Why Data Caps Suck: The Animated Examination

Why Data Caps Suck: The Animated Examination.

Same whiny, "Inconceivable!" voice, but it's only 11 minutes this time. Here, I talk about data caps, and why all the excuses that broadband and mobile providers use to put them in place don't hold water.

[bielgaucho_real]

This video is 3 years old, and Brazil is facing this issue right now. We, as citizens, are fighting against it. For now, we are winning.

[Dragonsamuari]

Except data caps hurt everyone, not just the casual user. Small businesses would suffer, students would be stuck with watching how they use their data when researching for classes, etc. Rather than taking advantage of the internet and the way people use it to offer goods and services, many companies are stuck in the past where they could control what content and offers they wanted you to see, so they are trying to impose all these restrictions just to get the consumer to buckle to their will.

[rockoviper]

data caps defeat the whole purpose of modern internet service

[irun_mon]

when someone says caps, comcast instantly come up in my mind

[antonsebastian]

The bastards would charge us to breathe if they knew how.

[MrDreigon]

I feel like we need a kickstarter to get this message onto TV in the form of a 30 second ad, so more people know about this, and hopefully pressure ISPs to change their data cap policies

[MrDeadInMyPocket]

I logged in and thumbed this up. I did it with a very serious face on too.

[Dirtbag]

So does this mean that Grandpa casually browsing the web at around say 7PM is probably putting more stress the network than me downloading a Steam game at 5MBps (yes capital MB) at 3AM?

[omega]

Great video.  Interesting to watch after reading that Comcast is starting to roll-out data caps in test markets.  Just had to address a couple corrections: GE doesn't own Comcast (they bought NBC/Universal from them) and Time Warner Cable is now an independent company after being spun off from Time Warner. The cable company kept the name, but they have no corporate ties to Warner Bros/HBO/CNN/etc anymore

[zachburke]

can we just get rid of throttling and data caps.

[EQuivalentTube]

I love your rants. We need more of that.

[Yemto]

I couldn't pay my internet bill last month, so I needed to use what data cap I had left on my phone, and it sucked. I needed to be very selective what I watched on youtube, and what quality. 

[rentacowisgoogle]

Get yourself an unlimited data plan on your cellphone while you still can, that allows at least 4G and no throttling. Keep it forever because soon no cell companies will provide unlimited data. You can keep a contract plan forever if you keep paying and they cant change your billing amount by much, you will get "grandfather" status when they stop offering the unlimited plan.

[adammoffett]

Nice video. disclosure: I am an administrator at an ISP (we don't have caps)
If we get a cap at tier1 it's on ninety-fifth percentile usage, rather than bytes transferred, and that is more relevant and fair than bytes transferred. It's done as a transfer cap by ISPs because counting bytes is administratively easier to do on a large scale.
Data caps are the wrong way to address the problem, but it is a way to address a real problem. Assertions that capacity problems do not exist are incorrect.

[CloudchaserShaconag]

I know that with Comcast, the reason given for a 250G a month cap (the enforcement of which has been suspended for some time now) was because if you had a neighborhood full of people doing high bandwidth things all at once, that would slow down the internet for everyone. It used to be that in the last few weeks of summer vacation and the first few weeks after Christmas, the internet speed at my den was ridiculously slow, as slow as 0.5mbps due to people doing high bandwidth things.

[trifontrifonov]

Great show, the jokes are funny, the narration is easy to understand and the information well translated to the viewer. You really should make more of those (and when enough of us watch it sign a contract with Youtube). Also maybe you should try to make a show explaining some basic tech stuff. Like a basic description of the different operating systems for P(god knows how many times I have been asked what Linux is) or how a router work - you know basic stuff.

[BareFinn]

Here in Norway the telephone company that used to have monopoly tried using caps when broadband started, but the other ISP's had no caps so they had to give in. There's only caps on cellular data plans. :-)

[jadkhoriaty]

For the TCP part of this video, the information is accurate but is not complete. You have to consider that if a group of 10 people all download large files at the same time on a network of 50 Mb/s, yes the speed will be divided amongst them equally, i.e. each will get a speed of 5 Mb/s. Now imagine that same group of 10 people browsing normally, i.e. needing to send packets from time to time (e.g. facebook, instagram, google...). Because each activity (the browsing) is considered a random event that is independent from the other activities (since it is done by independent users), statistics dictate that they will rarely "collide" on the network, i.e. need to send/receive a packet at the same time. Meaning that instead of splitting the 50 Mb/s network speed into 10, maybe 3 people will have to send/receive a packet at the same time, so each one of them will have ~16 Mb/s and the next moment maybe 2 will send/receive a packet and each will get 25 Mb/s... So overall the users of the network will have better speed and experience.
Also, you didn't account for UDP. In UDP the client or server does not care how congested the network is and just sends the packets no matter what. The bare UDP protocol does not expect an ACK for each packet thus it doesn't know when the network is congested and when it isn't. Video streaming is done using the UDP protocol because even if a frame sent in a packet is dropped/lost on the network, your eye won't notice that an image was skipped. So it is important to take UDP into account. I would safely assume that people that have unlimited data are streaming high definition videos/movies on their phones while commuting: Usually a video has a minimum of 24 frames per second (fps) but most of the time at least 30. Even if the frames are compressed when sent over the network (which they are), at 30 fps it's still a huge amount of data being transferred on the network for a movie that might occupy the network for minutes or even hours. Now imagine that those 10 people are streaming HD videos at the same time and you join this network, your tweet or Facebook status update will fail or will take a really long time before that TCP protocol realises that the network is HUGELY congested and will send and resend countless times bite-sized packets over the network until it eventually succeeds a few dozens of seconds late. So you're effective network speed might be 1 Mb/s which is very extremely sucky...

I honestly didn't think I'd blabber for that long when I started writing this comment but I just wanted to prove that you haven't considered all the possibilities. Full disclosure: I can't justify the telecom companies not honering a contract they have with those unlimited data subscribers, god knows that if you don't honor your contract they'll skin you alive! However I do understand their rationale; their justification is not entirely rubbish... Cheers!

[AlexYapTheGreat]

In Singapore all home and fibre broadband plans are uncapped and they are quite fast although upload speeds tend to be slow at times. On the other hand mobile data caps there are too frigging low such that the cheapest mobile plans from all providers will generally have a a 1-2GB cap. 

[Knowbody]

Fibre gives much better upload speeds than ADSL2+ (or even VDSL2).
NBN Co (in Australia) is offering 100mbps down, 40mbps up in the areas where it's available now (which is not many areas yet). And in December, they'll start offering 1000mbps down, 400mbps up.