ago, at such a high number, was to give people a false sense of security that they are so far away it won't matter to them. Keeps the public outcry down. Then before you know it, bam, you're over the cap and they are hitting you with fees.

Anyways, the price they pay for bandwidth does not go up or down based on how much data is being access, not that the level they operate at. That's just not how the Internet or networking works.

If Comcast truly thinks 1TB is the 'magic number', then that tiny percentage of people going over the cap will balance out with the 99% that are not going over the cap. There's no need for this. It's just a scam.
 
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