Are Data Caps Really Necessary?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
869 words · ~4 min read
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so let's be honest as much as it's an isp's job to provide us with a vital
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service they're still businesses and not
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surprisingly they're always looking for exciting and innovative ways to rake in
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that paper some of you won't remember this but back in the dial-up era they
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even charged for internet access by the
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hour assuming you were some kind of rube who
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didn't just ride from free three-month trial to three-month trial by switching
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credit cards all the time anywho
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internet by the hour went the way of the dodo once broadband proliferated but
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that didn't stop their innovation these
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days isps control the flow of that sweet
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sweet data by placing data caps on your
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internet usage the concept here is very simple when you
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sign up for internet service many isps will limit you to a certain amount of
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data each month typically somewhere between a hundred gigabytes and one
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terabyte if you exceed your cap you can be charged extra have your speed
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throttled down or even have your service
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terminated and as high bandwidth use cases like
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streaming hd video have become more and more common an increasing number of
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users find themselves tracking their megabytes as closely as their calories
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so why exactly do the isps impose these
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limits is there a legitimate reason or
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is it just a scheme to squeeze more money out of us
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well the most obvious technical explanation is that any given isp has a
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maximum amount of bandwidth it can handle at once
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data caps theoretically help the pipes
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from getting clogged but large isps the ones who are most
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known for restrictive data caps have so
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much bandwidth that network usage hardly
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ever approaches 100 and u.s giant comcast even tacitly
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admitted this in a leaked 2015 memo
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advising its customer service employees not to tell consumers their data cap
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policy was to help alleviate congestion
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because it wasn't combined with the fact that investing in
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more infrastructure to carry more data at once is
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much cheaper than it was a decade ago and the number of households with a
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broadband subscription has at least in the us
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stopped growing the argument for data caps as a means to
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unclog the pipes seems pretty flimsy
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especially as large isps tend to claim
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that the vast majority of their customers stay below their caps so
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what's the real reason behind it well at least one isp has analogized the
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provision of internet service to the availability of any other scarce good
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pointing out that someone who buys 10 gallons of gas pays more than someone
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who buys only 5. this argument might be
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intrinsically appealing but opponents say that because bandwidth is so cheap
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and isp's profit margins are so high
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internet service can't be thought of in the same way
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add the fact that due to regional opolies many consumers don't have a ton
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of choice when it comes to isps unreliable metering methods and the
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ability of isps to set their own prices free from the government rate regulation
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that you see on your water or electric bill and many people have become
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convinced that data caps are actually just another
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way for the isps to collude with their puppet masters on the trilateral
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commission and squeeze more money out of you
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but this is the part of the video where we
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say that's an overly simplistic and paranoid
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you know what i just can't do this yeah europe's got a much better system where
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isps are forced to provide service without data caps and
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i actually can't come up with a better explanation
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